How to Specify Material of a Certain Part in Design
 

I am working on this project where I will be using Uranium Dioxide fuel rods for nuclear power plant fuel assembly. Fuel is in the form of rods and each rod is encapsulated by a cover called cladding, which is made of Zircloy, between them is a gap of helium gas.

I've made geometry, and now I want to perform the analysis but the things is I don't know how to add materials. I mean how can I specify which part of the geometry is made of what material?

I tried adding materials to Engineering Data, but no use. I will duplicate the previously present material and then will change the properties as per my need, but the things is, how can I tell workbench that this part of the geometry is made of that certain material.

A little help will be appreciated,

In DesignModeler, you simply need to specify if something is a solid or a fluid...

The material selection happens in the solver setup.

You mean The Ansys Mechanical? Thanks for the help but could you please be more specific in where to find that option?

Yes, whatever your solver is. (you didn't mention a solver and ANSYS DM is used with many different solvers).

If you are using ANSYS Mechanical, then you just click on the part in the model tree and you will see an option to set the material assignment in the "Details" panel.

If you were using Fluent, you would set it up under Zones, etc.

Once you know what tool to use, it should be pretty easy to figure out how to setup the material. Check the help if you don't find it right away. In the mean time, try a tutorial or two. It will get you going faster than CFD Online for the basic stuff.

actually my geometry consists of multiple parts, take it as a rod made of multiple parts, and there are two covers on it but in the geometry tree, I don't know which parts is which one becuse I have like 4000+ bodies, is there anyway I can specifically select one body?

Like I said there are two covers of different materials, and then the main rod of different material

Thankyou very much, i got what I needed, Thanks again.

Care to share? It would help the next person who comes along with the same question.

I was going to suggest that you could select your parts (hold down CTRL to select multiple) in the screen and then right click to choose "Go to=>Bodies in a tree", but there might be a better way to handle the situation with so many parts.

There is probably something clever you could do with Named Selections...

I actually used Named Selections. Here is my situation:

I have fuel rod which is made of multiple pellets. and there are multiple fuel rods, the way I want to perform analysis is that I would like to give heat to the first pellet of each rod and then after that in the second analysis, I would give heat to first two pellets and so on.

But giving heat or defining material of all pellets would be kind of mess if you just go on clicking on single pellet every time. So what I did is, created Named Selection. It took me hardly an hour so but now I can select one level of pellets from all rods or in your case you can select one type of geometries using.

Here is how to do it:

When you are done with your geometry in design modeler, go to the Modeling tab and in the upper panel you will see a green color icon labeled as "BODY", it is actually used to select the body, click on that and then you will be able to select your bodies individually from your geometry. Once you have selected a body, simply name it from the properties, something you can easily comprehend.

For example in my case, I made one pellet and used pattern command to make 225 pellets. So when I name first pellet as "pellet" all 225 get the same name.

Now when you will open your analysis program/solver (Which in my case is Mechanical), go to process tree (left panel) and click on + sign before Geometry and you will see that now all the parts will be named what you used in Design Modeler.

Here click on one type of parts (keep pressing control) and select all parts, now Right click and choose Named Selection and Name this group.

This way you can add properties to multiple parts, and as far as I get, this is the most easy part because I cannot go on giving properties or boundary conditions to individual parts when in my case they are thousands.

Now once you are done creating named selection groups, every time you want to assign something to the "bodies" from the left panel where it asks to select the bodies, drop down and you will see and option "use named selections".

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not forget to name your geometries in Design Modeler because if you do not name them and have multiple parts then in your solver under the Geometry, all you will get will be bodies named as solid. So you will have to check by individually clicking on them as which solid represents which geometry part and this is real mess.

Hope this saves someone's time.