Or, when you click on the branch you also get a Coordinate System toolbar:Ĭlick on the three color triad icon and a new system will be inserted. To create a coordinate system you Right Mouse Button (RMB) on the Coordinate Systems branch and Insert->Coordinate System. Any imported coordinate systems will show up underneath the global. It is Cartesian, has an ID of 0, and sits at 0,0,0. You always get a Global Cartesian coordinate system, called Global Coordinate System. This allows you to define it once, and then use it many times. Once you define a coordinate system it becomes available for use with any other object that can use a coordinate system. In ANSYS Mechanical, coordinate systems reside in the Model Tree between Geometry and Connections. The following three images show setting it in DM, setting the property on the Project page, and how it shows up in Mechanical:Ĭreating Coordinate Systems in ANSYS Mechanical To make these available in ANSYS Mechanical, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the details for the planes you want converted over to coordinate systems, and set “Export Coordinate System” to Yes. Instead it has planes, which is a coordinate system where you draw on the Z-normal plane. But first, be aware that there is no “coordinate system” entity in DM. Even if you turn on the import properties you need to dell DM which coordinate systems you want imported. In workbench you can import those coordinate systems into ANSYS Mechanical by clicking “Import Coordinate Systems” from the “Advanced Geometry Options” properties for the Geometry cell in you systems.įor DesignModeler, there is an extra step. Design Modeler and all CAD packages I’m aware of allow you to define some sort of coordinate system. It is important to start at the beginning. Coordinate Systems in DesignModeler and CAD Tools Since everyone reading this is an engineer, I’m going to assume that everyone already knows what a coordinate system is. At solve time, everything gets converted. This avoids making the user do coordinate system transformations. Why Coordinate Systems MatterĪNSYS cares a lot about coordinate systems because they allow the program to solve in a standard, global, Cartesian system while allowing loads, constraints, material directions, layer information, beam sections, joints, result values, and a whole slew of other important aspects of the model to be specified in unique coordinate systems. We will also go over the basics for Mechanical APDL (MADL) in case you need to work with snippets. We thought it would be a good idea to do a quick review of how they work in ANSYS Mechanical. And some users are constantly futzing around with them. They are there, but some users never fiddle with them. Coordinate systems are one of those things that are fundamental to Finite Element Analysis, but that most of us do not think about a lot.