Introduction

Your installation of Workbench provides templates that enable you to customize the Engineering Data Workspace to provide inputs for a user-defined material model.

This appendix describes the files that you will use as templates to create your own property categories and the corresponding property data for your own user-defined material model(s).

Assumptions and Prerequisites

The process of creating user-defined materials requires you to edit installation files. Therefore, it is assumed that you have the necessary skills and experience to perform these tasks. Expertise in material constitutive modeling and software programming is necessary and experience writing XML. Furthermore, creating user-defined material models also requires validation and testing. Ansys, Inc. strongly recommends that you test both the single elements and the multiple elements with various loading conditions to ensure correct results. This feature supports shared memory and distributed parallel processing; however, you are responsible for ensuring that your code can use parallel processing.

In addition, in order to use user-defined material model(s) in Engineering Data, you must first follow the steps to create the corresponding Subroutine in Mechanical APDL. See the Custom Material Models section of the Mechanical APDL Material Reference before continuing.