mechanical-sim

mechanical-sim

This file is the Ansys Mechanical index. Use DPF for solved .rst files on disk; use sim-cli/PyMechanical for live Mechanical sessions that mutate, solve, inspect, or update the GUI-backed project.

This is not the Abaqus plugin. Do not run Abaqus .inp decks or Abaqus/CAE scripts here. Use solver=abaqus for Dassault SIMULIA Abaqus; use solver=mechanical only for Ansys Mechanical / PyMechanical sessions.

The /connect response tells you which active layers apply:

"skills": {
  "root":               "<sim-skills>/mechanical",
  "active_sdk_layer":   "0.12",
  "active_solver_layer": "24.1"
}

Always read base/, then your active sdk/<version>/, then your active solver/<version>/. Later layers override earlier ones on identically-named files.

First principles

1. Workbench orchestrates, Mechanical computes. PyWorkbench drives Engineering Data / Geometry / Model. PyMechanical drives Setup / Solution / Results. Do not try to define boundary conditions via Workbench scripting — that belongs here.

2. Observation is SDK+GUI coupled. Every uv run sim exec is a mechanical.run_python_script(code) call that mutates Mechanical's in-memory model. Mechanical's window on the desktop redraws after each call. Therefore uv run sim screenshot (which grabs the desktop) always reflects the current SDK state. This coupling only works with batch=False — so the driver defaults to GUI mode. Confirm both ui_mode == "gui" and batch == false from inspect session.summary before relying on screenshots for GUI sync.

3. Scripts run inside Mechanical's IronPython interpreter. Globals ExtAPI, DataModel, Model, Quantity, Tree are already available — do NOT import ansys.mechanical. The last expression's string form is what run_python_script returns, so end snippets with a json.dumps(...) literal to get structured output.

4. ExtAPI.DataModel.Project is the root. From there: .Model → the scene; .Model.Analyses[0] → the first analysis; .Model.Geometry → bodies; .Model.Mesh → meshing controls; .Model.Materials → material assignments.