To define the damage evolution law:

Define a damage behavior as described in “Defining damage,” Section 15.14.7.

In the Edit Connector Property dialog box, toggle on Specify damage evolution, and select the Evolution tabbed page.

Choose the evolution Type.

Choose Motion to define a plastic motion-based damage evolution law, and choose the Softening type.

• Choose Linear to define a linear damage evolution law. If you specified a force-based or constitutive motion-based damage initiation criterion, you provide the difference between the constitutive relative motion at ultimate failure and the constitutive relative motion at damage initiation. If you specified a plastic motion-based damage initiation criterion, you provide the difference between the associated equivalent plastic relative motion at ultimate failure and the associated equivalent plastic relative motion at damage initiation.

• Choose Exponential to define an exponential damage evolution law. If you specified a force-based or constitutive motion-based damage initiation criterion, you provide the difference between the relative motions at ultimate failure and at damage initiation and the exponential coefficient. If you specified a plastic motion-based damage initiation criterion, you provide the difference between the equivalent plastic relative motions at ultimate failure and at damage initiation and the exponential coefficient.

• Choose Tabular to define the damage variable directly as a tabular function of the differences between the relative motions at ultimate failure and the relative motions at damage initiation. If you specified a force-based or constitutive motion-based damage initiation criterion, you provide the differences between the constitutive relative motions at ultimate failure and at damage initiation. If you specified a plastic motion-based damage initiation criterion, you provide the differences between the equivalent relative plastic motions at ultimate failure and at damage initiation.

Choose Energy to define an energy-based damage evolution law. You provide the post-initiation damage dissipated energy at ultimate failure.

Toggle on Specify affected components, and in the Components field toggle on the forces or moments that are consistent with the available components of relative motion that will be affected by the damage evolution law. By default, only the components of relative motion specified in the Force/Moment field will undergo damage.

Choose the Degradation type to specify the contribution of this damage behavior to the overall damage effect if several damage behaviors are defined for the same connector property.

Choose Maximum to compare the damage value associated with this behavior to the damage values from any other damage behaviors defined for this connector property and consider only the maximum value for the overall damage.

Choose Multiplicative to combine the damage values for all the damage behaviors associated with this connector property in a multiplicative fashion to obtain the overall damage.

To define a damage evolution law that depends on temperature or field variables:

Toggle on Use temperature-dependent data to define behavior data that vary with temperature. A column labeled Temp appears in the data table.

To define behavior data that depend on field variables, click the arrows to the right of the Number of field variables field to increase or decrease the number of field variables. Field variable columns appear in the data table.

Enter the appropriate damage evolution law data in the table. You can enter data into the table using the keyboard. Alternatively, you can click mouse button 3 anywhere in the table to view a list of options for specifying tabular data. For detailed information on each option, see “Entering tabular data,” Section 3.2.7.