Problem with orthotropic material and orientation in Solid Section

General Questions
1

Hello everyone,

I am trying to run a simulation in PrePoMax with an orthotropic material (defined with Elastic, Type=Engineering Constants). My model is a solid mesh (C3D10 elements).

The problem is:

  • When I assign the material to my part, I don’t see any option to assign an Orientation in the Solid Section dialog.

  • In the exported .inp file, I only get:
    *Solid Section, Elset=Solid_part-1, Material=Material-1
    but I would expect something like:
    *Solid Section, Elset=Solid_part-1, Material=Material-1, Orientation=CS_fibres_x

    Without this orientation, CalculiX stops immediately (0 kB output).

    Could you please explain:

    How to correctly create and assign an Orientation to a solid part in PrePoMax?

    Is this feature available in the GUI, or do I have to manually edit the .inp file?

    Thank you very much for your help!

2

That’s exactly the issue. Orthotropic materials aren’t supported in PrePoMax yet and thus orientations are also unavailable. However, you can use the Keyword Editor to define them. The simplest syntax (assuming rectangular CSYS) is:

*ORIENTATION, NAME=…
a_x, a_y, a_z, b_x, b_y, b_z

So you have to specify the XYZ coordinates of two points: a (lying on the local X axis) and b (lying on the local XY plane but not on the X axis).

image
image528×411 18.7 KB

You can find several examples on the forum.

You will also need a custom *SOLID SECTION keyword to include the ORIENTATION parameter.

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