Ansys interface

The Ansys interface with Z-mat has matured to be a very dependable tool for engineers and scientists who model complex material systems with Ansys. The same material libraries and extensibility of the other Z-mat interfaces are now readily available from Ansys.

The Z-mat linked Ansys program will reside in the %Z7PATH%\Zansys directory, and can be accessed by the command Zansys which should be in your path, or can be set as the user executable in the Ansys launcher. There are test cases in the %Z7PATH%\test\Zansys\INP directory. The Z-mat material files are named 10#.txt where # is the material number selected in the test using Ansys commands such as:

TB,USER,4,0,0
TB,STATE,4,,9
MPCHG,4,1

which would set the Z-mat material for element group 1 to be read in the file 104.txt. Temperature is available as a parameter, and can be set using commands like:

BFUNIF,TEMP,523.0

The name TEMP will be re-mapped to temperature in the Z-mat files.

The material file then is loaded from the file named 104.txt which could be a complex porous plastic model with solution controls and initialized variables as follows:

***material
  *integration theta_method_a 1.0 1.e-8 1500
  *initialize_variable
     f   0.0
***automatic_time
  *limit f  0.05 
  *security   1.3
  *divergence 2.0
***behavior porous_plastic
 **elasticity isotropic
      young 1789.
      poisson 0.39
 **porous_potential
  *porous_criterion gurson
      q1 1.5
      q2 1.0
      fs function 10.*f;
  *flow plasticity2
  *isotropic_hardening by_point
      sigeq     p
      10.170,   0.00000
      20.204,   0.00084
      66.074,   0.00932
      72.264,   0.02581
      76.941,   0.05418
      80.624,   0.08573
      87.318,   0.14326
      87.318,   1.e20
  *strain_nucleation gaussian
      en 0.005
      fn 0.3
      sn 0.002
***return

Note that material coefficients are only defined in the Z-mat file. Coefficients can be defined by the somewhat more flexible format in Z-mat including tabular, functional and other formats, and can depend on temperature or any of the 9 user defined field variables. Also, some models such as the porous plasticity model above allow the coefficients to depend on integrated variables as well (pay attention to your thermodynamics here).

Z-mat for Ansys must be run using the 18x class elements. In order to get output for the sate variables in the Z-mat material model, an additional command must be issued to get the variables stored to the output database, such as:

OUTRES,SVAR,ALL,

PLESOL,SVAR5,1

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