Miscellaneous Problems
Miscellaneous problems.
Problems with coincident solid or thick-shell elements.You are warned if coincident solid or thick-shell elements are found when the files are read in. This is because all faces of such elements will be flagged as "internal" and the elements won't be displayed unless you turn the , switch ON . There may also be problems with averaging data at nodes for such elements unless you set the and switches carefully. See AVERAGING... Controlling data averaging across adjacent elements for more details. You can list coincident elements of all types with the , command. |
Problems displaying extra nodes on rigid bodies
D3PLOT considers nodes that are not attached to elements to be non-structural and does not normally display them. "Extra nodes on rigid bodies" can fall into this category as, unless they are attached to an element, they do not appear to be part of anything. To see these you need to turn the , switch ON .
You can list nodes that D3PLOT considers to be non-structural with the , command.
Problems seeing contact surfaces.
You can only see your contact surfaces if you have written the (optional) contact force ( .CTF ) file during your analysis. No .CTF file: no contact surfaces visible.
If your analysis would take a long time to re-run you can at least visualise the contact surface geometry by reinitialising it under a different name with a contact force file, and then renaming this .CTF to look as if it came from the original analysis. D3PLOT will extract the geometry from this but obviously will be unable to read transient contact force data which isn't there. It can cope with this, although you will get the warning message at initialisation that there are no contact force states to match structural states.
Problems seeing springs, joints and stonewalls.
The topology of these elements is extracted from the .XTF file so, if it isn't there, you won't see these.
Reinitialising and renaming the .XTF file as above will solve this problem.