Importing mesh from ANSYS with material assignments

[dougblake]

I have a mesh generated in ANSYS that I have exported into a .cdb file. This mesh has two different materials assigned to various elements. When I import it into Preview 1.20, it imports without any of the material assignments, even though the material assignments are stored in the EBLOCK command. When I tried to import the same file into Preview 2.0, it immediately gave an error saying the file couldn't be read. The only change I made was changing the extension from .txt to be read in by Preview 1.20 to .cdb to be read in by Preview 2.0. I have attached the file.

Thanks,
Doug

[dougblake]

Alternatively, if there is not a way to import the material assignments by element, is there a way to select materials using select logic and manually assign the element types. Unfortunately, my element selections to not conform easily to cartesian coordinates, so I would have to do some kind of manual picking.

Thanks,
Doug

[maas]

Hi Doug,

We already communicated via email, but just wanted to respond here too in case other users have a similar question.

PreView only reads the mesh from the Ansys file. I will look into reading more information from the Ansys file but the only workaround is creating the element sets in PreView and then assigning materials to these element sets. This is done as follows:

1. Select the elements. You can select the elements manually, or you can click on a saved element selection (under Named Selections) in the model tree and then click the select button (arrow button) above the model tree.
2. Create a partition for that selection: Activate the mesh panel with the element selection active. Click the Partition button under the "Edit Mesh" pane and then click Apply.
3. This creates a part from that selection. You can select that part with the part selection tool (Blue sphere on main tool bar) and then assign a material to that selection.

Cheers,

Steve