Translate Nastran to ANSYS - seamless?

[trainguy]

Hi all.
This site is quite neat, although I'm not getting that much work done...
I'm living thru the nightmare of exporting a MCS Visual Nastran 4 Windows (Femap version 8) to ANSYS, preferebly version 6.0. My geometry seems fine, but I've gone from 184 Nastran property numbers (for a quarter model of a passenger railcar) to 7600 Real Constant numbers in ANSYS.
Any suggestions?

 

[ISEAG]

trainguy

it's been a long time since I used the FEMAP translater but I do seem to recall this characteristic. If I remember right I had to colect all the similar reals and do an emodify to reduce the number of reals.......not a great answer but a solution non the less.

Good luck

 

[trainguy]

Thanks, ISEAG, but after many attempts, it seems that the trick was to set all my material angles in Nastran to 0 (because they were being stored in ANSYS as real constants),
do the import, then take the time to re-assign my element local axis directions in ANSYS.

Regards,
GA

 

[Arydanrekan]

I think FEMAP (until 8 version) has some defect on translating to Ansys PREP. Some of i know are :
1. GXY still exporting to Ansys while in isotropic material condition, which Ansys reject it.
2. Non-Linear function is not equivalent (stress-strain) if weread again using ansys interactive (5.4 to 6.1).
3. FEMAP having trouble converting from Ansys PREP 5.7.1 to 6.1 because the digit on element indicidences ( i have known to solve it).

If you had ansys i recomended that you are using ansys interactive than other mesher like FEMAP, PATRAN, Altair. I have seen some, but Ansys is the best on meshing and the best answer for your problem. I recommended that you had IGES form.
FEM S2 Student: ABQ,NAS,COS,ANS,MAR,SAP,
STaaD,ETABS,GTSTRUDL, Civil Eng.
LOOKING FOR A JOB ....

 

[DRDearth]

One should be able to Translate to Ansys 6.0 from Nastran using Femap interface. We do it on a regular basis at my company. I would suggest that you try translating some very small problems (geometry) that have all the features (element types, loading, boundary conditions,... etc) that are present in your REAL problem. Translate this Sample problem into Ansys (also make sure you are selecting the correct translation options), then run the Sample problem in Ansys and compare results. Write down all your steps (or put them into a script file in Femap). I would also suggest translating the Same Sample problem from Ansys Back INTO Nastran to see if the programs are "talking to each other" correctly. You should be able to make this translation with 100% of the information going from one program to the other. David R. Dearth, P.E.
Applied Analysis & Technology
E-mail "AppliedAT@aol.com"