If material is added to or removed from a system, certain elements in your model may come into existence or cease to exist. In such cases, you can use element birth and death options to activate or deactivate selected elements, respectively.

The element birth and death feature is useful for analyzing excavation (as in mining and tunneling), staged construction (as in shored bridge erection), sequential assembly (as in fabrication of layered computer chips), additive manufacturing (as in the progressive build of 3D printed parts), and many other applications in which you can easily identify activated or deactivated elements by their known locations.

The birth and death feature is available in the Ansys Mechanical Enterprise product.