Dear Dawn Morgan ,

You can simply use command snippet in Ansys Mechanical to define the material in case you have the experimental data. Command snippet APDL codes will be replaced with the existing material properties defined in mechanical when model is transferred to solver.

Hope this answer get you started!

I noticed the custom materials options in Engineering data and wondered if that was an easier option as I have no expertise in APDL. Any thoughts?

Yes. You can use "Create custom Model" in "Engineering Data" as well and the results will be identical since these material properties are going to be translated to APDL language upon transferring the model to the solver. You can see the command generated in the .dat file.

Thanks,

thank you