Materials in Ansys Lumerical HEAT — Lesson 1

Material Database

The Electrical/Thermal Material Database stores the electrical and thermal properties of materials used in HEAT simulations. Through the material database, you can also create new materials and modify their properties.

To access the Electrical/Thermal material database, click on the “Electrical and Thermal” button in the “Materials” section under the Design tab.

The Electrical/Thermal Material Database consists of two main panels: the Material List on the left and the Material Properties on the right. When a material is selected from the Material List, the electronic/thermal properties as well as the color associated with the material is displayed on the Material Properties panel.

1. “Add” button: Adds a new material to the Material List.

2. “Delete” button: Deletes the selected material from the Material List

3. “Copy” button: Creates a copy of the selected material in the Material List

4. “Import” button: Imports materials from other .ldev simulation files.

5. Material list: Displays all the materials stored with the simulation file. When you start a new project, the material database is populated with the default materials that came with the software installation. Any modification you make in the material database of your simulation file stays with the simulation file and won’t change the default material database.

6. Display option: Allows you to filter the materials that show up in the material list. When the “Active only” option is checked, only materials that are used in the current simulation will be displayed. The dropdown menu on the right filters the materials by their material type (semiconductor, insulator, conductor, binary alloy, fluid). Alternatively, you can type in the material name in the text box.

7. Send to the current project: Adds the selected material from the material list to your current simulation: (i) “create new” option creates a new “material” in the objects tree with the properties of the selected material, (ii) “add to existing” option adds the properties to the selected “material” from the objects tree.

NOTE: the dropdown list gets populated only by materials (from the objects tree) that do not already have the corresponding (thermal) properties added to them.

8. Color: Sets the color of the material.

Material Models

In this video lesson, we will learn about the thermal material models for the HEAT solver: solids and fluids. We will also discuss how to use the thermal and conductive model to simulate the Ohmic heating effect.


Alternate video link.