I have been told that Wildfire 4 has non-linear material - this is being launched at the PTC User Event in Tampa in June.

Wildfire 4 will indeed support nonlinear elastic material modeling, meaning there will be the possibility to model materials capable of undergoing (very) large deformation thereby not exceeding the limit of yielding, like rubbers seals.

Plastic material behaviour is scheduled for Wildfire 5. I suppose both isotropic, kinematic and combination of both hardening types will be supported.

There are however no intentions for implementation of visco-elastic (strain-rate dependant) and creep behaviour in the near future, as I have understood so far.

"will indeed support nonlinear elastic material modeling"

I think you meant "hyperelastic"...

well, in wildfire 4 I know that support for hyper-elastic models (ruber, plastic materials) were ADDED, so you can perform lineal analysis with large elastic deformation on ruber materials.

Know, from John Buchowski (Director Simulation Products
PTC Product Management) I got the answer:

"I saw you post on the PTC forum about plasticity.  We are tentatively planning to support rate independent small stain plasticity with the following hardening laws - Perfect Plasticity, Linear Hardening, Power Law, and Exponential Law.".

brep@

Nonlinear elastic material models (derived form the strain energy function) are often referred to as hyperelastic material models, indeed.

napoleonm@

Plastic materials (polymers) are not hyperelastic. Polymers and rubbers are modelled differntly. Polymers are viscoelastic (strain rate dependent) whereas rubbers are hyperelastic. So the rubbers can undergo large deformations without loss of strain energy. With polymers and plastics this is not the case.

"...rate independent small strain plasticity with the following hardening laws - Perfect Plasticity, Linear Hardening, Power Law, and Exponential Law..."

This will be most probably supported in Wildfire 5, as I said already. Though, rate dependent behavior (polymers/plastics) will not be supported.

This informations I do not have directly from John Buchowsky, but from one of the people who work with/for him.   

Regardless, it will interesting to see how the higher order elements (in fact anything beyond p order 2) behave when capturing yield... This has always been the Achilles heel for p-technology.

brep @

you are right, it was my written mistake.

cheers.