Extract text from ANSYS/COMSOL animations (CXA)
To convert CXA animations to another format, you need ANSYS Fluent or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Simulation Animation File" file type, you need software like ANSYS Fluent or a similar tool.
The .CXA file is an animation sequence definition file primarily used by engineering simulation software such as ANSYS Fluent and COMSOL Multiphysics. These files are generated during Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and multiphysics simulations to store the instructions and timeline required to animate fluid flows, heat transfers, and structural deformations.
To open or modify a .CXA file, you typically need an expensive commercial license for the original software. You can read more about the underlying physics engines on the CFD Wikipedia page.
The main disadvantage of the .CXA format is that it is highly proprietary and fundamentally useless to non-engineers. It is not a standard video file. You cannot play it in web browsers, smartphones, or media players like VLC. Furthermore, .CXA files often do not store the actual visual pixels; they only store the sequence metadata and point to the heavy data (DAT) and mesh (CAS) files on your hard drive to render the frames in real-time.
To share these animations with clients or colleagues, you must convert the simulation timeline into a standard video format like MP4 or AVI. This conversion almost always has to be done directly from within the export menu of the original software.
Because this file format is proprietary and deeply integrated with external simulation data, standard online converters fail to process it into video. Since sequence definitions are sometimes stored as plain text, our tool can inspect the file, show you the internal content, and help you determine exactly which software generated it.
Convert.Guru analyzes your CXA file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted HSF, MAT and DTA files.
If you want to convert CXA file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use ANSYS Fluent or similar software from the "Animation Sequence Definition" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to CXA, try ANSYS Fluent or another comparable tool in the "Animation Sequence Definition" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our CXA converter.