Drawing Shells with Thickness

Drawing Shells with thickness

The true thickness of 'thin' shells (*ELEMENT_SHELL) can also be visualised in D3PLOT. To preserve graphics speed, shell thickness is controlled on a per-part basis. You can switch on the thickness option for individual parts using either Quick Pick or the Part Tree.

Which thickness value is drawn?

• If ENGFLG set on *DATABASE_EXTENT_BINARY, Ansys LS-DYNA will write an average shell thickness for each shell (average is relevant in the case where thickness varies between nodes). D3PLOT will then draw shell thicknesses by averaging the values from Ansys LS-DYNA at nodes (so an average of averages). So *ELEMENT_SHELL_THICKNESS is considered, but beware averaging.
• If ENGFLG not set, D3PLOT takes values from *SECTION info in ZTF file (so *ELEMENT_SHELL_THICKNESS is ignored in this case).