Assigning materials

You can assign a material to each part in your BoM. In Sustainability analysis, material assignments are used to calculate the environmental impacts for the Material Production phase.

The Restricted Substances and Sustainability database includes generic materials provided by Ansys, and might also include in-house materials. These are both available from the Materials tab when browsing data.

Note: You can only assign one Material to a part.
When you assign a material to a part in the BoM, you must specify its Quantity and Unit of Measure. For Sustainability analysis, there are two ways of doing this:
  • If the mass of the part is defined in the BoM, then you can specify the quantity of material as 100% of the mass of the part.

  • If you don't know the finished mass of the part, but you do know the initial mass of the material before processing, you can specify the quantity of the material as an explicit mass value in the BoM.

    For example: You know the mass of the billet of material before processing, and you are assigning a Secondary Process that removes a known amount of material (specified either as an explicit mass, or as a percentage of the material), but you don't know the final mass of the part after processing. Enter the mass of the billet into the Quantity and Unit of Measure columns for the Material, and leave the Mass per UoM and Mass Unit columns for the Part blank.

For more information about options for specifying the quantity of material, see Quantities, measures, and masses for Sustainability.
You can also specify the grade of the material, as either Virgin or Typical.
  • For all generic materials, environmental data is provided for Virgin grade material (with 0% recycled content) and for Typical grade. For materials where end of life recycling has become integrated into the supply chain (such as metals and glasses), the data values for Typical grade take into account the amount of recycled material incorporated as standard practice.
  • For in-house materials, environmental data might have been provided for Virgin grade, Typical grade, or both.
    Note: If the in-house material has a fallback link to a generic material, the analysis can use data from the fallback material if the value you specify is unavailable in the in-house material. For more information, see Fallback data in Sustainability analysis.

If you don't specify the grade in the initial BoM, the analysis will use data for Typical grade.

Note: Specifying a material grade as a numerical percentage value is not supported at this release. If the initial BoM has a numerical or percentage value for the material grade, the analysis will use data for Virgin grade.

The material grade used by the analysis will be displayed in the results of the BoM analysis, and in the Excel report.

To assign a material:
  1. Identify the Part, and assign the Material:
    1. Right-click the Part and select Add > Material
    2. Select the data source to use.
      Either 'MaterialUniverse' (to add a generic material), or 'Materials - in house' (to add an in-house material).
    3. Select the Material, then right-click and choose Assign.
  2. When the Material has been added to the BoM, specify its Quantity and Unit of Measure.
    • If the mass of the part is defined in the BoM, enter the Quantity as '100' and the Unit of Measure as '%'.
    • If you don't know the finished mass of the Part, but you do know the initial mass of the material before processing, enter the mass of material.
  3. Specify the Material Grade.