There are five types of bodies that the Ansys DesignModeler application supports:
Solid — The body has both a surface area and volume.
Surface — The body has a surface area, but no volume.
Surface bodies also have a thickness value. This is not visible in the graphic in the Ansys DesignModeler application, however, it is used when the body is meshed. Thickness values are computed and assigned in the feature that creates the surface body.
The thickness propagation in surface body is controlled by Thickness Mode. It has two values, Inherited and User Defined.
Inherited: means that when the feature gets generated again, its thickness will be calculated and adjusted as needed, or the current body will get the thickness value from its parent body. When the Thickness Mode is Inherited, the Thickness property will be read-only.
User Defined: indicates that you can manually modify the thickness and the thickness value will be retained, even if you regenerate the feature. You can manually change the thickness value only if the Thickness Mode is User Defined.
Here is what the Detail View looks like when you select a single surface body:
You can select multiple surface bodies and change the thickness of all of them at one time. If the selected bodies have different Thickness Mode, then the resultant Thickness Mode will be shown as Mixed Mode. You can change the Thickness Mode to User Defined or Inherited.
You can also override the thickness value of individual faces within a surface body. When you are not in a feature creation, if you select a face from a surface body, you will see the following:
If you change the value of the "Face Thickness", it will change the "Thickness Mode" to "User Defined", and pass the value to other applications (for example, Ansys Mechanical and Meshing), when the file is transferred. You can reset the Thickness Mode to again to "Use Body Thickness" by assigning it a value of zero. As with surface bodies, if you select multiple faces, you can assign them a custom thickness all at the same time.
Note: When changing the thickness of multiple surface or faces at once, if the last surface/face selected has the desired thickness for all the rest, first assign a different temporary value, and then assign the value to be used for all the surfaces/faces.
Line — The body, consisting entirely of edges, does not have a surface area or volume.
The Ansys DesignModeler application suppresses and hides line bodies without cross sections that were created prior to release 11.0 upon loading the database.
Planar — A special case of surface body is the 2D planar body. A 2D planar body is defined as a flat surface body that lies entirely in the XYPlane. These bodies are available to use for 2D analysis, meaning they will be sent to the Mechanical application when you have chosen 2D analysis from the simulation options in the Project Schematic. In the Ansys DesignModeler application, the only difference between 2D planar bodies and other surface bodies is the icon that appears in the Tree Outline. A 2D planar body behaves in exactly the same way as any other surface body regarding feature operations and selection.
The easiest way to create planar bodies in the Ansys DesignModeler application is to create sketches on the XYPlane, then use the Surfaces From Sketches feature to create the surface bodies. Since they are flat and they lie in the XYPlane, they will be identified as planar bodies.
Winding — The body, consisting entirely of edges, does not have a surface area or volume.
Winding bodies are special forms of Line bodies that are intended to model coils of wire. In fact, a normal Line body can be converted to a Winding body or back if desired. The other way Winding bodies can be created is via the legacy feature Winding Tool. Winding bodies created by the Winding Tool, cannot be converted to normal Line bodies. Instead of having a standard Cross Section assigned to them, Winding bodies currently only allow a rectangular cross section, and its values are determined by the Winding Table for Winding bodies from the Winding Tool.
To create a valid Winding body from a Line body, it must be based on only line and arc edges and form a closed loop. If the Alignment direction is not consistent when it is converted, the conversion process will reverse alignments on edges as necessary to assure a consistent orientation. You may right click on a converted Winding body in the tree and reverse the alignments of all edges in that converted Winding body.
For Winding bodies that are converted from Line bodies, any previous cross section assignments to them are cleared, and you can manually enter length and width values for the cross section. These converted Winding bodies still allow you to control the alignment whereas those created by the Winding Tool do not. Likewise you can modify the Number of Turns property for a converted Winding body. Turns comes from the Winding Table for those created by the Winding Tool.
Although no longer available, prior to Release 12.0, when Winding bodies were passed to the Mechanical application and the Ansys environment, a special element type (SOURC36) is used to mesh winding body edges with a single element. Converting Line Bodies that contain edge types other than Line or Arc/Circle to Winding bodies will cause errors in the Mechanical application, and therefore should be avoided.
Other Body topics: