Development Of Complex Structures Based On Ansys Cad

With the development of construction industry and building structures in the urbanization process, the structural analysis for all types of these newly special structures -- cable, cable-stayed, cable-supported, cable nets, cable dome, membrane -- as well as the combined structures of them involves a growing number of factors such as physical, geometric nonlinearity and loading state nonlinearity. While the increasingly demanding design functions are not well performed currently by the general design software based on a simple linear system of beam, bar and plate elements, it is necessary for civil engineers to develop an advanced structural analysis software to create an integrated and powerful tool with planning, designing and drawing capabilities for complex structures.As a finite element analysis software, ANSYS has advantages in functions, compatibility, operability and calculation speed and is used to analyze all kinds of complex structural stress. Although the calculated results in ANSYS can be extracted, the post-processing is not supported by drawing functions.The purpose of this paper is to develop a drawing platform for ANSYS based on the secondary development to the AutoCAD, which has powerful drawing functions, using Visual Lisp. As data interface between ANSYS and AutoCAD is designed to realize data extraction, the structure design program and the selection of parameters are analyzed in this paper.Applying such programs to practical problems, the results has shown that the ANSYS data files can be extracted with great accuracy and time-to-solution efficiency and then be stored into AutoCAD databases. This process enables civil engineers to design, analyze and thus realize the auto-drawing functions in AutoCAD for complex structures generated and calculated by ANSYS. Without building drawing models and parameters in AutoCAD, the program in this paper helps to control the error rate in manual drawing, promote the efficiency in structure designing and provide solutions to practical engineering problems involving complex structures.