ANSYS Report Writing Guidelines

Report Components and Basic Guidelines

You are expected to produce a professional quality report presenting the results of the analysis.  Report would consist of three sections:

1. A title page with your group number, team member’s names, title etc.

2. A 1-page (max) Executive Summary. This should be a self-contained description of the problem and all important conclusions.

3. A Descriptive Report which provides all relevant details, interpretations, recommendations and analysis of your results. This section shall have no more than 8 pages, including all figures and tables.

The report must be typewritten.  Figures and tables should be computer generated and of high presentation quality.  Raw results listings should not be included. 

Reports must be concise and complete.  You may assume that the reader is familiar with the finite element method. No generic statements such as “The finite element method is a method to solve PDEs…” should be included.  Only relevant content receives credit.  Irrelevant text will be penalized

Important Rules

If two or more reports contain significant amounts of essentially identical material, all offending reports will receive a zero grade.  Protect your work!  If your work appears in another report, you will receive a zero grade, too!  The same applies for reports substantially copied from previous semesters.

Accuracy is important.  A report with definitely inaccurate results or with quantitative results reported without units will be penalized. The penalization will be more severe if the errors are widespread. Be absolutely sure that units are reported for all computations reported.

A document that reports absurd results without a clear indication that the student is aware of the absurdity will receive a zero grade. A "clear indication" of awareness is the statement "THIS RESULT IS ABSURD" next to the result in question. Absurd results are, e.g., displacements of several feet in a part that is inches long, stresses 100,000 times larger than the yield strength of titanium.