Which grades work with which simulator

You load DC04, run a heat treatment, and it works. You generate a CCT diagram for it, and that works too. Then you ask for a spot weld on a custom chemistry you built from DP600, and the run is refused before the solver starts. Nothing is broken. Each simulator asks the material for a different thing, and a material can answer some of those questions and not others.

A material is not one object#

Phases splits what a material is into four separate capabilities. Every workflow declares only the capabilities it actually consumes, and each one is resolved independently at run time.

Two consequences follow, and they explain most of the surprises.

First, RSW needs something that is not in that list at all. A spot weld with microstructure tracking switched off requests no material-model capability whatsoever. What it does need is the spot-welding FEM's own database of electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, specific heat, density, latent heat and mechanical property curves, and that database is calibrated for a fixed list of grades. A grade can have a perfectly good material card and still have no RSW property mapping.

Second, confirming a custom chemistry does not create any of these capabilities. It stores a stable material definition plus a compatible base-card template, and nothing more. Kinetics, phase flow stress and bulk flow surfaces are resolved later, by whichever simulator you run next. See using your own chemistry for what that means in practice.

Capability is resolved per run, for whichever grade you named#

The built-in catalog holds 2,060 grades, 2,059 of them enabled. Nothing about that number decides what will run. There is no pre-computed list of supported combinations: each simulator asks for its declared capabilities at the moment you start a run, against the material you actually loaded, and reports what it resolved, what it substituted and what it could not find.

V-Gleeble thermal covers CCT dilatometry, weld HAZ, isothermal hold, hot stamping and the custom mode. V-Gleeble deformation covers hot tensile, hot compression and Satoh — the three modes that need a bulk flow surface.

Three things in that first row are worth spelling out.

Heat treatment, CCT and the thermal V-Gleeble modes cover almost the whole catalog. They need a base card plus transformation kinetics, and both resolve for 2,053 of the 2,060 grades. Seven have no readable authored kinetics and will refuse: the grade ids hc420, 13cr-4ni, if, if1, 18cr, 316l and saf2507. They come back with Required material physics is unavailable rather than a silent substitution. The set is not a random scatter — six of the seven sit at the stainless and interstitial-free end of the catalog — and it is not fixed forever, so treat the run's own answer as authoritative rather than this list.

RSW runs on exactly twenty grades and no others. That is a property of the spot-welding FEM's bulk-property database, not of the catalog. The solver is explicit about the distinction: the catalog holds thousands of microstructure cards, but the electrical, thermal, density, latent-heat and mechanical property database intentionally supports only this calibrated subset.

V-Gleeble deformation runs on the same twenty, and nothing else. Coverage does not scale with the catalog at all. Seventeen per-grade flow-stress tables ship, plus one reviewed mapping that covers 20MnB8, 25MnB5 and 29MnB7. Any other catalog grade — 42CrMo4, 100Cr6, H13, all 2,039 of them — comes back with No reviewed V-Gleeble bulk flow table is available for {grade}. Thermal V-Gleeble modes on those grades are unaffected.

Two unrelated twenties#

The twenty grades below are also the twenty printed as the reference set on the material catalog, and also the twenty Phases falls back to when the live catalog is unreachable. That is one reference set reused for three purposes, not evidence that the catalog is twenty grades wide. The catalog is 2,060. The RSW limit of twenty is a separate, independently correct fact about a different database.

The twenty#

Reading the cells:

• Yes for heat treatment, CCT and V-Gleeble thermal is not special to these twenty — it is what almost every catalog grade does. Resolution still happens per run; if it ever fails you get an explicit Required material physics is unavailable error rather than a silent substitution.
• Yes, calibrated template means the RSW property mapping exists and a calibrated case exists that you can pull up with list_rsw_templates. No calibrated template means the grade still runs, but you supply the current, force and timing yourself. See resistance spot welding.
• Exact table means a per-grade flow-stress table ships for that grade and is used as it stands, with no run-time substitution or rescaling; the resolver reports it as an exact per-grade table. Read that label as nothing was swapped in at run time, not as measured on this grade: the seventeen per-grade tables were themselves generated from five MSC Marc reference files using temperature-dependent scaling and gap-filling for the temperatures the reference data did not cover.
• Reviewed surrogate means no per-grade table exists, so the run falls back to an explicitly reviewed mapping onto a different steel's table with a strength scale factor applied at run time. All three boron grades in that row map onto the same reviewed source, 16MnCr5.mat, and the result carries a warning naming that table and the scale factor applied.

One more thing worth knowing about the RSW column: the twenty supported grades collapse onto two bulk-property families inside the FEM. The five DC grades and the five HC grades all share the DC04 property set; the four DP grades, the five boron press-hardening grades and EN13261 all share the 22MnB5 property set. Two grades in the same family therefore see identical electrical, thermal, density, latent-heat and mechanical curves. Only the optional microstructure path uses each grade's own card.

Why the custom-chemistry row looks the way it does#

The last row of the first table is the one to internalise. A custom chemistry runs happily through heat treatment, CCT and the thermal V-Gleeble modes, because those need kinetics, and kinetics can fall back to the verified template card's authored values — reported explicitly as a preserved-source result, never as calibrated custom physics. It cannot run a V-Gleeble deformation mode at all, because no validated bulk flow surface exists for a chemistry nobody has tabulated. And it does not create a new RSW grade: the plate still has to name one of the twenty supported grades, with your chemistry carried alongside it.

That asymmetry is also a good reason to check the catalog before typing a chemistry. A named catalog grade keeps every thermal capability and, if it happens to be one of the twenty, the deformation ones too. See finding your steel.

Checking a grade from chat#

Ask about the grade you care about rather than asking for the catalog. list_materials returns the whole enabled catalog in one unpaged call, and above forty grades the agent answers a "what do you support" question with a summary by family and counts, not an enumeration — so the broad question is the slow way to a specific answer.

Do you have 42CrMo4?

For the spot-welding subset specifically, which really is a short list:

Which grades can I use for a spot-welding simulation?

To check one grade end to end, load it and then ask for the run you actually want. The capability check runs before the solver does, so an unsupported combination comes back as a message rather than a wasted simulation:

Load 25MnB5, then run a hot compression test at 1000 °C at 1/s to 0.5 strain.

Load 16MnCr5 and generate a CCT diagram.

When a combination is unsupported#

You will see one of these, and each has a different remedy.

A grade RSW does not support. The tool rejects the parameter outright, and the workspace materials surface returns "This material has no validated RSW bulk-property mapping" followed by the list of twenty. Note that the plate-material dropdown in the RSW configuration card offers the whole catalog, so a grade being selectable there is not a capability check — the refusal comes at run time. Pick the closest supported grade for the plates. If you need your own chemistry in the weld, keep a supported grade as the plate grade and attach the chemistry to it — the chemistry then feeds the optional microstructure model while the FEM uses the supported grade's property curves.

A deformation mode on a catalog grade outside the twenty. The resolver reports "No reviewed V-Gleeble bulk flow table is available for {grade}". There is no workaround: bulk flow surfaces exist for seventeen grades directly and for three more by reviewed mapping, and for nothing else in the catalog. Run the deformation test on the nearest grade that does have one, and record in your own notes that the chemistry differs.

A deformation mode on a custom chemistry. The result names your material and says that no validated custom V-Gleeble bulk flow surface exists for it, and that phase P1-P4 is not a compatible substitute. A phase flow-stress prediction is a different capability and cannot stand in for the bulk surface.

A capability that cannot be resolved for this material. The run fails with "Required material physics is unavailable" for the simulator in question, plus the specific warnings and the list of missing capabilities. On a catalog grade this usually means the grade is one of the seven with no readable authored kinetics. On a custom material, reload it and check its status card; no active verified template is the usual cause.

A grade or simulator switched off for you. Any of the four simulators can be disabled for a workspace; built-in grades are enabled or disabled at the platform level rather than per workspace — exactly one grade, 20mnb4, is disabled today. A disabled simulator disappears from the panel and the agent tells you it is disabled here rather than pretending it failed. For a disabled grade, the agent confirms the grade exists, says it is currently disabled, and suggests the closest enabled alternative.

The one thing none of these do is quietly substitute a different material. Every fallback in the system is named in the result — surrogate tables, preserved kinetics and template deviation are all reported. See known limits for the full list of things the product declines to claim, the material catalog for what the grades are, and common problems if a refusal does not match anything here.