About Core and Covering Materials

In Engineering Release, you can either apply materials to a product or add quantities of materials to a product structure. When you apply a material to a product, you are indicating that the product consists of that material (such as aluminum) or that material (such as paint) covers it. For example, when you apply an aluminum core material and a red paint covering material to a bicycle frame, you are indicating that the frame is made of aluminum and is red. When you add a quantity of a material to a product structure, you are indicating that the structure includes a specified quantity of that material such as a container of oil for an engine assembly.

Quantities of materials appear in the child product list. Core materials appear as physical products and display either a mass, volume, or both. Covering materials appear under the Instance Covering Materials and Covering Materials columns. If these columns are not shown, you can add them. For more information, see Display and Hide Attributes in the Child Product List.

Covering materials appear in the child product list based on the context in which you use them.

You can apply a covering materials in an Instance context, which means that you select each instance and then apply the covering material. The covering material is applicable only to objects that you select. Engineering Release lists these covering materials under the Instance Covering Material column:

Alternatively, the context might be Reference, in which the covering material applies to all occurrences of the object under a common parent. To apply a covering material in reference, you only need to select one occurrence of an object and apply the covering material in reference to the parent. The covering material applies to all occurrences of the object under the parent object. The covering material also applies to further occurrences of the object that you add under the parent. Any instance context that you define on an object takes precedence over the reference context.

Reference covering materials are listed here in Engineering Release:

As an example of how contexts are applied, consider a scooter as a physical product. Assume that, to manufacture the scooter, you purchase wheels that are available only in white. This means that white paint is the reference covering material for all wheels and the context is "wheel."

Let us say that your scooter design requires that the wheels on the rear assembly be blue. This means that the white wheels on the rear require that the covering material is "blue" in the "rear assembly" reference context.

If the specification requires one of the wheels (perhaps a braking wheel) to have a protective coating, the coating covering material applies to an instance context of "braking wheel."

How the child product list displays the wheel covering materials:

• All four wheels are white in the reference context of a wheel.
• The rear wheels are blue in the reference context of the rear assembly.
• One wheel on the rear assembly has protective coating in the instance context of the braking wheel.

Core materials, unlike covering materials, can be applied only in a reference context and cannot be applied to instances. Also unlike covering materials, you can add core materials to an object in Engineering Release.

For more information, see Adding a Material Quantity to a Product Structure.

An object might have two or more core or covering materials that are all used in the same context.

The covering material is shown for each object in the child product list in either the Instance Covering Material column or the Covering Material column, depending on the context. Core materials for an object are listed in the Core Materials column. An adjacent number, such as "[3]," indicates how many materials are applied.