8.1.1 Material Types and Databases

In ANSYS FLUENT, you can define six types of materials: fluids, solids, mixtures, combusting-particles, droplet-particles, and inert-particles. Physical properties of fluids and solids are associated with named materials. These materials are then assigned as boundary conditions for zones.

When you model species transport, define a mixture material, consisting of the various species involved in the problem. Properties will be defined for the mixture, as well as for the constituent species, which are fluid materials. The mixture material concept is discussed in detail in Section  15.1.1. Combusting-particles, droplet-particles, and inert-particles are available for the discrete-phase model, as described in Section  23.5.2.

ANSYS FLUENT provides a built-in global database of approximately 675 predefined materials along with their properties and default values for each property. To define a material in the problem setup, you can copy materials from this global (site-wide) database and use the default properties or define new materials by editing their properties. The ANSYS FLUENT materials database is located in the following file:

path /Fluent.Inc/fluent12. $\stackrel{\Downarrow}{x}$ /cortex/lib/propdb.scm

where path is the directory in which you have installed ANSYS FLUENT and the variable $x$ corresponds to your release version, e.g., 2 for fluent12.2.

In addition to using the ANSYS FLUENT materials database, you can also create your own database and materials, and use it to define the materials in your problem setup. See Section  8.1.3 for information about creating and using user-defined custom material databases.

All the materials that exist in your local materials list will be saved in the case file (when you write one). The materials specified by you will be available to you if you read this case file into a new solver session.