# ANSYS Mechanical APDL - Rotating Boundary Conditions

All,

I recently completed a project where transient thermal boundary conditions are rotated around a cylinder for a general number of revolutions. In reality, the cylinder rotated but it was much easier to rotate the thermal conditions around the model in the ANSYS environment.

I used 360 nodes on the outer surface perimeter to keep the math easy when adjusting the RPM of the cylinder. This also allows for simple creation of different thermal conditions per degree and allows for writing out each time step during the transient to plot the temperature distribution per degree of rotation. If each temperature result is written out then each temperature result can be mapped onto a structural version (use structural elements and recreate the model) and the stress/strain solution can be acquired at the desired time step.

By keeping each revolution as a stand alone *DO loop, each revolution can have different thermal boundary conditions.

This model could not be done in Workbench. This is one of many reasons that learning and understanding Mechanical APDL is still very valuable.