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Objective:

Learn how to calculate the angles of lattice beams, based on a plane, and export them as a text file for further processing.

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Procedure:

This workflow uses the Filter Beams by Angle block and edits the block to only calculate the lattice beams instead of filtering them. 1. Add a Filter Beams by Angle block 2. Right-click on the block and select ‘Export block’ and save the block to your computer. This saves the block as a nTop file that you can open up and see what blocks it is made of. 3. Open the Filter Beams by Angle nTop file that you just saved 4. Edit the Filter Beams by Angle file:
  • In the input section, delete the Condition and the Angle
  • In the Body section, delete the Filter block and the New Lattice Body block
  • Drag the Abs block into the Output section
  • Rename the Notebook and give it an appropriate description (in this tutorial, it is named Analyze_angles)
  • Save the nTop file
filter_angles.gif 5. Open a new nTop file 6. Import the new custom block you just created 7. Add a Cylinder block
  • Point 1: (0,0,0) mm
  • Point 2: (0,0,15) mm
  • Radius: 30 mm
8. Add a Random Points in Body block
  • Insert the Cylinder
  • Set the Point spacing to 8 mm
  • Set the Random Seed to 1 mm
9. Add a Voronoi Volume Lattice Body
  • Insert the Random Points in Body block
  • Set the Thickness to 0.5 mm
10. Insert the Voronoi Volume Lattice Body into the Custom Block, Analyze_angles 11. Add a Plane from Normal and insert it into the Plane input of the Analyze_angles block mceclip0.png 12. Add a Text from Scalar block (in order to convert the scalar angles into a format we can export)
  • Insert the Analyze_angles block into the Value input
  • Set the Reference to 1 deg
  • Set the Precision to 2 (or whichever value works best for you)
13. Add an Export Text block
  • Add the Text from Scalar block into the Text input
  • Choose a path to save the .txt file to
14. Open up the .txt file and copy the contents to a graphing program of your choice to analyze the angle of each lattice beam And that’s it! You’ve successfully exported the angles of lattice beams. Are you still having issues? Contact the support team, and we’ll be happy to help!

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Download the Example file:

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Keywords:

block lattice export calculate custom angle filter graph scalar beam how-to values degrees analyze txt text excel