FGRAD – Directs the solver to include the effects of field-dependent gradients in the solution.

PREA – Activates resource prediction for supported analysis and solver types.

WKSP – Automatically adds weak springs at the nodes of degrees of freedom with small or near-zero pivots during solution.

AMENV – Specifies the build-environment thermal boundary conditions in an additive manufacturing (AM) analysis. New options (RADOPT, EMIS, and SBC) enable you to define radiation boundary conditions in a powder bed fusion (PBF) simulation.

BF – Defines a nodal body-force load. A new DIVT label type enables the use of the divergence of Lighthill’s tensor as a body-force excitation source.

CNCHECK – Provides and/or adjusts the initial status of contact pairs. Use the new label MPC for InterType when Option = MERGE (CNCHECK,MERGE,,,,MPC) to merge MPC bonded contact pairs that share the same nodes or elements.

CUTCONTROL – Controls time-step cutback during a nonlinear solution. Use the new label CONT for Value to limit the substep incremental displacement based on the minimum pinball radius of all open contact pairs and help ensure accurate contact detection.

EMSEL – Specifies conditions for selecting reinforcing members or shell layers. The pre-processing and post-processing commands (PLESOL, PLNSOL, PRESOL, PRNSOL, ETABLE and EPLOT) now support selected layered results for shell sections and elements (SHELL181 and SHELL281).

*GET – Retrieves a value and stores it as a scalar parameter or part of an array parameter. Use the new preprocessing data type output (IT1NUM = BSTF when Entity = SHEL) to retrieve the bending stiffness scale factor.

MONITOR – Controls contents of variable fields in the nonlinear solution monitor file. An additional field has been inserted between variable fields 1 (VARIAB 1) and 2 (VARIAB 2) to report current memory usage (in GB) at each converged substep. For more information, see Change in Format of Nonlinear Solution Monitor File (.mntr).

NLADAPTIVE – Defines the criteria under which the mesh is refined or modified during a nonlinear solution. For Option = ESTN and Option = PSTN:

NLHIST – Specify results items to track during solution. Smart stop criterion now includes an optional stop tolerance (STOP_TOL) that automatically stops the solution when a tracked variable is within the specified percentage tolerance of the desired value (STOP_VALUE). STOP_TOL defaults to 0.025 (2.5%).

NLMESH – Controls remeshing in nonlinear adaptivity. Use the new Control option, VBND, to include or exclude loaded boundary elements for void creation in multiple voids per substep variant (NLADAPTIVE,,,REMMAT). The new Control option, ISLD, allows you to remove all orphaned elements or element patches (islands) after an element removal operation (NLADAPTIVE,,,REMELM).

PMLOPT – Defines perfectly matched layers (PMLs) or irregular perfectly matched layers (IPML). A Logarithmic absorption function is now supported in addition to the polynomial one. To select the logarithmic function, which is recommended for analyses with a radiation space that is less than one wavelength, specify the new NF option for WOptXm, WOptXp, WOptYm, WOptYp, WOptZm, WOptZp as desired on the PMLOPT command.

PIVCHECK – Controls the behavior of an analysis when a negative or zero equation solver pivot value is encountered. The existing Key = AUTO option now prints the list of pivot values along with their corresponding degrees of freedom, in addition to the error or warning message.

SECMODIF – Modifies section properties based on the keyword. You can now modify the properties of shell, beam, pipe, link, and reinforcing sections. Selected layer modification is also supported for shell sections using the EMSEL command.

SOLVE – Starts a solution. A new option, SOLVE,ELFORM,,REFORM, has been added to trigger multiple load steps in linear perturbation modal analysis using SOLID272 and SOLID273.

TB – Activates a data table for linear and nonlinear material properties or special element input.

TBFT – Performs material curve-fitting operations. Use the new option, Oper = AFIT, to automatically read and fit experimental data from TB,EXPE and save material model to the TB command format. Use the new option, Oper = AFPAR, to enable or disable diagnostics during the automatic fitting process.