CB Card

The CB card can be used to change geometry element labels that have been previously defined. Labels that are associated with points, segments, triangles, cuboids, polygonal plates and tetrahedral elements can be updated.

On the Construct tab, in the Modify group, click the  Change label (CB) icon.



Figure 1. The CB - Change already assigned labels dialog.

Parameters:

Specify old/new label here
This selection allows to specify an old label and a new label in the corresponding input fields.
Read list of old/new labels from file
This selection allows to read a list of old/new label pairs from an external data file. See further details below.
Old label
All the structures with this label are relabelled.
New label
The new label for all the structures with the old label.
File name
The name of the file used when reading the label list from an external data file.

Renaming labels is especially useful when more labels are created by using symmetry (SY card), transformations (TG card), when importing geometry from files (IN card) or any other properties that would be set by label. Structures created after the CB card are not affected.

In order to make the renaming of a whole set of different labels simpler, the Old label field in the CB card is also supporting wild cards “*” (an arbitrary sequence of characters) and “?” (a single arbitrary character). For instance, to rename all these labels

Cube.Face1
Cube.Face2
Cube.Face3
Cube.Face4
Cube.Face5
Cube.Face6

to a new label CubeSurface one could use six CB cards, but with the wild cards this is much simpler to use just one CB card and specify the old label as

Cube.Face?

or also as

Cube.*

depending on what other labels are also in the model.

Note that such wild cards are only supported in the Old label field of the CB card. The New label must be unique.

Another possibility to do a bulk renaming of labels is to read a label mapping table from an external file, which follows the syntax of the ANSA package. In ANSA version 11, this file consists of an arbitrary number of lines

old_label | new_label

where the old and new label entries are separated by the “|” character. Alternatively, the ANSA version 12 format is also supported, where there is no “|” character to separate the old and new label, but just white space such as a space or tab character. Comment lines are allowed in these files and are indicated using “**” as the first characters of the line.

Some external meshing programs can for instance export a NASTRAN file along with such a mapping table, and then by using the two commands

IN   3  3  "geometry.nas"
CB: :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  : "geometry.txt"

one can get the model into Feko with the proper names of the parts. In this case, the file geometry.pre would then do a proper mapping of the NASTRAN property to the part name in the original CAD program.