Question QC-002:

I get an error message from TRANSOR for I-DEAS that the number of element groups exceeds 200. What is the problem?

Answer:

During the translation of the I-DEAS model, the following rule is used for creating a new element group division.

  • When looping over all the elements according to element label order, if the element type OR material type of the element is different from the previous element, a new element group division is created.

Example:

Element Labels Element Type Material Group Division
1 - 25 Shell 20 1
26 - 77 Shell 23 2
78 - 122 Shell 20 3
123 - 129 Beam 20 4
130 - 184 Shell 20 5

In general, if the number of element groups exceeds 200, it may mean that the element label sequence is too fragmented. If that is the case, it is advisable to re-label the elements in I-DEAS such that elements of the same type and material are labeled in a contiguous manner.

In the above example, by re-labeling the elements such that all the shell elements with material 20 are contiguous, the number of element group divisions will be reduced from 5 to 3.

If the error message still occur after re-labeling the elements, you can increase the maximum number of element groups by using the TRANSOR option file. Create a file called "transor.opt" in the working directory with the following text in the file. 

  MAXA_EGROUP_DIVISION  500
This will set the maximum number of element groups to 500.


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