StructuralMaterialAssignment Properties

(To be removed) Structural material property assignments

StructuralMaterialAssignment will be removed. Use the MaterialProperties property of femodel instead. (since R2023a) For more information on updating your code, see Version History.

A StructuralMaterialAssignment object contains the description of material properties of a structural analysis model. A StructuralModel container has a vector of StructuralMaterialAssignment objects in its MaterialProperties.MaterialAssignments property.

To create the material properties assignments for your structural analysis model, use the structuralProperties function.

Properties of StructuralMaterialAssignment

RegionType — Region type

'Face' | 'Cell'

Region type, specified as 'Face' for a 2-D region, or 'Cell' for a 3-D region.

Data Types: char | string

RegionID — Region ID

vector of positive integers

Region ID, specified as a vector of positive integers. To determine which ID corresponds to which portion of the geometry, use the pdegplot function, setting the 'FaceLabels' name-value pair to 'on'.

Data Types: double

YoungsModulus — Young's modulus

positive number

Young's modulus of the material, specified as a positive number.

Data Types: double

PoissonsRatio — Poisson's ratio

positive number

Poisson's ratio of the material, specified as a positive number.

Data Types: double

MassDensity — Mass density

positive number

Mass density of the material, specified as a positive number. This property is required when modeling gravitational effects.

Data Types: double

CTE — Coefficient of thermal expansion

real number

Coefficient of thermal expansion, specified as a real number. This argument is required for thermal stress analysis. Thermal stress analysis requires the structural model to be static.

Data Types: double

HystereticDamping — Hysteretic damping parameter

nonnegative number

Hysteretic damping parameter, specified as a nonnegative number. This type of damping is also called structural damping.

Data Types: double

Version History

Introduced in R2017b

R2025a: To be removed

StructuralMaterialAssignment will be removed. Use the MaterialProperties property of femodel instead.

For example, you can check the material properties as follows.

model = femodel(AnalysisType="structuralTransient", ...
                Geometry="Block.stl");
model.MaterialProperties = ...
        materialProperties(YoungsModulus=200e9, ...
                           PoissonsRatio=0.3,MassDensity=7800);
model.MaterialProperties

You also can check a particular property:

model.MaterialProperties.YoungsModulus

You can check properties for a particular cell or face:

model.MaterialProperties(1)
model.MaterialProperties.YoungsModulus(1)

The unified finite element model workflow defines the type of a problem and all of its parameters as the properties of an femodel object. This object enables you to specify physical parameters for structural, thermal, and electromagnetic types of analyses. The solver in the unified workflow uses only the parameters (properties) appropriate for the current analysis type while ignoring all other properties. If you switch the analysis type by setting the AnalysisType property of the model, the solver uses the appropriate set of properties corresponding to the new analysis type.

For more help migrating your existing code that uses StructuralModel to the unified finite element workflow, see Migration from Domain-Specific to Unified Workflow.