3.1.14: Select Elements

Use the “Select Elements” component to filter elements based on specific properties. The selected elements can then be used to retrieve results, calculate their mass, surface area, volume, or generate meshes (see the “Element Query” component).

Fig. 3.1.14.1 shows how this works: the input plugs “ElemIds”, “Colors”, “CrosSecs”, “Materials”, “LenInter”, and “ElemTypes” can be supplied with lists of element identifiers, colors, cross sections, materials, length intervals, and type indexes. The values in each input plug form criteria via “OR”. For example, in Fig. 3.1.14.1, the selected elements may be either purple or red. The individual input plugs are connected via “AND”: in the image below, the selected element must be named “Membrane_D”, be red or purple, and be either a membrane or shell, and so on.

For shells and membranes, the length refers to the diagonal of their axis-aligned bounding box. For 1-D elements, it is simply their length. The element types are indexed starting with zero. Right-click on the component icon and select “Expand ValueLists” to make the value-list input appear.