Part of the process of setting up a particular analysis for your design is to assign specific material properties to the part. Access to the Material commands and libraries is via the Material group on the FEA tab.
The Materials group in Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis allows you to consult several sources for material information:
• A Material Database
• The Preferred Material List
• The Session Material List
In addition to the above libraries, you can also access materials used in other studies.
The material database
The material database is part of the Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis package and provides access to CAE standard material entries and their associated physical characteristics. This database includes over 900 entries in 30 different databases for the most common construction and manufacturing materials.
The material database is hierarchically structured and can be found in personality/DesignAdvisor/DA_matdb6.0. In addition to the material-specific databases, there are two test-material databases which can be used for test purposes and creating your own database. The test-material databases are:
• test_materials.dat is an example database which can be used as a basis for creating your own company-specific database.
• test_materials2.cdb is also an example database but it cannot be edited.
The preferred materials list
This list is maintained by you or your company and typically includes entries for all approved and commonly used materials for product manufacture and design in your company.
You can create a local Preferred Material list by adding additional materials to the default Preferred Materials list from a database or the Session list. You can then save this customized Preferred Materials list with a local filename and recall it later.
The Preferred Material file contains pointers to material entries in the appropriate database. It does not contain material entries itself. This means that when the source database is updated, the Preferred Material list is also updated.
A typical entry in a Preferred Material file looks like this:
If you change the location of a database, you must modify the path :pm_path to point to the new location. This is also true if you want to update your Preferred Material list from earlier versions of Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis.
If you load more than one Preferred Material list into Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis, the lists are combined and displayed as one list although they are two separate files (and kept as two separate files).
The session materials list
This list is the session materials list maintained by Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis and automatically includes entries for the materials which have been used in the open Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis session. This list is not saved when the session is closed, but is created for each new session of Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis.
Existing materials
This selection refers to materials that are currently assigned in other studies. This is particularly useful, when you want to create a new study and assign the identical material as was used in an earlier study. Materials that have been used in other studies can easily be viewed and selected using the Structure Browser. After making your selection, Creo Elements/Direct Finite Element Analysis displays the Inquire Material dialog box for you to inspect the entry (you do not see a list of materials as you do with the Session list).
