Interface to Ansys - support issues

This page gives information on the interface to Ansys that may help in running jobs and improving the performance you obtain with this interface. Some key items that you may have missed in the user manual are also included.

Which versions of Ansys is Zencrack interfaced to?

Zencrack is interfaced to Ansys/APDL. Testing has been conducted up to and including Ansys 13.0.

Calculating j-integrals with Ansys

The Ansys j-integral capability was added via the CINT option in Ansys 11.0. Interfacing to this capability is available from Zencrack version 7.5 and requires the service pack release Ansys 11.0SP1 (or later).

Using Ansys 13.0 or later

The Ansys j-integral output up to Ansys 12.1 included a -ve sign on the output value. This was changed in Ansys 13.0 such that the same input generates a +ve j-integral value. As a consequence of this change, Zencrack 7.6 (and earlier) will not process the j-integral results correctly from Ansys 13.0 (or later). If using Ansys 13.0 (or later), it is necessary to use at least Zencrack 7.7 to have correct processing of j-integral results. Processing of displacement based results is not affected by this change in the Ansys behaviour.

Crack-block restrictions

Some crack-blocks contain collapsed elements that cannot be handled by Ansys. Therefore these crack-blocks cannot be used in the Ansys interface. The following table identifies these crack-blocks: