"Manual" element creation (for large number of elements)

[LtSnikch]

Hello all,

I've been using NX Nastran for quite some time now. However, I've run into an issue which I can't seem to resolve, so I was hoping for some input.

My goal is to create a number of individual 2d elements on a polygon surface (so, not necessarily in contact with each other). Later these will be used to construct contact elements between two surfaces.
These contact elements resemble the mechanical contacts of a support system with multiple contacts. The elements used as contact elements are defined by a point set obtained by the physical contact coordinates.

The problem comes from the number of the contacts and dimensions of the contacts/support
I have a circular surface with a diameter in the order of 500 mm. However, I require in the order of 50000 contacts with an element size of 0.3 mm.
Consequently, making a surface mesh with uniform element size 0.3 mm and selecting the elements to be extruded by hand, is not really an option here.
Preferably I'd create the 0.3 mm elements only on the 50000 coordinate points. I was thinking that this might be possible by executing a script of some sort.

However, I've never written executable scripts and would not know how to go about this issue using such a script (or other methods).
Perhaps someone has some insight in how to tackle this problem as time-efficient (and with minimum computing force) as possible?

Hope to hear from someone soon, thanks in advance.

Greetings,
Lt

 

[LtSnikch]

Dear all,

I have managed to go one step further.
By obtaining node and element data, I have calculated which elements should be extracted from the mesh.
However, now a new problem occurs which might be easier to solve:

I now have the element labels which I wish to select.
This array contains approximately 50000 element labels.
When using element labels to select the elements I wish to, for example, copy, The element labels input has a limit of characters that can be inserted.
Due to this limit, I can only select approximately 25 elements when simply copy-pasting the array in this input line.

Therefore, I was wondering if there was a method to select the elements by labels from an external array which lets me select all 50000 at once instead of having to do it in groups of 25?

Any help is welcome