APDL Math extends the APDL scripting environment of Mechanical APDL to give you access to the powerful matrix manipulation routines in the Mechanical APDL product, including its fast and efficient solvers. APDL Math provides access to matrices and vectors on the .full, .emat, .mode and .sub files, as well as other sources, so that you can read them in, manipulate them, and write them back out or solve them directly. This functionality augments the vector and matrix operations (such as *VOPER and *MOPER), in the standard APDL scripting environment. Both dense matrices and sparse matrices can be manipulated using APDL Math.

Differences Between Standard APDL and APDL Math  —  APDL Math works in its own workspace independent of the APDL environment. However, APDL arrays (vectors or matrices) may be imported into this workspace for manipulation, and also may be exported from this workspace into the standard APDL environment.

The following is a summary of the APDL Math commands:

Commands to create and delete matrices and vectors
*DMAT	Creates a dense matrix.
*SMAT	Creates a sparse matrix.
*VEC	Creates a vector.
*FREE	Deletes a matrix or a solver object and frees its memory allocation.
Commands to manipulate matrices
*AXPY	Performs the matrix operation M2= v*M1 + w*M2.
*COMP	Compresses the columns of a matrix using a specified algorithm.
*DOT	Computes the dot (or inner) product of two vectors.
*FFT	Computes the fast Fourier transformation of the specified matrix or vector.
*HPROD	Performs a Hadamard vector product (C = A∘B).
*INIT	Initializes a vector or matrix.
*KRON	Computes the Kronecker product of two matrices/vectors,
*MERGE	Merges two dense matrices or vectors into one.
*MULT	Performs the matrix multiplication M3 = M1(T1)*M2(T2).
*NRM	Computes the norm of the specified vector or matrix.
*REMOVE	Suppresses rows or columns of a dense matrix or a vector.
*RENAME	Renames an existing vector or matrix.
*SCAL	Scales a vector or matrix by a constant or a vector.
*SORT	Sorts the values of the specified vector.
Commands to perform solutions
*LSENGINE	Creates a linear solver engine.
*LSFACTOR	Performs the numerical factorization of a linear solver system.
*LSBAC	Performs the solve (forward/backward substitution) of a factorized linear system.
*ITENGINE	Performs a solution using an iterative solver.
*EIGEN	Performs a modal solution with unsymmetric or damping matrices.
Commands to output matrices
*EXPORT	Exports a matrix to a file in the specified format.
*PRINT	Prints the matrix values to a file.
Other useful commands
*INQUIRE	Retrieves properties of an existing APDL Math object.