SHELL ELEMENTS:

Once all of the nodes were in place, it was necessary to mesh the cylinder with the same kind of elements at the same nodal locations.
This set of data is exported from I-DEAS in the format as follows:

IDEAS Element Information

You will notice in the transition from the IDEAS element information to the ANSYS element information that the node numbers progress from 1 through 8 in the IDEAS formulation but progress from 1 through 4 in the ANSYS formulation. This is because the ANSYS model was built with 4-noded area elements as opposed to the 8-noded area elements used to construct the IDEAS model. This was done in order to reduce the total number of degrees of freedom in the model and thereby the computing time in this process and in the process of creating the time data.

A Matlab code (corner_nodes) was written to extract only the corner nodes from the IDEAS element information. The conversion from 8-noded area elements to 4-noded area elements was performed as follows:

8 node and 4 node shell elements

When rearranging the element data for ANSYS input, it was necessary to keep the nodes in the proper order such that the two models could be meshed in the same manner. Keeping this in mind, another Matlab code (Elem_num_and_nodes) was written to arrange the element connectivity data in the following format:

Ansys Element Connectivity Format

Here is the final output from this code.

This element information was inserted into an ANSYS batch file to create the shell elements used to form the overall shape of the model. The elements created by the ANSYS batch file appeared as follows:

Whole Cylinder

We can now see that the planar elements form the geometry for the cylinder and the face-plate.

The next view shows half of the model, giving a more informative view of the geometry, the element mesh, and the planar nature of the elements:

4 Node Element Mesh - Half Cylinder