MD-Nastran - clarification on Installation and Setup for use with MicMac/FEA

Related to the message that Dr.Freed posted earlier regarding running the analysis and viewing results in Excel using MicMac/FEA for MD-Nastran: I am going to provide some clarifications on the installation and 2 files that you may need to update in your installation.

We have setup the MicMac/FEA (MD-Nastran) spreadsheet to automatically:
1. Open Patran and create the full model, materials, laminate, boundary conditions
2. Write out the input BDF file for MD-Nastran (file is OpenHole.bdf for the openhole case)
3. MD-Nastran run submission from Patran (I believe this step is not happening for you currently; use the updated P3trans.ini file that we provided, or add this line to your existing P3trans.ini file; For the default installation path for Patran 2008r2, the P3trans.ini file will be in: C:\MSC.Software\Patran\2008_r2
The line to update: Acommand2008=C:\MSC.Software\MD_Nastran\bin\mdnastran.exe
4. Read in the results from the analysis for post-processing using the .op2 post-file format Openhole.op2 file should exist from this current run; it will typically be >2MB for this Openhole case
5. Create a series of plots using Patran to post-process the .op2 results.
6. Import the Strength Ratios for each layer back into Excel and also fringe plots for the Strength Ratio on each layer. The first plot shows the envelope of the Min.Strength Ratio over all layers.

If the analysis does not run or has an error for some reason, all of the steps from #3 on will not properly take place (you might pick up plots from an earlier run should they still exist).

Note in the plots, Global Layer IDs are used starting from
Layer 101.

Layer 101 - 1st Layer
Layer 102 - 2nd Layer
etc.

Your typical result plot for the Strength Ratio on the 4th layer (Global Layer ID 104), is attached in: Openhole_A_SR_L104.jpg
In the filename: SR denotes Strength Ratio, L104 denotes the Global Layer ID 104 or the 4th Layer. The coloring on the plots should be a White background with Black Text, similar to the plot attached.

The files you need to update are in the attached:
P3_TRANS_settings_updates_090518.zip.txt
Rename the file to:
P3_TRANS_settings_updates_090518.zip
first. Then extract the files from the ZIP archive.

Please post another message if you are still having problems. I also noticed that you mentioned using Patran 2008r1. Patran 2008r2 was on the DVD distributed to the Tutorial participants. Did you already have Patran 2008r1 installed previously?