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Ansys Developer product guide

Structures

Last update: 29.04.2025

Autodyn

There are no developer tools available at this time.

Forming

There are no developer tools available at this time.

However, Ansys Forming runs on the LS-DYNA solver. For more information, see LS-DYNA.

LS-DYNA

LS-DYNA has an open-source Python interface named PyDYNA.

PyDYNA documentation (PyAnsys)

MCalibration

There are no developer tools available at this time.

Ansys Mechanical and MAPDL

The Ansys Mechanical product consists of two aspects: Mechanical and Mechanical APDL (MAPDL). MAPDL further consists of two constituent parts: the user interface that lets you call and run APDL code, and APDL itself. APDL stands for "Ansys Parametric Design Language."

Ansys Mechanical and MAPDL are essentially two sides of the same coin, being two ways to access the same solver. There are four principal developer tools associated with them plus a fifth that's only available as part of the Mechanical Premium and Enterprise products.

  • Mechanical scripting interface: Available within Mechanical, this is a Python scripting interface used for programmatically interacting with the Mechanical UI. For more information, see Mechanical scripting interface (Developer Portal documentation).
  • APDL: A FORTRAN-like scripting language that directly interacts with the underlying solver of both MAPDL and Mechanical.
  • PyMAPDL: An open-source Python wrapper for APDL that can call APDL commands from within Python scripts when installed alongside a compatible installation of MAPDL. For more information, see PyMAPDL documentation (PyAnsys).
  • PyMechanical: An open-source Python interface with the Mechanical UI. This interface has access to the .NET objects available in ACT. For more information, see PyMechanical documentation (PyAnsys).
  • Ansys Rigid Body Dynamics: An analysis system within the Ansys Mechanical Premium and Enterprise products that allows you to study the kinematics of mechanical systems. This system takes the form of an IronPython library within ACT. For more information, see Ansys Rigid Body Dynamics for developers (Developer Portal documentation).

Ansys Mechanical and MAPDL training material

Non-Ansys Mechanical and MAPDL training material

Motion

Ansys Motion provides both a preprocessor C# library and a postprocessor C# library.

Motion for developers (Developer Portal documentation)

nCode DesignLife

There are no developer tools available at this time.

PolyUMod

There are no developer tools available at this time.

Sherlock

Ansys Sherlock has an open-source Python interface named PySherlock.

Ansys Sherlock training material