Generating results to understand the behavior of an analyzed model is fundamental to any analysis in Mechanical. The application supports a variety of result types and tools to facilitate this process.
Capabilities include:
Display result contours over the entire, or a portion, of the model for various solution quantities, such as displacement, stress, temperature, and electric field density.
Customized result access using user-defined results.
Chart minimum and maximum values over time for multiple result sets.
Options to quantify and visualization result contours that represent vectors, iso-surfaces, slice planes, path operations, surface cuts, and capped iso-surfaces.
Probes to calculate abstract engineering quantities such as reaction forces, reaction moments, and virtual strain gauges.
Export result data in a variety of formats, such as ASCII files for raw data, static images such as .png, .avi animations, as well as HTML reports.
Result Application
To apply results:
Highlight the Solution object and select a result, result probe, or result tool from the options on the Solution Context Tab.
Or...
Right-click the Solution object, select , and then choose from the result options.
Note: See the User Defined Result section of the Help for more information about the specification and definition of this result type.
Once inserted into the tree, you need to scope your result objects to geometric or meshing entities of the model.
Note:
When using the Mechanical APDL solver, the default solver, the Mechanical post processor caches the result and nodal (X, Y, Z) data in single precision format (rather than double precision) in order to conserve memory. This processing requirement can affect accuracy. For an analysis with high precision requirements, the implication can be significant. Note the following comparison of Displacement result values for the MAPDL application versus the Mechanical application.
UX UY UZ MAPDL POST1 Displacement Values 0.487107183574E-004 0.758421247657E-004 0.103875499252E-003 Mechanical Displacements Values 4.871071724e-005 7.58421229e-005 1.038754999e-004 If you suppress any result object, the application clears all generated data.
Because of software limitations, Mechanical currently cannot display the results of some types of nodes and elements. For example, a total deformation display in Mechanical excludes the deformations of nodes that are not attached to elements (like nodes associated with remote points).
Mechanical requires the mesh information to be present on the Mechanical APDL result file in order to postprocess. Therefore, result files created from Mechanical APDL cannot have the /CONFIG,NORSTGM option set to 1 (the default is zero).