Mesh and geometry

The Mapdl class allows you to access the mesh and geometry without writing to an intermediate file or interpreting the text output from various MAPDL commands. For example, to access the nodes and elements of a model, normally you would list the nodes within MAPDL using the Mapdl.nlist() <ansys.mapdl.core.Mapdl.nlist() method. However, this generates a string. Array access requires either cumbersome MAPDL GET commands or that the nodes be written to an archive file and then read in with other software:

NLIST

LIST ALL SELECTED NODES.   DSYS=      0

NODE        X             Y             Z           THXY     THYZ     THZX
    1   0.0000        0.0000        0.0000          0.00     0.00     0.00
    2   1.0000        0.0000        0.0000          0.00     0.00     0.00
    3   0.2500        0.0000        0.0000          0.00     0.00     0.00

However, with the Mapdl.mesh class, you can interface with a current instance of the Mapdl class and access the current nodes coordinates with this code:

>>> mapdl.mesh.nodes
[[0.0, 0.0, 0.0],
  [1.0, 0.0, 0.0],
  [0.25, 0.0, 0.0],
  [0.75, 0.5, 3.5],
  [0.75, 0.5, 4.0],
  [0.75, 0.5, 4.5]]

Both the Mapdl.geometry and Mapdl.mesh attributes support additional, lower-level access to MAPDL data. You can use this code to access them:

>>> mapdl.mesh
>>> mapdl.geometry

To view the current mesh status, you can use this code:

>>> mapdl.mesh
 ANSYS Mesh
   Number of Nodes:              7217
   Number of Elements:           2080
   Number of Element Types:      2
   Number of Node Components:    0
   Number of Element Components: 0

Geometry commands

For additional MAPDLcommands for creating geometries, see the Preprocessing commands.

API reference

For a full description of the Mesh and Geometry classes, see Mesh and Geometry.