Grasshopper to Ansys and Back

Here is a short experiment that we recently worked where we created a connection between Grasshopper and Ansys. There are four main VB components responsible for writing the ANSYS macro, exporting IGES files, creating the ANSYS input file, and retrieving the ANSYS output file.

This is in no way a replacement for Daniel Piker's amazing work with real time simulation, but instead is seen as a way of more closely collaborating with consultants.

For more information visit http://lmnts.lmnarchitects.com/parametrics/grasshopper-to-ansys/

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Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on May 4, 2010 at 11:20am

Really nice :). Are you going to share this components?

Best Regards.

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Permalink Reply by lmnts on May 4, 2010 at 4:04pm

Eventually, but at this point it could use some cleanup as well as additional flexibility.

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Permalink Reply by Giulio Castorina on May 4, 2010 at 3:58pm

do you export and importt point coordinates of the geometry?

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Permalink Reply by lmnts on May 4, 2010 at 4:04pm

The current version is exporting the wireframe geometry as an iges file. It wouldn't be difficult to switch to points so that the coordinates could be written without exporting any files.

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Permalink Reply by djordje on August 11, 2011 at 3:17pm

when are you expecting to release the vb components to the public?

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Permalink Reply by lmnts on August 11, 2011 at 3:29pm

Djordje,

To be honest we haven't been able to put any time into furthering the developing of these components. At the time it was an interesting proof of concept for us. Since then we've become distracted with other interests.

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Permalink Reply by djordje on August 11, 2011 at 4:30pm

Thank you for the reply.

But you seemed to get some kind of result? So these VB components worked, at least on a beta level?

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Permalink Reply by lmnts on August 11, 2011 at 4:52pm

Yes they did work.

We wrote them to carry out a particular workflow. At the time we thought we could extend the components to become more generalized to other operations within ANSYS but we never had the time to do so.

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Permalink Reply by djordje on August 11, 2011 at 5:12pm

thank you for the reply.

by "particular workflow" you mean, that those VB components worked only for that specific project of yours and that they can not be used for a different one?

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Permalink Reply by lmnts on August 11, 2011 at 5:54pm

The workflow was the analysis of a space frame structure using a small sets of elements from the ANSYS library. The setup of that analysis was coded into one of the VB component. If you wanted to instead analyze a post and beam structure then our code wouldn't work. In an ideal situation we would have been able to access all of the library but our familiarity with ANSYS was limited.

I should point out that we're architects and were mostly interested in the potentials for collaboration using a tool like grasshopper to send information to other pieces of software. We were not interested or capable for that matter in absorbing the roles of structural engineers.