Introduction
I often receive questions about how to use temperature-dependent material models in Ansys. In this article I will show how you can calibrate and use the Ansys TNM in MCalibration, Workbench, and Ansys Mechanical.
Procedure
Start by opening MCalibration, and then open the options dialog. Select “Units” and select the temperature unit to be Kelvin. Most of the time the units that are used by MCalibration do not matter, but when you export a material model to Ansys xml-format the units are also exported to Engineering Data.
Read in your experimental data into MCalibration. Make sure each load case has the correct temperature specified. Then select the Ansys TNM and run the calibration. In my example I’m using data for a PA66 tested at 2 different temperatures. Then export the calibrated material model into Ansys dat and xml formats.
The following image shows the calibrated Ansys TNM in dat-file format.
Finally, read in the material model in xml-format in Engineering Data, or read in the dat-file into Mechanical as a set of commands. Specify the simulation temperature, then run your FE simulation. The figure below shows the stress field of the test case that I ran. Note that the material model is temperature dependent, so it should provide accurate predictions over the calibrated temperature range.
