Why add a material to an assembly?

[Pettersson]

simple question: Does anyone know why you can add materials to assemblies? You used to not be able to do this, but in Creo 5 you can. You still can't assign any material to the assembly, so what's the point of being able to add materials to it? They don't seem to be used for anything? Does anyone have a use case for this? why was this functionality added?

[KenFarley]

Maybe to help in Simulate runs? You need to assign materials to the components if you're going to do an analysis, so they might be letting you pre-load what you'll eventually use?

[Pettersson]

I don't have access to Simulate, but trying to leverage the assembly level materials to add them to the individual components in normal Assembly mode doesn't really work well. I can open the Assembly materials and save them to disk, and then load them at the component level, but that doesn't seem very practical.

[MartinHanak]

Hi,

I think that Creo Simulate is able to use material assigned to assembly, only. Creo Parametric ignores material assigned to assembly.

[Dale_Rosema]

This may be one reason:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Data-Exchange/Piercing-a-tube-to-create-a-boss/m-p/404657

(my post from 2014)

[Pettersson]

That thread talks about adding material (i.e. increasing the volume of material) on the assembly level). I'm talking about adding a material (adding material properties) at the assembly level. Either you misunderstood me, or I misunderstood you.

[Dale_Rosema]

I misunderstood you.    🙂

[LukaszMazur · Accepted solution]

It's for defining flexible (variable) materials in assembled components. Thanks to that you can define various materials at assembly level and then use this materials to assign specific material to a flexible component. It allows you to insert multiple models and vary materials for every one of them depending on their occurrence (materials you can assign to a flexible component are restricted to only ones defined in the assembly) like this:

As you can see, even though the original model has been assigned a material, at the assembly level it has been changed to a different material for every occurrence of the model.

[Pettersson]

Thank you! That's an interesting use, and makes sense. My curiosity is sated.

[Ben8]

In addition to this, it seems that assembly materials are used (and required) by Weldments application as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJfOM8kLnEY&list=PLRhPac0z_f-EVYiBkl4i-smIbxLouBt0B&index=1