Principal Components and Positioning
These sections are available for the Principal Stress Volume, Principal Stress Surface, and Principal Stress Line plots:
Principal Components
Under Principal Components, select a Type — Principal stress or Principal strain — to visualize either the principal stresses (the default) or the principal strains as vectors.
From the Data list, choose one of the available principal stresses or strains (depending on the type selected above); for example, Solid mechanics: Principal stresses. The principal values and directions are then defined based on the selected data. If you choose Manual, you can enter the following values and direction components:
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Under Principal values, enter information in the First, Second, and Third Value fields. The default are the three principal stresses (solid.sp1, solid.sp2, and solid.sp3, for example, for a Solid Mechanics interface; the prefix is the Name of the physics interface node), plotted using red, green, and blue arrows, respectively.
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Under Principal directions, enter information in the table under First, Second, and Third for the X, Y, and Z coordinate fields. The defaults are the directions (eigenvectors) for the first, second, and third principal stress.
For transient problems, enter a Time.
Positioning
For Principal Stress Surface in 3D plot groups and Principal Stress Line in 3D and 2D plot groups:
Under Positioning, first select a Placement: Gauss points, Mesh elements, Uniform, or Uniform anisotropic.
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Select Gauss points to position the principal stress symbols in the elements’ Gauss points when a solution is available. Also specify the order of the Gauss points in the Gauss point order field (default: 1). A higher order increases the principal stress symbol density in each element.
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Select Mesh elements for principal stress symbols positioned in the mesh element nodes (that is, more densely placed symbols where the mesh density is high).
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Select Uniform (the default) for principal stress symbols positioned uniformly on the surface. Then enter the number of symbols to plot in the Number of points field (default: 200).
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Select Uniform anisotropic to position the principal stress symbols using an anisotropic density (that is, more symbols in some directions than in others). In addition to entering the number of principal stress symbols to plot in the Number of points field (default: 200), use the x weight, y weight, and (in 3D) z weight fields to give weights for the symbol density in the different directions (using positive scalar weights). The default weights are 1 in all directions. A higher value increases the symbol density in the corresponding direction.
For Principal Stress Volume in 3D plot groups and Principal Stress Surface in 2D plot groups:
Under Positioning, first select a Placement: Element centers, Mesh nodes, or Grid (the default):
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Choose Element centers to position the principal stress symbols in the element centers; if desired, change the value in the Maximum number of points field (default: 100,000).
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For Mesh elements, see above.
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For Grid, in the X grid points, Y grid points, and Z grid points fields, select an Entry method: Number of points or Coordinates:
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If Number of points is selected, enter the number of Points in each direction (the default is 7 for Principal Stress Volume plots and 15 for Principal Stress Surface plots).
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If Coordinates is selected, enter Coordinates (SI unit: m) or click the Range button () to define a range of values.
In the settings above, X, Y, and Z appear by default as the coordinate names if the plot uses data defined using the material frame. If the data is defined using a spatial frame, for example, x, y, and z appear instead.