Orthotropic element orientation

[Stefan2653]

It would be helpful to add an option to orient orthotropic thermal brick elements to the UCS rather than only to three reference nodes. With the nodal reference requirement not only must you run a check, look up the node number (challenging on very large models), then go back to the preprocessor to input the nodes, but if you ever modify the model resulting in nodal renumbering, you must redo that lookup process.

Most of our models are built in orthogonal to the UCS, so a simple UCS alignment would save a lot of time. My recollection is that older versions (Algor) worked that way.

Thanks.

Stefan