FEMAP Material Assignment in Assembly 4

[SolidworksFan]

How do you assign different material properties in an assembly? Example, part 1 is 6061-T6 and part 2 is Alloy Steel.

I tried using mesh/geometry/solid, pick the geometry and then Load the material and select the material. Nice and easy. I used the same approach to assign a different material to part 2 but I do not get the Load material choice.

Also, once materials are assigned, how do you check the parts to insure the correct material has been assigned?

 

[dwallace1971]

Have you worked through the tutorials? That would be a good place to start. There are many ways to assign materials and properties to your mesh as well as to check your mesh. However, from your questions, it seems that you have little to no familiarity whatsoever with the user interface. FEMAP includes several tutorials that, as you work through them will answer your questions above. If you don't have the hard-copy examples manual, an electronic copy is included with the help files. I hope this helps.

 

[SolidworksFan]

True I am a newbe to FEMAP. I worked thru most of the tutorials but only one delt with an assembly and they chose to assign the same material to all parts. I slugged thru the manuals and read between the lines and figured it out. FEMAP really needs more examples and/or pics in the Commands text.

Thanks for responding.

 

[dwallace1971]

FEMAP doesn't recognize assemblies as such. You can do a number of different things. I would suggest you define all of your materials and properties up front. You should have a property defined for each component (some suggest you should go so far as to have a unique material for each component, but that's a bit much). Create a group for each part in your assembly. If you imported your geometry, you can do this quickly by choosing GROUP, OPERATIONS, GENERATE SOLIDS from the menus. Then, in the model info pane, expand the GEOMETRY tree, and right click on the first solid in the tree, then choose, ATTRIBUTES. Pick a property to assign to that solid. Repeat for all of your parts. Now when you mesh them, FEMAP will automatically assign the properties you chose to the mesh for those parts.

You can create the properties and materials on the fly by choosing to mesh a solid, then when the first pop-up menu pops up, click on the little icon out to the right of the properties field (it looks like a cross section of an i-beam), this will bring up the property definition menu. To the right of the material field, you'll see another little icon. Clicking this will take you to the materials definition menu, that you're probably familiar with.

I don't prefer the on the fly method because it can lead to sloppy models. I prefer to plan my model out before I begin defining it. I define the materials and properties up front. FEMAP allows you to add your own materials to the materials library (or even create your own library if you prefer). If you have a materials you use regularly, I would advise you to save them to the library to make them quickly accessible.

If possible, it's also of benefit to apply your boundary conditions to the geometry as opposed to the mesh. That way, if you end up remeshing you won't necessarily have to redefine your loads and constraints.

I hope this helps.

D.

 

[rb1957]

your assembly is two (at least) pieces, distinct geometries.
you mesh the geometry, creating nodes.
you then assign elements to the meshed geometry. one of the inputs you have to give the elements is a property card which includes ('cause it's based on NASTRAN) the material id. different materials ? create different material properties.

this should be clearly covered in the examples.

to check afterwards, modify/edit/element/properties (or something like that) or view, assign different colours to different materials, or group elements by pid, or (olde school) print out the NASTRAN input (export model data).

 

[SolidworksFan]

Thanks for all of the help.

 

[rb1957]

if we've been helpful it's polite to shower LPSs

 

[SolidworksFan]

LPSs???

 

[rb1957]

Little Purple Star ... see "thank xxx and star this post"

 

[rb1957]

thank you !