ThermalMaterialAssignment Properties

(To be removed) Thermal material properties assignments

ThermalMaterialAssignment will be removed. Use the MaterialProperties property of femodel instead. (since R2023a) For more information on updating your code, see Version History.

A ThermalMaterialAssignment object contains the description of a thermal model’s material properties. A ThermalModel container has a vector of ThermalMaterialAssignment objects in its MaterialProperties.MaterialAssignments property.

Create material properties assignments for your thermal model using the thermalProperties function.

Properties

RegionType — Region type

'Face' | 'Cell'

Region type, specified as 'Face' for a 2-D region, or 'Cell' for a 3-D region.

Data Types: char | string

RegionID — Region ID

vector of positive integers

Region ID, specified as a vector of positive integers. To determine which ID corresponds to which portion of the geometry, use the pdegplot function. Set the 'FaceLabels' name-value pair to 'on'.

Data Types: double

ThermalConductivity — Thermal conductivity of the material

nonnegative number | function handle

Thermal conductivity of the material, specified as a nonnegative number or a function handle.

Data Types: double | function_handle

MassDensity — Mass density of the material

nonnegative number | function handle

Mass density of the material, specified as a nonnegative number or a function handle.

Data Types: double | function_handle

SpecificHeat — Specific heat of the material

nonnegative number | function handle

Specific heat of the material, specified as a nonnegative number or a function handle.

Data Types: double | function_handle

Tips

• When there are multiple assignments to the same geometric region, the toolbox uses the last applied setting.

• To avoid assigning material properties to a wrong region, ensure that you are using the correct geometric region IDs by plotting and visually inspecting the geometry.

Version History

Introduced in R2017a

R2025a: To be removed

ThermalMaterialAssignment will be removed. Use the MaterialProperties property of femodel instead.

For example, you can check the material properties specification for the three faces of the 2-D geometry as follows.

model = femodel(AnalysisType="thermalTransient", ...
                Geometry=@lshapeg);
model.MaterialProperties(1) = ...
        materialProperties(ThermalConductivity=10, ...
                           MassDensity=1, ...
                           SpecificHeat=0.1);
model.MaterialProperties(2) = ...
        materialProperties(ThermalConductivity=20, ...
                           MassDensity=2, ...
                           SpecificHeat=0.2);
model.MaterialProperties(3) = ...
        materialProperties(ThermalConductivity=30, ...
                           MassDensity=3, ...
                           SpecificHeat=0.3);
model.MaterialProperties

The unified finite element model workflow defines the type of a problem and all of its parameters as the properties of an femodel object. This object enables you to specify physical parameters for structural, thermal, and electromagnetic types of analyses. The solver in the unified workflow uses only the parameters (properties) appropriate for the current analysis type while ignoring all other properties. If you switch the analysis type by setting the AnalysisType property of the model, the solver uses the appropriate set of properties corresponding to the new analysis type.

For more help migrating your existing code that uses ThermalModel to the unified finite element workflow, see Migration from Domain-Specific to Unified Workflow.