All Material Properties created are associated with an Analysis Preference. This preference is selected in the Preferences/Analysis menu. Make the appropriate selection before proceeding. Be aware that if the analysis preference is changed during a session, Patran will attempt to convert existing material properties to the new preference requirements. No record of the properties entered with the original preference active is retained, so converting back to the original preference may not completely restore the material property sets.

Materials can be created, deleted, modified, and shown. Modification is completely general in that this action essentially deletes the original set and replaces it with the modified set.

The Create option may also be used to Modify a material. The only difference is the user will be prompted with a message warning that the set already exists and asking whether it can be overwritten.

Creating a new material that is a modification of an existing material is accomplished by creating a renamed set using the Create action.

Every Material has a unique, user-defined name from 1 to 31 characters long. A sequential ID number is also automatically assigned for internal use, and may be supplied to certain analysis codes during translation.

Each material has an associated user provided description (1 to 256 characters). By default, this descriptor contains the date and time of the start of the Patran session during which the material was created.

Material properties may be associated with specific finite element types. See the Translator Documentation for discussions of large numbers of specific element types and properties supported.

The use of fields to define complex temperature, strain, strain rate, time or frequency dependencies is encouraged. These material property fields are created in the Fields application. Multiple material fields can be used in the definition of a single material.