Development of a user-friendly interface for the creation of user elements

Abstract

The solution of the basic equations relating stiffness, displacement and force in finite element analysis is not trivial, partially due to the large numbers of equations involved. Various techniques have been developed for this purpose and commercial finite element packages like Ansys resolve the equations and store the results quite efficiently and have large element libraries. If a particular element formulation is not found in the library of Ansys, the users can develop their own elements with the help of Fortran routines provided with Ansys. It should be emphasised that these routines are not at all user friendly and require considerable work every time a new type of element is needed.

This paper describes the development of a user friendly program by interfacing the mathematical package Mathematica with Ansys to make the user element capability more or less generalised, and more efficient.