While Ansys provides comprehensive engineering simulation solutions across all physics areas, you are likely to have business-specific needs that are not native to Ansys products. To tailor Ansys products to meet these needs, ACT provides customization capabilities, categorized into three types:
Note: For additional information about ACT, including "roadmaps" designed to guide you through the steps of creating the desired type of ACT customization for an Ansys product, see ACT Overview.
Feature creation is the direct, API-driven customization of Ansys products. In addition to leveraging the functionality already available in a product, ACT enables you to add functionality and operations of your own. Your custom additions operate as “native” features in the target Ansys product.
Feature creation examples include:
Creating custom loads and geometries
Adding custom preprocessing and postprocessing features
Integrating third-party solvers, sampling methods, and optimization algorithms
These Ansys products support feature creation:
DesignModeler
Fluent
Mechanical
Workbench
Feature creation capabilities common to all these products include user interface entry creation, ACT-based property creation, and property parameterization. Product-specific feature creation capabilities are described in the ACT customization guide for the product. The concluding section provides links to these guides.
A few examples follow of feature creation in various Ansys products:
- DesignModeler
Define new user interface elements to execute custom actions
Expose new geometry features
- Fluent
Deploy your own UDFs with ACT UDF macro encapsulation
- Mechanical
Integrate your legacy APDL macros with APDL encapsulation
Develop your own criterion using IronPython and integrate it into the powerful Mechanical Post environment
Add new boundary conditions, preprocessing and postprocessing algorithms, and custom results
Define new user interface elements to execute custom actions
- Workbench
Define new user interface elements to execute custom actions
Feature creation also includes the integration of custom solvers directly in Mechanical. By embedding your solvers into Mechanical simulations, you can create new Workbench analysis systems based on your technologies. Within Mechanical, the solver operates seamlessly with the processing routines for the native mathematical model, solver, and results processing.
Simulation workflow integration is the incorporation of external knowledge such as apps, processes, and scripts into the Ansys ecosystem. With ACT, you can create custom simulation workflows that can be inserted on the flowchart-like schematic in Workbench.
An engineering simulation workflow is a sequence of actions performed on well-defined data to obtain insightful results. A typical simulation workflow can be broken down into five steps:
Define or retrieve input data
Prepare for execution
Run the process
Generate output data
Publish results
With ACT, you define each workflow step as a custom task (component) and then combine multiple custom tasks into a custom task group (system). You can then insert custom task groups on the Workbench Project Schematic to construct consistent and cohesive simulation workflows, allowing your business-specific elements to coexist and interface with pre-built Ansys solutions. Currently, Workbench is the only Ansys product to support simulation workflow integration. For more information, see the ACT Customization Guide for Workbench.
You can use integrated workflows for various simulation scenarios, performing custom behaviors such as specialized data processing, report generation, and application synchronization to manage and integrate heterogeneous processes and tools into your Ansys simulation environment. By using ACT to integrate diverse data generated from in-house and commercial engineering software products into your Ansys environment, you can improve your product lines and innovate faster.
Examples follow of using custom workflows to integrate external data and applications:
Maintain or reuse data from an external application, such as a CAD system. With ACT, you can automate the process of mapping and linking to this data to save time and reduce errors, greatly improving productivity. Additionally, you can use ACT to batch process the generation of images and reports from your model results.
Expose external applications and data with custom workflows in Workbench to achieve:
Native "OEM" look and feel
Professional-grade application deployment
Project data and file management solutions
Collaboration with industry-leading applications
Flexible project construction
Remote Solve Manager (RSM) job submission to send large jobs to more powerful remote high-performance machines
Process compression is the encapsulation and automation of processes available in one or more Ansys products. The result is a simulation wizard, which incorporates your best practices to reliably guide non-expert users step-by-step through a complex simulation to produce desired results quickly. This type of ACT customization provides the greatest breadth because wizards simplify complex processes, allowing them to be repeated whenever needed. You can create wizards for all products listed in the introduction.
With wizards, you can manipulate existing features and simulation components, organizing them as needed to produce a custom automated process. A wizard can compress and automate processes within a single Ansys product to manage complex model interactions for one physics area. Or, a wizard can compress and automate processes of multiple Ansys products and even external applications for complex multi-physics simulations. By using wizards to simplify the analytical process, you boost the performance of the entire enterprise.
Wizards allow you to leverage both the existing functionality of Ansys products and the scripting capabilities of the Workbench framework API. For example, you can copy a journal of the steps that you take in an Ansys product into an ACT script and then parametrize the syntax to make the script generic for reuse.
The degree of automation possible depends on the product being customized. Examples of a Workbench-based project wizard and a mixed wizard appear in this guide. Examples of wizards specific to an Ansys product are described in the ACT customization guide for the product. The concluding section provides links to these guides.
Because simulation workflows are often so complex, the use of simulation tends to be limited to only a few expert users, reducing the overall efficiency of the engineering process. The need to satisfy process compliance requirements and ensure data integrity adds even more complexity. Using wizards, you can leverage the knowledge of your engineering process experts by compressing your business-specific processes into streamlined, simple-to-follow steps. Because each step exposes only the critical information required to ensure successful simulation, wizards shield users from technical complexities.