Abaqus System Requirements Check and Installation Details

Use

abaqus information=system

in the Abaqus command prompt to get details about the Abaqus installation on your system and system requirements of Abaqus met by your system. For example, use this to check if  Visual C++, Fortran compiler, etc that go with Abaqus are already installed on your system.

Reading field output using Python Scripting

Here is a short Youtube video on using Python to read field output from .odb files using scripting.

Remove Mesh Lines in the Output Viewer

Usually when an analysis is done with a fine mesh size, you would prefer to view the results without the mesh lines since the dense mesh would not present a neat output view

 

To remove the mesh lines and display only the feature edges, follow these steps:

1. In the menu bar, select Options
2. Choose Common in the drop-down menu
3. A Common Plot Options dialogue box appears. Click the Basic tab
4. In the options available for Visible edges, click Feature edges
5. Click Apply

Pilot Studies before Full Fledged Analysis

If you are dealing with complicated problems, simplified analyses with simplified models and limited analysis goals would be always helpful. Such simple analyses as your pilot study would provide you with the following benefits:

• Provide a preview to the structural behavior, with less input data (i.e reduced effort)
• Provide insight into what computational options would be appropriate
• Help to plan better on what output to request from full scale analysis, since there would be only less output to examine in the simplified analysis of pilot study.

Pilot studies are helpful in answering “what if” questions in modelling or to test the software and to see if it behaves as expected.

 

Source: Concepts and Applications of Finite Element Analysis by R. D. Cook et al

A Quick Start to Abaqus

For those of you, who are not lucky to have any colleagues/lab mates/seniors to introduce you to Abaqus and would like to have a jump-start on this FE package- here is the simplest way. Abaqus documentation is one of the best among its competitors and this comes in handy.

The Appendix B of Getting Started with Abaqus: Interactive Edition provides a quick step by step walk through the different modules in Abaqus and gives the basic steps to create and submit a model for FE analysis. You can find it in this online Abaqus documentation or you can download a pdf copy of the same here.

 

To further grow in your expertise of Abaqus, go through the Getting Started Manual from the beginning. It starts by explaining how the Abaqus package works and takes you through different elements available in Abaqus, illustrating them with help of simple examples.

Identifying the ErrElemMissingSection elements

When the error ErrElemMissingSection pops up, the Visualization module can be used to identify the elements to which this error is attributed. The Abaqus processor writes the error sets to the ODB, which can be accessed in the Visualization module.

To view the elements:

1. Double click the Display Groups in the Results tree.
2. In Create Display Group dialog box, select the Item Elements
3. In Method, select Element sets
4. The elements set would be shown on the right. Select ErrElemMissingSection and toggle on Highlight items in viewport to see the elements with the error. (You can perform Boolean on the viewport contents for better visualization using the buttons on the bottom)