Thank you for your reply @rszoeke.
I do remember making (some of) those changes – but I thought they all came after the Run2/Run4 transition.
I don’t know if your system allows you to see it, but I attempted literally dozens of runs over the weekend; mostly I deleted them when they failed to produce any results.
The large jump in the force value was an attempt to avoid needing to apply the displacement scaling factor; and actually, just to see what if any effect it had.
I added the sin(t) and cos(t) to the x&y translational part of the remote BC in an attempt to simulate [sic] the effects of torque in the z-axis. (because I couldn’t wrap my brain around how to define the torque about z-axis).
And also because if I used a simple scalar (eg, 200*t) it crapped out with FPE, but if I wrapped t in a system defined function (sin/cos/pow/etc.) it didn’t. (Just failed for unsolvable matrix reasons.)
Essentially, by then I was in a try anything and see what changes, debug mode.
You have provided a lot of very dense information, and several simulations for me to work through. Thank you, and I’ll get back to you in a few days on that.
With respect to a phone call – I’m not good on the phone, but if you want to take this off-line by email I okay with that.
As for how to improve the experience.
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the single easiest to implement and immediately valuable thing would be to provide a way to download the settings used by individual runs in a flat ascii format so I could diff them.
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A feature that I believe would be most useful in the long term, but it would probably involve a considerable amount of development effort to implement; would be the ability to duplicate BCs (in the way you can copy simulations) and then select between those copies using (say) a check box.
Most changes to a model seem (to my inexperienced self) to be made at the BC level, and if you could make a copy, make a change, and quickly switch between them, that would go a long way to simplifying the suck-it-and-see approach to learning.
Add a comment field displayed alongside or underneath in the navigator and you end up with an undo/redo facility and an aide-mémoire to what you’ve tried and why. -
Beyond that, commissioning a (human) technical translator to translate the French error messages to English and providing links to them when the errors occur probably wouldn’t cost much; but would help immensely.
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Imposing upon the @powerusers to put their collective heads together and come up with a guide or check list of things they do to try and isolate which of the 9 possible causes of a Matrix insoluble/singular error might allow us beginners to help ourselves when that arises.
Of course, if one you know the cause, it won’t tell you how to fix it, but it would be a starting point
Right now I have to decide whether this project is worth the pain and humiliation I’ve felt here over the last few days. When the idea came up whilst discussing the underlying problem with some equally minded friends, I described how (in my former career) I would tackle such problems by having a simulation created.
It was then that one of them pointed me at your site and the community accounts, and suggested I “knock up a few simulations” to explore the ideas we’d had to resolve the issue. I failed to explain that mostly I would produce a CAD of the part(s) and then hand those over to a guy (Dassault Systèmes trained simulations engineer) who constructed and ran the simulations and post-processed the results to according to my description of what I wanted to see.
Well, I’ve some decisions to make.
Thanks for your time. M.