Introduction - Make Ansys find PolyUMod
In this post I will show you how to make sure Ansys Mechanical finds and uses PolyUMod during a FE simulation. It turns out that Ansys comes with a default user material model that is used if no other user-material model is found. Note that the PolyUMod installer should normally set up everything that is discussed here, and it should just work! Read on to learn how to make Ansys find PolyUMod.
But if somethings goes wrong during the PolyUMod installation then your Ansys FE simulation may still run even if PolyUMod is not found, and you may get some results that will be wrong. And you may not even realize it. The steps summarized here will show you how to avoid this.
Step 1: Make Sure PolyUMod is installed
First, go to the directory shown below to make sure that you have the PolyUMod library installed. The key file to find is: UserMatLib.dll
. On a Linux computer this file is called libansuser.so
.

Step 2: Make Sure ANS_USER_PATH is set
Then check that you have an environment variable called ANS_USER_PATH
that contains the path to the directory where the UserMatLib.dll
file is located. For a Windows computer this path is typically: C:\Program Files\PolymerFEM\PolyUMod\PolyUMod_ANSYS

Step 3: Read in the PolyUMod Material Model into Workbench
Read in the PolyUMod material model into Ansys Workbench. Instructions for how to do this are discussed in detail in this article.


Step 4: Run Ansys Mechanical and Check for PolyUMod
The final step is to run the FE simulation as usual. After the simulation has finished you should check the Solution Information Solver Output (see image below). There should be a printout saying ***PolyUMod Version: ...
If you have this printout then Ansys found and used PolyUMod, if you did not find the PolyUMod Version
lines then PolyUMod was NOT used. Feel free to contact our tech support if you have any problems making this work.
