Translating an Abaqus substructure to an EXCITE flexible body

The abaqus toexcite translator converts an Abaqus substructure to a flexible body in a format that can be used by the EXCITE multibody dynamics code.

The translator reads Abaqus data from a substructure SIM file and writes data to an EXCITE binary (.exb) file.

The following topics are discussed:

Related Topics
About Execution Procedures

ProductsAbaqus/Standard

Using the translator

The following procedure summarizes the typical usage of the abaqus toexcite translator:

  1. Create an Abaqus substructure. (General guidelines for building Abaqus models with substructures are described in Using substructures.)

    The substructure generation step must write at least mass and stiffness matrices. It can also write the recovery, viscous damping, and structural damping matrices. The FLEXIBLE BODY option must be used. For example, 

    *SUBSTRUCTURE GENERATE, MASS MATRIX=YES, RECOVERY=YES,
 VISCOUS DAMPING=YES, STRUCTURAL DAMPING=YES
*FLEXIBLE BODY, TYPE=EXCITE

    • If TYPE=EXCITE, an EXCITE flexible body of type CON6, including high-order inertia invariants, is created.

    • If TYPE=EXCITE, REDUCED FORMULATION, a simplified EXCITE flexible body of type CON6, without certain high-order inertia invariants (T1 to T3 and F1 to F6), is created.

  2. Run the Abaqus analysis.

  3. Run the abaqus toexcite translator to read the substructure SIM database produced by the analysis and to create the excite binary file.

Command summary

abaqus toexcitejobjob-name substructure_simfilename

Command line options

job

This option specifies the input and output file names to use during results translation. The job-name value is used to construct the default substructure SIM database file name, job-name.sim. The output flexible body interface file is given the name job-name.exb.

If this option is omitted from the command line, you will be prompted for this value.

substructure_sim

This option specifies the name of the substructure SIM database (.sim) file if it is different from job-name.sim. The file will usually be named job-name_Znn.sim.