Using ANSYS WORKBENCH question on element types?

[coffeelady]

so my team is transitioning from ANSYS APDL to ANSYS Workbench; however, I cannot for-the-life-of-me find WHERE you set the element types (solid, quad, brick, etc.) on ansys WORKBENCH. it appears the program just "does it" for the user.

[1] Is there anyway to VIEW which element type WORKBENCH chose?

[2] Is there anyway to modify which element type WORKBENCH chose?

thanks!!!

[Francis Gagné]

To be honest, Workbench is good at choosing it's element type and you don't really need to mess with it. If you choose your meshing controls wisely you can get to have whatever you need. For a structural analysis that has bending and/or curve faces (a.k.a. most of the time) :

- Create a method selection (right click on mesh -> Insert -> method) : Set all solids to Hex Dominant. Set shells to Quadrilateral dominant.
-In the advanced meshing options, put Element Midside Nodes to KEPT.

You should end-up with 20nodes hexahedral (second order bricks) elements with sparse 10nodes tetrahedral. SOLID186 and SOLID187. There are ways to force other types of nodes, but they are deprecated, or used for different analysis type (Fluid, Magnetic, etc...)

You can also have an insight of what Workbench is doing you can look the Solution Information in the Analysis tree.

If you still want to verify or play with the meshing more in detail the simplest way to go and see what is being done by Workbench is to open the project in the Classic Interface (APDL). Workbench is merely a GUI for APDL. But much more user-friendly.

To do so, open APDL, File -> Read input from, go in the Projectname_files\dp0\SYS\MECH\ folder, and load ds.dat (SYS 1, SYS 2 are the other available analysis created in workbench).

Best regards,

[nms553]

I know the answer to this. All you have to do is go into your MESH and change your "span angle center" (or something like that). You can adjust it to be something like fine, medium, large.
This tool is nice because it keeps your cells large for the areas that are continuous and finer as the geometry curvature changes

[nms553]

and I must add that this should be the only mesh parameter you should change, at least for our purposes.