Using history variables in materials to reduce modelling effort and increase model accuracy

In crashworthiness simulation the definition of material properties is one of the key aspects to obtain reasonable results. However, a lot of materials come with properties that either change locally or are generally of stochastic nature. Additionally, production processes (e.g., welding) might change the behavior of certain materials. To overcome the necessity of defining an individual part for each region where material properties differ a new approach was developed. With the new keyword *DEFINE_TABLE_COMPACT it is now possible to define material properties by means of a multi-dimensional table with arbitrary variables controlling for example the plastic flow curve or the damage behavior. Secondly, the keyword *INITIAL_HISTORY_NODE enables the user to set these variables individually on each node in the model. This presentation shows possible applications of this approach and the benefits on parametric modelling and simulation.