PeDAL Tutorial

1

PeDAL Tutorial

Compiled by:

Eric Miller

Phoenix Analysis & Design Technologies

7755 S Research Dr, Suite110

Tempe, AZ 85284

www.PADTINC.com

1-800-293-PADT

info@padtinc.com

PeDAL Tutorial

2

Just like the APDL language it was designed to edit, the PeDAL editor is very simple and

straightforward, but if you dig deeper into it you will find many ways to be more efficient. In this

tutorial we will mostly cover the basics of how to create APDL macros in PeDAL, and use the

integrated help. At the end we will look at some of the more advanced features. We will be

using examples from PADT's "Introduction to the ANSYS Parametric Design Language" book.

Getting Started To begin we will be typing in bracket1.mac from "Introduction to the ANSYS Parametric Design

Language" We will type in the whole thing to get some practice with the interface.

1. From the Windows Start m menu select PADT, Inc>PeDAL X64. You should see:

2. Note the text editor in the left window and the browser, with the online PeDAL help on

the right.

3. To get warmed up we are going to slowly type the first command, finish, and see what

the interface does. Click in the text editor window and type in the first letter of the first

line for the macro: f

F is a command (force) so it shows you the syntax for that command and the one line

description:

PeDAL Tutorial

3

4. Now type the i. The interface searches for valid APDL commands and shows you a list

with the first "fi" command highlighted.

5. Type in the n and it will highlight "finish" You can press the TAB key and PeDAL will

insert "finish" You can also type in a comma (,) and it will also use the currently selected

keyword.

6. Press Enter to go to the next line and notice two things:

Finish is highlighted in a burnt orange color. This is because the default color for a

"processor" command is set to that color.

Line numbers are now being placed next to the lines as you type (1 and 2).

PeDAL Tutorial

4

7. Enter in the next two lines: /clear then /prep7.

Note that it still shows you choices as you type and when you enter the full command, it

shows the syntax and short description.

/clear is blue, the color of a standard command, and /prep7 is burnt orange because it

changes the processor.

8. Next we are going to type in a bunch of keypoint coordinates. But since this is the first

time we are doing more than just the keyword, just do the first one by itself: k,1,0,0,0

9. As you type in the first line (k,1,0,0,0) note that the syntax clue shows you what

argument you are currently entering.

PeDAL Tutorial

5

This is one of the most useful features in PeDAL because it is almost impossible to remember all

the arguments to a command, but with the prompting you get enough information to enter the

command correctly without having to consult the manual.

10. Enter in the rest of the keypoints:

k,2,0.25,0,0

k,3,0.25,4-.25,0

k,4,3,4-.25,0

k,5,3,4,0

k,6,0,4,0

11. Note that the keyword is highlighted blue and the numbers are in beige.

12. What if you type in a keyword that is not a command? Type in nmcmp,all, instead of the

correct command, numcmp,all. Note that the keyword is black instead of blue. This tells

you that PeDAL does not recognize the command.

PeDAL Tutorial

6

13. Delete that line by clicking on the 10 to highlight the whole line, then press the delete key

or use the Right Mouse Button and select "delete".

You have just done 50% of what you will use PeDAL for. Typing in commands and using the

lookup and syntax prompting to help you be more accurate and efficient.

Creating a Simple Macro We are going to now finish typing in the macro. Don't worry about formatting and such right

now, we will come back and clean it up a little. Simply get used to using PeDAL by typing in

these simple commands. Look at the syntax prompting, and the way the program colors your

text and make sure that your keywords are all blue, numbers are beige, and text values are

black.

1. Type in the following lines:

l,1,6

l,6,5

l,2,3

l,3,4

lfillt,1,2,.1+.25

lfillt,3,4,.1

a,1,2,9,10,4,5,8,7

vext,all,,,0,0,4

kwpave,5,17

wprota,0,-90,0

cyl4,,,1,,,,-.25

vsbv,1,2

PeDAL Tutorial

7

et,1,solid92

mptemp

mptemp,1,0

mpdata,ex,1,,29e6

mpdata,prxy,1,,.27

esize,0.25/2,0

mshape,1,3d

mshkey,0

vmesh,all

eplot

2. Now that we have a macro we want to save it. PeDAL has the same concept of

"working directory" as ANSYS Mechanical APDL. So we want to make sure we go to

the directory we are going to run ANSYS in: Click on the "house" icon to set the working

directory to a valid place you want to run ANSYS in:

3. Now click on the save icon, or use File>Save. Call the macro ws1.mac

4. Start up ANSYS MAPDL in that working directory and type in ws1 to run the macro.

You should see this:

5. If you do not, or you got an error when you ran your macro, you need to debug.

PeDAL Tutorial

8

Debugging If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we spend most of our time debugging our

commands. So PeDAL was written to make that easier.

1. If your macro worked, let's put some bugs in so we can practice debugging

Change line 17 to be: vext,xll,,,0,0,4

Change line 19 to: wprota,0,90,0

Save your changes

2. Now run your macro again in ANSYS MAPDL

3. You will get an error. Unfortunately it does not tell you what line it failed on. But if you

look at the output window you should see the some sort of warning or error. If you

munged the VEXT command you will see:

*** WARNING *** CP = 13.307 TIME= 09:51:21

Specified range of 0 to 0 is not permitted. The VEXT command is

ignored.

4. Once you have identified where your command failed, put a /eof command on the line

before that command. PeDAL will mark /eof line and all lines below it with a dark

background, telling you that if you run the file those lines will not get executed.

PeDAL Tutorial

9

5. Save and execute the macro. It will stop at the line before the error command.

6. Now look at the command and try and figure out what is wrong. You can type it into the

ANSYS command line, or you can change it in PedAL, copy that line, and paste it into

the command line in ANSYS. Keep running the macro and fixing the command till you

get it right.

Running Part of a File with CTRL+D The copy and paste in PeDAL work like any other program, but when you paste some commands into

the ANSYS command input, they don't execute. You have to place the commands in a file and run the

file. PeDAL provides a function for this by taking a selection of text in a temporary file and putting a /INP

command for that file into the clipboard for pasting. If you ever use *vwrite you will need to use this

option.

1. Select lines 1 through 17.

2. Press CTRL+D or use Edit>Copy to Input File from the menu.

3. Now go to the ANSYS input window and CTRL+V for paste.

4. Now press return and ANSYS will read that tmp file. Note the ,,,,1 option. This tells the

program to put the contents of the file in the *.log file, not the /inp command.

Using ANSYS Help with PeDAL The ability to quickly access the ANSYS help manual from within PeDAL is the second most

useful feature in the program, just behind the syntax prompting. You can access the full help,

search for a specific command, or get the command help for a given command. In this section

we will do all three.

1. To search for a specific topic, simply type the word you want to search on in the search

window and press the enter key. Let's practice by searching on "plasticity"

PeDAL Tutorial

10

As you can see, it tells you the string it is searching on and then the names of the sections it

found information in, along with the number of times the string is used in that section. 1000

times in TB… that is a lot. If you click on the entry, it will take you to that help page. All of the

hyperlinks in the ANSYS help still work, so you can explore from there.

2. Click on TB and look around the help page.

3. Now click on "data table" near the top and it will go to section 3.1.

4. Click on the left pointing blue arrow on the browser tool bar to go back to the TB

command.

5. Click on the left pointing blue arrow again to go back to the list from the search.

6. To search on a specific command you can just put that command in the search box. Or,

you can do it from the text editor.

In the text editor, click on the wprota keyword (line 19) and then Right Mouse Button to

PeDAL Tutorial

11

get the context menu.

Select "Search Help for "wprota"

7. You will see the same search result as if you typed "wprota" into the help window. This

will show everywhere that the command is mentioned.

8. If you want the command help for that command, which is what you want 90% of the

time, then do the same thing but choose "Show Command Help for "wprota" instead.

Now the browser will go directly to that manual page. Try it.

Commenting Comments are an important part of any program, even an APDL script. PeDAL has some nice

tools to make it easier to comment your macros, including some automatic generation of

comments.

1. The first thing we want to do is a simple comment on a line. Click in front of the f on the

first line and press enter, this creates a new first line. Then type "! This is a comment"

The ! is a comment in APDL, and everything to the right of the ! is not read by the

program. PeDAL shows this by setting all comment text to Italic and green.

PeDAL Tutorial

12

2. To comment out commands, you simply have to highlight the lines you want

commented, and then click on the "Add Leading Comment…" icon: or Right Mouse

Button and Select "Comment Selected Lines". Try it out by selecting all the keypoint

creation commands (k,) and click on the icon or select the command from the context

menu. The top of your macro should now look like this:

3. As you probably noticed, there is also a way to uncomment a commented line. Select

the K commands again and click the "Remove Leading Comment…" icon: or Right

Mouse Button to choose "Uncomment Selected Lines"

4. A very handy feature of PeDAL is the ability to automatically comment a command, or all

the commands in a macro. To do this select one or more lines of code and click the

Auto Comment icon, it looks like a lightbulb.

Select lines 18 through 23 (vext to et) and click on the icon

A dialog box will come up to set options for the comments

PeDAL Tutorial

13

5. Click on Current Selection for Scope

6. For Comment Location you can have it above each command, to the right of the

command with a fixed number of spaces, or aligned with the number of spaces specified

as the minimum distance.

Chose Right of Command Column Aligned and set Padding Spaces to 2. Click OK.

The result should look like this:

7. Click on the icon again and choose "Whole Document" and you will see a description of

every command in the macro. That may be overkill but if non-experts are using your

macro, it can be a real time saver.

8. Click the undo arrow (or Edit>Undo) twice to get rid of those comments.

Aligning Large macros can get a bit messy, so PeDAL has some great tools to clean things up.

1. Look at the K commands. Notice how the numbers don't line up and it is hard to tell what

the X, Y, and Z components are for each one. To line everything up:

Select all of the K, lines.

PeDAL Tutorial

14

2. Click the "Align Command Fields" icon or Right Mouse Button and chose "Align

Command Fields"

3. The "Remove any Whitespace" icon and "Compress Command Field" context menu

picks get rid of any spaces if you want that.

Do so for the K commands

4. Now go and put the alignment back in.

Indentation PeDAL will automatically indent code that should be indented, mostly *do loops and *if

statements. You can also do indentation on your own. For this tutorial we will do a *do loop in

an *if statement.

1. Go to File>New Macro to create a new tab for our simple *if/*do macro. We are going to

make a very silly macro that loops through nodes 1 to 100 and assigns a displacement

of UX if it is an even numbered node, UY for the first half of the odd numbered nodes,

and UZ for the second half of the odd numbered nodes.

2. Type the following commands in:

Nmnd=100.*do,i,1,nmnd

*if,mod(i,2),eq,0,then

d,i,ux,0.1

*else

*if,I,gt,nmnd/2,then

d,i,uy,.1

*else

d,I,uz,.1

*endif

*endif

*enddo

3. As you type, notice how PeDAL does the indentation for you. Don't use tabs, just let the

program do it's thing.

PeDAL Tutorial

15

4. Notice that PeDAL not only does the indentation, but it draws a line connecting the start

and stop of a "group" and it provides tools that let you collapse and expand a loop.

Click on the triangle for the most inner *if statement (i,gt,nmnd/2).

5. Note that the triangle turns to ellipses (…) and lines are put above and beyond the part

the collapsed. The first line is still shown to tell you what was collapsed.

6. Click on the ellipses to show the whole *if statement again.

7. Save the macro as "sillyloop.mac" We will use it in the next section.

Hyperlinking Macros PeDAL looks in the same places that ANSYS does for macros, and if it recognizes the name of

a macro it will treat it as a valid command, highlight it as such, and create a hyperlink to the

macro file.

PeDAL Tutorial

16

1. Click on the ws1.mac tab to go back to the original macro

2. At the bottom of the macro, type sillyloop. Note that PeDAL highlights it as orange.

3. Hover your mouse over the line and it will behave like a hyperlink.

4. Click on it, and the editor switches to sillyloop.mac.

Exporting Your Macro Once you are done with your macro you may want to put it in a report or a website or

something. You can easily do this using the Export feature in the File menu.

1. Go to File->Export

PeDAL Tutorial

17

2. Note that you can save as RTF, TeX, and HTML. RTF can be read by MS Word and

most other word processors, and the HTML is perfect for blog postings and such. TeX,

well you must have a graduate degree if you use TeX…

3. Choose RTF and save the file as ws1.rtf.

4. Go to your working directory in your file browser and open up the file. It should be a nice

copy of what you saw in PeDAL, nice and ready to use in your report or Powerpoint.

Learning More In this short tutorial we covered only the basics of PeDAL, with a few very useful advanced

features. To learn more use the online help or just explore. Push a button, nothing will break.