Abaqus/CAE is integrated with Python 2.7, settings and commands are read through python-based environment files at start-up and commands are streamed to replay files along the session. This produces powerful opportunities to form the CAE environment into a specialized package to accelerate day-to-day tasks. Instead of painting a flowery picture I’d rather jump in and demonstrate selected techniques that enables you to customize the user interface to your will.

I often work on organically shaped CAD data and often find the default geometrical refinement setting too low – this does sadly not exist in the session.default* objects so we need to apply some creative approaches.

Scripting in Abaqus is a powerful way to reduce working hours and ensure a consistent method is used. Previously, we have given an example of postprocessing and tips on getting started. Now I want to discuss what kinds of problems are easy or more challenging to script by using examples. Hopefully this will make it easier to find a suitable problem and get started scripting.

September’s webinar is entitled ‘Plug-ins and Python scripting in Abaqus’. It will be held on the 25th of September.

Scripting is the easiest way to automate all the repetitive tasks. There is number of reasons why someone would like to avoid doing everything manually. Number one of course is that doing things manually is boring. However, there are far more important reasons to create scripts. From an engineering point of view, the most important attribute of our work is quality and reliability. Scripts always perform tasks the same way and that gives users confidence that any mistake will not sneak into.

Lately, I’ve received a few questions related to python scripting. It is a nice way to add to the default Abaqus functionality and automate repetitive work. Here I want to give a few tips that may help when you are creating your first Abaqus python scripts.

One of the benefits of doing simulations, is that it is easy to change various parameters to assess their influence on results. When doing this, often the same post-processing is needed for more than one analysis. Of course you can manually open each .odb, create the right images and save them, but this can be quite a lot of (boring!) work and the chance of making a mistake is definitely there. Therefore, it is often beneficial (and more fun) to create a script to do this automatically. In this blog, I will show how you can create a script to automate the creation of images using Abaqus.

26th of February we will host our Abaqus Scripting Online Training Webinar. February’s webinar will cover an introduction to Abaqus scripting.

Abaqus uses an extension to the Python language called the Abaqus Scripting Interface. It contains all the commands you need to customize Abaqus/CAE and create automatic pre-processing or post-processing programs. But there is no need to learn this long list of commands. Abaqus offers tools to help you to develop your scripts. You just need to remember 2 or 3 tricks and you are ready.