Introduction
When I am setting up models, I’ll often scope boundary conditions, loads, material properties, and other important aspects of my model using the geometry selection option.
This works well enough for small models that don't have many faces or bodies. As my models get larger and more complex, clicking to scope boundary conditions and material properties becomes an exercise in tedium with a high chance of making mistakes.
Named selections allow us to group desired faces, edges, bodies, points, elements and nodes. We can use these groups to scope material assignments, boundary conditions, loading conditions, and use other capabilities in Ansys Mechanical.
Example
The simplest way to create a named selection is to select one or more bodies, faces, lines, vertices, elements, or nodes, right click on it, and use the named selection option in the drop down window.
A window appears with an option for us to name the named selection. There are additional options for us to apply this selection to every geometry item of the same size, type, or location.
We use named selections for mesh controls, boundary conditions, and in other Ansys Mechanical capabilities by changing the relevant geometry scoping from "Geometry Selection" to "Named Selection."
The following video goes through an example of applying named selections to a table.
Conclusion
We can use named selections to help us with pre processing and post processing tasks in Ansys Mechanical. They can help us create more robust workflows and set up models more efficiently, and extract our results of interest.
