I am writing a Plugin which creates an orphan shell mesh of cylindrical surface then applies an external pressure load to the outer surface and an edge load to the two open ends of the cylinder. 

If you do this in the GUI, you can create a surface by highlighting the elements and then selecting the brown or purple face to be the surface. when you apply a pressure load to this, the load is then applied normal to the surface as expected.

I wish to create a surface in the script called by the plug in from an element set. There is a command to do this, SurfaceFromElsets() which creates the surface without a problem. However when you try to apply a load to this surface, the load is applied in the plane of the surface to the edge of each element. not normal to the surface. 

There is an argument for SurfaceFromElsets() which can be S1, S2 etc. However when i try this S1 work, S0 gives and error and S2, S3, etc. It creates a surface but one in an error state (red exclamation mark in the tree next to it). 

How do I create a surface that I can apply a pressure load normal to the surface to, by scripting? 

Secondly, to apply a shell edge load to the ends  of the cylindrical shell, in the GUI you pick individually the edges of the elements. I am unable to find a python command which allows me to pick the edges from the script. Is this possible to do from a script? 

Thanks in Advance

Richard