Simcenter Femap How to stop a SOL 401/402 job and preserve the results in Femap

For gracefully stopping a multistep analysis and preserving the results of the simulation, you need to use the Simcenter Nastran's Solution Monitor. The following steps indicate how to activate and use the Solution Monitor:

1. Activate the Solution Monitor:

- In the Analysis Set Manager, edit the nonlinear solution, and go to the NASTRAN Executive and Solution Options dialog box
- In the Executive Control section, find the "Solution Monitor" field and select the option "2.. Launch Simcenter Nastran's Solution Monitor"
See image below:



2. Launch the Solution Monitor

- By setting the option above, the solution monitor will be launched automatically when the job is started, as seen in the following image:



3. Stop the Analysis

- To stop the analysis, click the "Stop" button of Solution Monitor when needed. This action will preserve the partial results, which can then be post-processed.

More information about the Solution Monitor can be found in the Femap Documentation

Finally, it is important to mention that a SOL 402 job can be as well gracefully stopped and preserve its results by following the indications given in the Multi-Step Nonlinear User's Guide (SOL 401 and SOL 402): 

"A SOL 402 job may be terminated at any equilibrium iteration (or time step) by modifying the RUN file NAME_PID_me.run, where NAME is the input file name and PID is a unique number defined by the software.

To dynamically update any numerical parameter for the next time step, the software reads the content of this file at the end of every computation time step, up to the EXIT line. In particular, moving the line containing ISTO before the EXIT line and setting this parameter to 999 will stop the computation. When you do this instead of killing the job, you ensure that all results are saved and all files are properly closed."