Follow Along: Importing and Exporting Simulation Data

In this lesson, we will walk through some of the options that we have available for importing and exporting simulations into nTop. So, in our Simulation tab, you can go to the top right and under Exchange, we can see the different blocks we have available for importing and exporting.

So we can Import an FE Mesh, Import a Static Analysis for instance, as well as our modal, buckling, thermal, and topology optimization. And when we’re importing something like this, if we click on that file path, we can see the different options that we can import as we’ve discussed in the previous lesson. And it will have all the same properties as an FE Mesh as if you had created it within nTop.

Same situation for importing simulation results. So we’ll still have all of those properties that we saw when creating our Static Analysis, this in our follow-along video. And all you have to do is place in that file path, whether it’s an or Noran options.

And then for the unit system, if I double click, we can see that I’ll just define what is that unit system that we are importing. If we are exporting, so if we’ll Export an FE Mesh, you can bring in that FE Mesh right into there, define the units of that mesh. And then we also have this Sets option. If we go into our information, you can learn a little bit more about this, but this is really, if I double click on this option, we can see that it’s really just our different boundaries available. So I can get an FE Set List option, I can have those different locations where my boundary conditions are occurring and export that along with my FE Mesh.

I can also Export an FE Model, so I have my model, we can just double click and choose that unit system. And same thing with our Set. So we could do an FE Boundary List for instance. If we are exporting something like our Static Analysis, modal, buckling, or thermal, then we’ll just instead of exporting that Static Analysis block, we’ll just take those inputs, that model we define in the boundary conditions. You’ll just place them into those options and you would just define that unit system and we can see what those options are as well. So that’s what we have available for our Import and Export Exchange.

You can also look into our Beta tab. So we often are adding more options there as well when it comes to our simulation. So for instance, we can also Export an FE Mesh to CFD. If you want to define those CFD boundaries on FE Mesh, you can do that as well. And we can also bring in different point maps as well. So if you’re working with a pressure point map from a CFD analysis for instance, we can bring that in. So how we would import and export. So if you are working on an analysis that for instance is nonlinear or transient, then you could export that FE Mesh or model and have that in your simulation software.