What is a matid in Ansys
MATID is short for Material ID.
It is a number assigned to a material definition. Each material definition in Ansys is assigned a unique matid. Elements in the model reference this ID to inherit material properties. The user can manually assign a matid in APDL when creating a material definition.
Ansys Mechanical and matid
In Ansys workbench, materials are defined via Engineering data, and the matid assignment for each material is done automatically. However in addition, By default when Mechanical creates an input file, the application assigns a unique material identifier to each body of the model regardless of the material assigned to the body/part. In some situations, you may need to know the matids for individual components.
One example is, specifying source bodies to import displacements from global model into a submodel. This specification is done by inputting the matid associated with the source bodies as shown in the image below. This is done within the submodel. The numbers separated by commas identify individual parts within the global analysis from which the displacements will be imported onto the cut surfaces of the submodel.
How to find Matid in Ansys Mechanical?
The matids for the parts are not listed in Ansys Mechanical GUI (Note that, there is another “ID” associated with parts within Mechanical which is different from the matid. You will see it under the details of a part if you have turned on Beta features. This is NOT The same as the matid).
In order to identify the matid for a part, you have to access the input file (How to access input file in Workbench). You should look for parts of code similar to the one shown below:
!Part 1, Structural Steel, matid, 1
!Part 2, Structural Steel, matid, 2
!Part 3, Structural Steel, matid, 3
!Part 4, Structural Steel, matid, 4
!Part 5, Structural Steel, matid, 5
!Part 6, Structural Steel, matid, 6
In this example, Part 1, Part 2 etc. are the names of the bodies as defined in Ansys Mechanical. Each part is assigned the same material (Structural Steel) but has a unique material identifier.
You can do a CTRL + F search in the input file for the name of the part whose matid you are trying to identify.