Units and unit conversions in IMPETUS

We have put a lot of effort in helping you control the units of any value used in IMPETUS simulations. The software currently supports eight unit systems, specified by the *UNIT_SYSTEM command. In general, we recommend to always specify the unit system you use in your model, as the software will activate some powerful features if it knows the unit system used.

Units in the Engine

The IMPETUS Afea Solver Engine comes with some really powerful functionality to do automatic conversions between different unit systems. However, it requires you to explicitly specify the physical quantities of parameters, curves and functions.

As long as you define the required physical quantities, the Engine will be able to automatically convert between different unit systems. So, if you receive a model that is not in your preferred unit system, you can convert it to your unit system of choice with the ~convert_from_/~end_convert pair of commands.

This is the mechanism that is used behind the scenes to make an object usable in any of the supported unit systems.

Units in the GUI

In the Configure dialog in Assemble and Post mode you can specify your preferred display units of several physical quantities. The same options are available from the Units button in Plot mode. The default is to use whatever unit is used in the model.

As you have specified the *UNIT_SYSTEM, the GUI will know the units of most quantities and will show them where applicable.

However, if you prefer to see the values in different units, you can modify the display units in the Configure dialog.

Then the GUI will automatically convert the corresponding values to the preferred display unit. The model above will then automatically be updated to this.

As you can see, the time, displacement, force and stress are now shown in the selected display units.

Setting the display units makes it very easy to compare models in different unit systems, as the automatic conversion makes values directly comparable. This should make it easier to detect any unit related errors. It will also make it easier to present results to others in the units they are most accustomed with.

Check out the different options now available in the units configuration dialog. The list of physical quantities is getting long, but is not yet complete. More will be added in the future.