External Material Examples, Structural Mechanics

Application ID: 32331


The External Material functionality makes it possible to program your own material models for cases when the built-in material models are not sufficient.

For structural mechanics, you have the possibility to either completely define the material model in a domain, or to add an inelastic strain contribution to a built-in elastic material.

The external material functions are coded in C and compiled into a shared library. By programming a wrapper function in C, you can also call material functions written in another programming language.

This technology makes it possible to program your own material models and distribute compiled versions of such models as add-ons.

Here, you can find three examples:

  • A simple linear elastic example
  • An example with a basic plasticity model
  • An example with Mazar's damage model

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: