In fact, I was in a room next to one of our support engineers while they were showing a customer how to change the elements that the solver would solve (Mechanical defaults to the most common formulation, but you can change them to whatever still makes sense) and the user had to admit he had never really used or even seen APDL commands before. But new users did not get the chance to be exposed to the power of APDL (ANSYS Parametric Design Language), so getting access to those advanced capabilities can be tough.

So to access all those features, you just need to enter in the commands you want.įor many older users, this is not a problem because we grew up using the text commands. MAPDL is a good old-fashioned command-driven program that takes in text commands one line at a time and executes them.

This is awesome because you, as a user, have complete and full access to the huge breadth and depth available in the MAPDL program. One of the most powerful things about ANSYS Mechanical is the fact that it creates an input file of APDL commands that is sent to ANSYS Mechanical APDL (MAPDL) to solve. We have recently updated it a bit, and added some additional links at the bottom that you should check out, including an interview with John Swanson, the man who invented APDL. This shows how powerful the APDL language is and how building Ansys Mechanical on top of MAPDL was a good move. Editors note: For over ten years, this article has been PADT’s most popular post.

Ansys apdl command reference