Elements With External Physical Properties

With the external physical property type, ANSYS physical property data cards can be drawn directly from a named file in a directory specified by environment variable FG_PRE_PHY (see section 1.4).

The elements that require external properties, see tables A.1 and A.2 of Appendix A, should be assigned thus:

PROPERTY PHYSICAL EXTERNAL propname 1

where 'propname' is the name of the file, in the specified directory, that contains the element physical properties written in an ANSYS format. The integer 1 must be included but is not used.

The physical property filename can be up to 8 characters. The interface program will test for both 'propname' and 'PROPNAME' on unix systems. A valid physical property file (pbeam44) might contain the following data:

            
R,    10,  44.00    ,  558.7    ,  318.7    ,  4.000    ,  5.000    , 0.0000    
RMORE   , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    
RMORE   , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000    
RMORE   ,  1.492    ,  2.184    ,  4.000    ,  5.000    , 0.0000    , 0.0000

and is called with the following FEMGEN command:

PROPERTY PHYSICAL EXTERNAL pbeam44 1

Note: The interface program assigns an identification number to the physical property and writes it out in the 'R' command line in place of the existing number.