How to make walls of a component different materials?

[Anonymous]

I am trying to make a static stress analysis on a tank. the wall on either end of the tank is plywood, and the walls on the side of the tank are metal. I am wondering how I can change the material type of theses walls?

[jeff_strater]

right click on the Body or Component and choose "Physical Material"

or, invoke it from the toolbar:

from the Physical Material dialog, choose a material, and drag it onto the body:

This should assign all the material properties you need to simulate

[Anonymous]

I keep getting this error, I want the front and back  to be plywood and the sides to be metal

[jeff_strater]

that is a different question entirely.  You want to know how to separate one body into multiple bodies.  Split Body is one way, but you do have to be careful about the splitting surfaces to get the right results.  From this image, the tank looks simple enough that I would just create the bodies from the start separately, rather than try to split them after the fact.

[Anonymous]

In doing so, I also need to add angled steel beams on the ends of each wall for support. So would I have to make them all components and combine them together for the static stress analysis? As well, would I have to add all of the bolts into the plywood?

[jeff_strater]

I am not much of an expert at static stress simulation, but I think you do not need to combine the bodies to do simulation.  You will need separate bodies to apply different materials, but in SIM, I think you can just apply constraints and loads to the bodies.