pymapdl: Did you publish this tutorial ? I'm having hard time running it at current time it keep failing

Sadly, MAPDL doesn’t directly support reading STEP files, but it turns out you can do it with gmsh!

I’m working on a tutorial right now, but the gist of it is:

import gmsh
import math
import os

gmsh.initialize()
gmsh.option.setNumber("General.Terminal", 1)

gmsh.model.add("t20")

# Load a STEP file (using `importShapes' instead of `merge' allows to directly
# retrieve the tags of the highest dimensional imported entities):
# path = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
filename = 'pf_coil_case_1.stp'
v = gmsh.model.occ.importShapes(filename)


# Get the bounding box of the volume:
gmsh.model.occ.synchronize()

# Specify a global mesh size and mesh the partitioned model:
gmsh.option.setNumber("Mesh.CharacteristicLengthMin", 10)
gmsh.option.setNumber("Mesh.CharacteristicLengthMax", 10)
gmsh.model.mesh.generate(3)
gmsh.write("from_gmsh.msh")

# Show the result:
# gmsh.fltk.run()

gmsh.finalize()

That gives you your gmsh file. You can then convert it to MAPDL with:

import pyvista as pv
import pyansys

filename = '/home/alex/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/gmsh-4.6.0-Linux64-sdk/share/doc/gmsh/tutorial/python/t20.msh'
mesh = pv.read_meshio(filename)
# mesh.plot()
mesh.points /= 1000
pyansys.save_as_archive('archive.cdb', mesh)

mapdl = pyansys.launch_mapdl(exec_file='/ansys_inc/v194/ansys/bin/ansys194',
                             override=True, additional_switches='-smp')
filename = '/home/alex/Downloads/two_step_files/archive.cdb'
mapdl.cdread('db', filename)

I’m going to have to clean it up for an example, but it’s quite promising. Once you have the mesh, you can go ahead and analyze it in MAPDL. According to mesh.bounds, it seems that the dimensions are in mm. You’ll have to scale it down and then copy it over to MAPDL with mesh.points /= 1000 prior to saving it.

I did a quick modal analysis because they make great gifs, but you’ll probably want to do a structural analysis.

# verify cells are valid
mapdl.prep7()
mapdl.shpp('SUMM')

# specify material properties
# using aprox values for AISI 5000 Series Steel
mapdl.units('SI')
mapdl.mp('EX', 1, 200E9)  # Elastic moduli in Pa (kg/(m*s**2))
mapdl.mp('DENS', 1, 7700)  # Density in kg/m3
mapdl.mp('NUXY', 1, 0.3)  # Poissons Ratio
mapdl.emodif('ALL', 'MAT', 1)

# Run an unconstrained modal analysis
mapdl.run('/SOLU')
mapdl.antype('MODAL')  # default NEW
mapdl.modopt('LANB', 20, 1)  # First 6 modes above 1 Hz
mapdl.solve()

result = mapdl.result

# result.plot(cpos='xy')
cpos = [(0.0, 0.3074999999873, 2),
        (0.0, 0.3074999999873, 0.5),
        (0.0, 1.0, 0.0)]


result.animate_nodal_displacement(4,
                                  cpos=cpos,
                                  show_edges=False,
                                  lighting=True,
                                  loop=True,
                                  add_text=False,
                                  nangles=30,
                                  movie_filename='tmp.gif')

_Originally posted by @akaszynski in https://github.com/pyansys/pymapdl/issues/234#issuecomment-649240031_