Ansyswbuexe Encountered A Problem A Diagnostic File Has Been Written New -

Symptoms: The crash happens at the same simulation step (e.g., writing the sparse matrix). Your system RAM is high (16GB+) but the error persists.

Why it happens: ANSYS requires a contiguous virtual address space. Even with free RAM, Windows may fail to allocate memory for large matrices.

Fix:

The most crucial part of the error message is the phrase: “a diagnostic file has been written.” This file is not an error log in the traditional sense; it is a memory dump (often with a .dmp extension) or a detailed crash report. Its location is typically in the user’s temporary folder or the project’s solve directory (e.g., C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local\Temp\ or [Project Folder]_files\dp0\SYS\MECH\).

The diagnostic file contains:

For the average user, this file is nearly unreadable. However, for ANSYS support engineers or experienced analysts, it is the equivalent of a flight data recorder. It distinguishes between a crash caused by bad geometry, insufficient RAM, a corrupt installation, or a genuine solver bug.

This article explains what the message means, common causes, and a step‑by‑step guide to diagnose and fix the problem when Ansys Workbench (ansyswb.exe / ansyswbuexe) crashes and reports a diagnostic file was written. Symptoms: The crash happens at the same simulation step (e

Large FEA models (especially nonlinear contact, explicit dynamics, or coupled-field analyses) can cause the ansyswbuexe process to exceed the available RAM or virtual memory.
Windows will terminate the process without mercy, and ANSYS catches this as “encountered a problem.”