Overview

Ansys Workbench is a CAD-neutral environment that supports bidirectional, direct, and associative geometry interfaces (plug-ins) with CAD systems as well as non-associative interfaces (readers) that generally do not require the CAD be installed. The readers and associative geometry interfaces are not interchangeable. The specific import options that are supported can be viewed at Geometry Preferences.

The plug-ins support import/update without translation to the intermediate geometry formats. The associative geometry interfaces allow you to make parametric changes in a CAD system or drive those changes from within Ansys Workbench and when the geometry is updated assigned scopings will persist if the topology is present in the updated model. The Named Selection Manager, available in most integrated CAD systems, provides a means to create custom selections within the CAD systems for use in modeling, meshing, and analysis.

Readers, with the exception of the CAPRI interface, do not require the CAD system to be present to import geometry files. These interfaces however, are not associative, nor bi-directionally parametric.

Ansys CAD integration supports the Smart CAD Update, where supported by the CAD, and Selective Update of CAD parts instead of updating an entire model. All interfaces can update the model using Compare Parts on Update and those parts that are not modified will maintain their existing mesh so it does not need to be regenerated.