4.13 Exporting Solution Data

The current release of ANSYS FLUENT allows you to export data to ABAQUS, Mechanical APDL, Mechanical APDL Input, ASCII, AVS, ANSYS CFD-Post, CGNS, Data Explorer, EnSight, FAST, FIELDVIEW, I-deas, NASTRAN, PATRAN, RadTherm, and Tecplot formats. Section  4.14 explains how to export solution data in these formats after the calculation is complete, and Sections  4.14.1 to 4.14.17 provide specific information for each type of File Type. For information about exporting solution data during transient flow solutions, see Section  4.16

For NASTRAN, ABAQUS, Mechanical APDL Input, I-deas Universal, and PATRAN file formats, the following quantities are exported [ 3]:

• Nodes, Elements

• Node Sets (Boundary Conditions)

• Temperature

• Pressure

• Heat Flux

• Heat Transfer Coefficient

• Force

  To generate the force data that is exported for nodes at boundaries, ANSYS FLUENT performs the following steps:

  1.   Facial force for each wall face is calculated by summing the pressure force, viscous force and surface tension force of the face.

  2.   Partial force for each wall face is calculated by dividing its facial force by its number of shared nodes.

  3.   Total force for each wall node is calculated by summing the partial forces of all the wall faces sharing that node.

Exporting Limitations

Note the following limitations when exporting solution data:

• When using the parallel version of ANSYS FLUENT, you can only export to the following packages:
  • ABAQUS

  • Mechanical APDL Input

  • ANSYS CFD-Post

  • CGNS

  • EnSight Case Gold

  • Fieldview Unstructured

  • I-deas Universal

  • NASTRAN

  • PATRAN

  • Tecplot

  The exported file will be written by the host process (see Section  32.1). Note that the memory required to write the file may exceed the memory available to the host process.

• ANSYS FLUENT cannot import surfaces. Consequently, if you export a file from ANSYS FLUENT with surfaces selected, you may not be able to read these files back into ANSYS FLUENT. However, TGrid can import surface data (see the TGrid User's Guide for details).

• ANSYS FLUENT supports exporting polyhedral data only for ASCII, EnSight Case Gold, and Fieldview Unstructured file formats. For further details, see Sections  4.14.4, 4.14.9, and 4.14.12.

• If the files that are exported during multiple transient simulations are to be used as a set, you must make sure that all of the simulations are run on the same platform, using the same number of processors. This ensures that all of the files are compatible with each other.