This article gives an overview and examples of Altair ASCII format which can leveraged to read custom results formats generated by in-house or propriety codes.


Altair HyperView supports reading of multiple CAE results file formats for post-processing and has an additional capability to read generic ASCII results generated from any in-house or propriety codes deployed at customer’s organization. Altair ASCII format(*.hwascii) is the generic data format which aims to ensure seamless collaboration and results integration with Hyperworks and External applications . This flexible format supports multiple data types (scalars, vectors, and tensors) spanning across various simulation types (linear, modal, and transient), and allows user defined labels for the data types. In this article, we will explore the basics of HWASCII files, their structure, and some methods to create this format.

The Altair ASCII file Header format is structured as :

For detailed information of each keyword please refer to https://help.altair.com/hwdesktop/hwd/topics/reference/hwdref/keywords_and_descriptions_r.htm

Examples of Altair ASCII formats for transient and frequency response analysis:

                  

           Static Analysis ASCII format                              Frequency Response Analysis ASCII format

To ensure that the custom results data is accurately read in HyperWorks, there are a set of rules and guidelines to create Altair ASCII format which can be referred at  https://help.altair.com/hwdesktop/hwd/topics/reference/hwdref/rules_guidelines_r.htm

Generating Altair ASCII results format for specific use cases can be cumbersome task since the custom results have to reformatted based on a set of rules and guidelines. We would recommend using Altair compose which will allow users to write scripts (*.oml , *.py , *.tcl ) which can read generic ASCII files from users and perform conversion to an HWASCII format.

Compose resources:

  1. Read data from Text Files:

https://2022.help.altair.com/2022.1/compose/business/en_us/topics/compose/oml_ascii_files_readwrite_t.htm

  1. Read and Write ASCII Files in OML :https://2022.help.altair.com/2022.1/compose/business/en_us/topics/compose/oml_ascii_files_readwrite_t.htm