Assigning material properties to an orphan mesh to an input file

[CM949]

I have an issue trying to assign material properties to an orphan mesh generated from gmsh. In gmsh, I exported the surface, volume, and physical volume information and saved it as an ABAQUS input file (.inp). I made edits to this file and manually defined materials and assigned them to their respective element sets like so:

*SOLID SECTION, ELSET=PhysicalVolume1, MATERIAL=Mat1
*SOLID SECTION, ELSET=PhysicalVolume2, MATERIAL=Mat2

The file loaded fine and there was no problem setting up a simulation. I had no problem assigning boundary conditions to pre-defined surface sets and node sets. After running a job, it tells me that " #### elements have missing property definitions." So I'm a bit confused as to what I a missing.

 

[corus]

Look in Viewer at the internal set names. You should be able to view the set of elements in error that have no material properties.

 

[CM949]

I followed these steps to try and visualize the sets of elements with no luck. I get this error: “The Selected option is not available for Preprocessing Models”.

 

[CM949]

Okay I figured out that I had to open the output database file (.odb) to view the element sets in question. It turns out that the surfaces were not assigned material properties so I combined the volume and surface set into one element set:

*ELSET, ELSET=Combined1
Surface1, Surface2, Volume1
*ELSET, ELSET=Combined2
Surface3, Volume2
*SOLID SECTION, ELSET=Combined1, MATERIAL=Mat1
*SOLID SECTION, ELSET=Combined2, MATERIAL=Mat2

I get this error after running this modification, "The area of 33578 elements is zero, small, or negative. Check coordinates or node numbering, or modify the mesh seed. The elements have been identified in element set ErrElemAreaSmallNegZero". I went back to check the .odb file and saw that most of the surface elements were highlighted.

Is assigning material properties even possible to orphan meshes?