D3PLOT2HDF5

D3PLOT>HDF5
  • Converts LS-DYNA d3plot binary files to HDF5
  • Creates XDMF files for postprocessing with tools like ParaView, VisIt or EnSight
  • Free for non-commercial use (creative commons license: BY-NC-ND 4.0)
  • Commercial license upon request

Gallery

The following pictures show some examples postprocessed by ParaView using the XDMF input. Most of these models have been taken from LS-DYNA's examples page.

elastic beams
railgun
inductive heating
temperature

Features

  • Supports single and double precision input.
  • Handles volume, shell, and beam elements.
  • Reads nodal fields such as temperature, displacements, velocities, and accelerations.
  • Reads electromagnetic (EM) multi solver data.
  • Element-wise postprocessing (average/min/max) of fields defined at integration points.
  • Generation of XDMF files allows for immediate use with postprocessing tools like ParaView, VisIt, and EnSight.
  • The generated HDF5 data can be processed with tools like MATLAB or Mathematica.
  • d3plot2hdf5 comes as a command-line tool, the Windows and macOS versions features a simple GUI.
  • d3plot2hdf5 is free for non-commercial use.

Known limitations

  • The d3plot binary file has to come from a x86-like architecture, big-endian data is not supported.
  • Thick shell elements are not tested and likely to fail.
  • Multi solver data other than EM data is currently not supported.
  • Extra data sets, such as higher order mesh data, are currently not supported.
Please contact us if you face any difficulties in using this software or if you would like to have more features included.

Sample usage

Using d3plot2hdf5 is straightforward. On Linux, unzip the downloaded file via

unzip D3PLOT2HDF5.zip .

Then, the command

d3plot2hdf5 d3plot

parses the (k+1) input files d3plot, d3plot01, d3plot02, …, d3plot09, …, d3plotk and produces the two output files d3plot.h5 and d3plot.nm.xdmf. The placeholders n and m denote the dimensions of local and global coordinate systems. E.g, the combination 33 indicates a volume grid in 3-dimensional space while 23 denotes some surface data embedded into the 3-dimensional space.

Call d3plot2hdf5 --help to obtain a list of possible command line options.

On Windows just open D3PLOT2HDF5.msi to install the installation process.

On macOS mount the disk-image D3PLOT2HDF5.dmg and copy the Application to its desired place.

About d3plot2hdf5

d3plot2hdf5 is a file converter that transforms LS-DYNA's d3plot binary files into HDF5. It is free for non-commercial use.

Typically, d3plot binary files are either used in conjunction with LS-PrePost, or with some proprietary third party applications such as, e.g., Oasys D3PLOT, and the tools developed and distributed by Dynamore. Apart from these commercial software products, a freely available tool for processing d3plot files is provided by qd-eng. It features a python API and is also capable of exporting the contents of d3plot files into HDF5 files.

Our aim is to provide a fast, secure, and lossless conversion from d3plot to HDF5. Thanks to its BSD-like license HDF5 can be easily incorporated into both commercial and non-commercial applications. Therefore, powerful tools for further postprocessing can be developed on top of d3plot2hdf5. E.g., d3plot2hdf5 automatically creates an XDMF file, which references the HDF5 data and which can immediately be processed by freely available visualization tools like ParaView or VisIt as well as by the proprietary ANSYS product EnSight.

Licensing

Creative
                                                                                          Commons License
d3plot2hdf5 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

For commercial licenses of d3plot2hdf5, please contact us.