Materials file (.mat)

Files with the extension .mat include the definition of different materials through their properties. These are base materials as they can be used as templates during the Preprocessing step for the creation of newer ones.

You can define as many materials as you wish, with a variable number of fields. None of the unused materials will be taken into consideration when writing the data input files for the solver. Alternatively, they can be useful for generating a materials library.

Conversely to the case of conditions, the same material can be assigned to different levels of geometrical entity (lines, surfaces or volumes) and can even be assigned directly to the mesh elements.

In a similar way to how a condition is defined, a material can be considered as a group of fields containing its name, its corresponding properties and their values.
The format of the file is as follows:

MATERIAL: material_name
QUESTION: field_name['#CB#'(...,optional_value_i,...)]
VALUE: default_field_value
...
QUESTION: field_name['#CB#'(...,optional_value_i,...)]
VALUE: default_field_value
END MATERIAL
MATERIAL: material_name
...
END MATERIAL

All the fields must be filled with words, where a word is considered as a string of characters without any blank spaces. The strings signaled between quotes are literal and the ones within brackets are optional. The interface is case-sensitive, so any uppercase letters must be maintained. The default_field_value entry and various optional_value_i entries can be alphanumeric, integers or real numbers, depending on their type.

Note: There are other options available to expand the capabilities of the Materials window (see Special fields).