I have a model with a complex curved surface made of SHELL281 elements, and I've performed a harmonic analysis in ANSYS . Now, I need to find the velocity in the normal direction to the surface at each node.
In ANSYS Harmonic Analysis, to extract the normal velocity at each node of SHELL281 elements on a curved surface, use the ETABLE and POST1 processing tools. First, retrieve the nodal velocities using POST1 with *GET or PRNSOL, V. Then, compute the normal direction at each node using the element normal vector or by extracting the surface normal from nodal coordinates. Finally, project the velocity onto the normal direction using vector dot product calculations in APDL or external post-processing (e.g., MATLAB or Python).