Why doesn't the nastran-environment in Inventor use the materials that are asigned to the part in inventor?

[schaefera.acl]

In order to run simulations in the Nastran environment, I have to assign an idealization and a material. What makes me wonder, because I already have assigned a material to the part from the Autodesk (or Inventor-) material data base, Moreover, some of the material parameters that I can set in Nastran, are the same parameters that also are available in Inventor. But they are called differently.

All in all, are those materials that I can assign in nastran simply of a different format than those in Inventor, and because of that, I have to assign a new material in nastran?

[John_Holtz]

Hi @schaefera.acl 

Can you clarify what steps you are doing when the Idealizations are not created automatically? Are you working with solid parts?

Nastran does use the material that is assigned in Inventor when your workflow is as follows:

1. Assign materials to the parts in the Inventor model.
2. "Environments > Begin > Inventor Nastran".
3. Idealizations are automatically created for the solids. All the parts with a material of "A" are assigned to one Idealization, parts with a material of "B" are assigned to another idealization, and so on.

John

[schaefera.acl]

You are right, following the workflow you suggested, a new idealization is automatically created. There, the material is asigned. However, since I defined a custom material (that was in just in the document materials), the values that I had given in the physical properties of the material have not been reused in the material that was assigned in the nastran environment. Hence my question.

[John_Holtz]

Hi @schaefera.acl 

Can you clarify when you defined the material?

• Did you do it after you had already entered the Nastran environment? In this case, Nastran is using the materials that are "defined" in Nastran which is the materials defined in Inventor the first time you enter Nastran. In other words, the material properties do not remain associative with the Inventor model.
• If the material is defined in Inventor before entering Nastran the first time, the properties should transfer over.

I may not understand what you mean by defining the properties in the document materials. The following figures show what happens when I click the "Tools > Material" and enter properties. Let me know if there is a different way you are defining the materials that do not transfer to Nastran on first entering the environment.

Material name set in Inventor.

Material properties entered in Inventor.

Material properties transfer into Inventor Nastran environment.