For general information about defining Engineering Data, see Define Materials in the Mechanical User's Guide.
Material properties can be linear elastic or orthotropic. Many different forms of material nonlinearity can be represented including hyperelasticity, rate and temperature dependent plasticity, pressure-dependent plasticity, porosity, material strength degradation (damage), material fracture/failure/fragmentation. For a detailed discussion on material models used in Explicit Dynamics, refer to Material Models Used in Explicit Dynamics Analysis.
Density must always be specified for materials used in an Explicit Dynamics analysis.
Data for a range of materials is available in the Explicit material library.
Note: In Engineering Data, temperatures defined in the Material Field Variable section are not used by the Explicit Dynamics analysis system. In addition, elastic material data and expansion coefficients that are temperature dependent are not taken into account. Only the first value in the table is used for these coefficients, and you can only have one reference temperature even if multiple materials are used in the model. If you need different reference temperatures per material, this can be accomplished by adding an Autodyn component system to the analysis and defining the material reference temperature information there.
The LS-DYNA system in Workbench partially supports temperature dependency. The environment temperature is used to interpolate temperature dependent properties for Isotropic Elasticity, Bilinear Hardening, and Multilinear Hardening.
The LS-DYNA system only supports the environment temperature and will not consider the body Reference Temperature Value, which can be defined for each body in Mechanical.