Remote session

This section provides an overview of how you use PyMechanical as a client to a remote Mechanical session.

Overview

The launch_mechanical() method creates an instance of the Mechanical class in the background and sends commands to it as a service. Because errors and warnings are processed Pythonically, you can develop a script in real time without worrying about whether the script runs correctly when deployed in batch mode.

Here is how you use the launch_mechanical() method to launch Mechanical from Python in gRPC mode:

import os
from ansys.mechanical.core import launch_mechanical

mechanical = launch_mechanical()

If multiple versions of product are installed, then you can use exec_file argument to select the version of the product to launch.

exec_file_path = "C:/Program Files/ANSYS Inc/v242/aisol/bin/win64/AnsysWBU.exe"
mechanical = launch_mechanical(
    exec_file=exec_file_path, batch=False, cleanup_on_exit=False
)

If batch option is set True the Mechanical launches without GUI. The cleanup_on_exit option decides whether product exits at the end of the PyMechanical script or not.

Note

version argument is used only if PyPIM is configured. For general cases, use exec_file

You can send genuine Python class commands to the application when Mechanical is active. For example, you can send a Python script:

result = mechanical.run_python_script("2+3")
result = mechanical.run_python_script("ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.ProjectDirectory")

Mechanical interactively returns the result of each command that you send, saving the result to the logging module.

Errors are caught immediately. In the following code, an invalid command is sent, and an error is raised:

>>> mechanical.run_python_script("2****3")
grpc.RpcError:
"unexpected token '**'"

Because the error is caught immediately, you can write your Mechanical scripts in Python, run them interactively, and then run them in batch without worrying if the scripts run correctly. This would not be the case if you had instead outputted the scripts that you wrote to script files.

The Mechanical class supports much more than sending text to Mechanical. It includes higher-level wrapping that provides for better scripting and interaction with Mechanical. For information on advanced methods for interacting with Mechanical, see Examples.