How MIRICAL SOFTWARE and EXPERTA | TESTING Deliver Smarter Material Models for Their Clients
In modern engineering, material performance is no longer just tested — it’s predicted.
Whether you’re designing lightweight automotive parts, electronic housings, or precision seals, success depends on knowing how materials behave under stress, heat, and time.
That’s exactly what the new collaboration between MIRICAL SOFTWARE and EXPERTA | TESTING delivers: a powerful fusion of laboratory precision and computational intelligence that transforms experimental data into simulation-ready digital material twins.
Their joint showcase research — the Viscoelastic Material Modeling and Calibration - Turning Data into Predictive Power — illustrates how combining EXPERTA | TESTING’s advanced material testing with MIRICAL’s automated modeling and calibration technology creates an end-to-end workflow that is faster, more accurate, and far more useful for design engineers.
A Partnership Built on Complementary Strengths
The partnership between EXPERTA | TESTING and MIRICAL SOFTWARE brings together two specialized worlds that rarely operate seamlessly:
- EXPERTA | TESTING provides access to world-class Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA), creep, and stress-relaxation testing. Their partner laboratories capture how materials respond across wide temperature and frequency ranges, producing clean, traceable datasets that reveal the true viscoelastic character of a polymer or composite.
- MIRICAL SOFTWARE develops cutting-edge inverse modeling, time–temperature superposition (TTS), and Generalized Maxwell (Prony) model calibration tools. Their software transforms raw experimental results into physically validated, simulation-ready material models for leading finite-element solvers such as Abaqus and ANSYS.
When these capabilities are connected, the result is a digital bridge between the lab and the design office.
What once required weeks of manual data cleaning, curve fitting, and parameter tweaking can now be delivered as a validated FE material card — ready to drop directly into simulation environments.
From Testing Data to Digital Models — the Workflow
The joint report showcases this workflow on a viscoelastic polymer dataset:
- Comprehensive Laboratory Testing via EXPERTA | TESTING performed DMA measurements from −40 °C to 80 °C and frequencies between 5 Hz and 100 Hz, obtaining the material’s storage modulus (E′), loss modulus (E″), and damping (tan δ). These parameters describe how the material stores and dissipates energy — the essence of viscoelasticity.
- Data Cleaning and Pre-Processing with MIRICAL SOFTWARE applied automated preprocessing, including outlier removal and light smoothing, ensuring that only consistent and physically meaningful data feed the calibration process.
- Time–Temperature Superposition (TTS) data were merged into a master curve spanning over 10 decades of frequency, using the Williams–Landel–Ferry (WLF) shift law. This master curve compresses an enormous range of material behavior — from long-term creep to high-frequency vibration — into a single, continuous dataset.
- Model Calibration with MIRICAL’s inverse modeling tools fitted the master curve with a 13-term Prony series (Generalized Maxwell model), accurately capturing both the short-time stiffness and long-time relaxation of the material.
- Simulation-Ready Output: The final result is not just a report — it’s a solver-ready material card, including all parameters, shift factors, and temperature dependencies formatted for direct use in FE simulations.
Why This Matters for our Clients?
This combined capability means more than just technical excellence — it translates into tangible business value.
- Faster Time-to-Model
Traditionally, converting laboratory data into usable simulation inputs could take weeks or even months. EXPERTA | TESTING and MIRICAL SOFTWARE eliminate that delay. DMA testing and calibration are performed within a unified workflow, so clients receive both experimental validation and FE-ready models almost simultaneously. That drastically shortens the development loop between testing, simulation, and design optimization.
- Reliable, Physics-Based Predictions
Because the models are rooted in high-quality experimental data and physically consistent calibration (via WLF and Prony formulations), engineers can predict creep deformation, stress relaxation, and damping behavior with confidence. This reduces the need for oversizing components or performing excessive safety testing later in the product cycle.
- Seamless Integration with Simulation Tools
The output files are formatted specifically for Abaqus, ANSYS, and other solvers. Design engineers can plug them directly into their simulations — no reformatting, no manual curve-fitting. This ensures traceable, auditable material models that are directly linked to experimental evidence.
- Reduced Risk in Product Performance
Accurate viscoelastic modeling directly affects long-term reliability. Whether predicting assembly preload loss, sealing performance, or warpage under thermal cycles, these calibrated models give clients quantitative insight long before physical prototypes exist. That means fewer surprises during validation and fewer costly redesigns.
- A Scalable and Repeatable Approach
The joint workflow is not a one-off exercise — it’s a repeatable system. Once a client’s material family has been characterized, new grades or formulations can be modeled quickly using the same calibrated framework. Over time, this creates a digital materials library specific to the client’s product range.
Technical Highlights — Where Science Meets Software
The joint study also demonstrates how carefully chosen modeling strategies improve accuracy and insight:
- The WLF shift law (C₁ = 20.20, C₂ = 171.20 °C) accurately captures the temperature dependence of polymer mobility near the glass transition, outperforming simpler Arrhenius approaches.
- The 13-term Prony series achieves a smooth fit across 13 orders of magnitude in frequency, covering both instantaneous and long-term responses.
- Predicted creep and stress-relaxation behaviors align with theoretical viscoelastic expectations: higher temperatures accelerate deformation and relaxation, while low temperatures stabilize geometry and stress retention.
- The model ensures thermos-rheological consistency, meaning temperature shifts affect only relaxation time, not structural form — a key condition for reliable long-term simulation.
These technical achievements directly underpin the practical value clients experience:
“Greater predictability and fewer unknowns in how materials will behave in real-world use …”
The Digital Materials Advantage
For product developers, the ability to simulate material behavior accurately before building prototypes changes everything. It enables:
- Earlier virtual validation of part performance under realistic loads and temperatures.
- Design optimization using credible, data-driven material responses.
- Improved sustainability, as fewer prototypes and physical tests are needed.
- Knowledge retention, since calibrated models become part of the organization’s digital materials database.
Through the partnership, EXPERTA | TESTING provides the reality — precise measurement of how materials actually perform — while MIRICAL SOFTWARE provides the predictive intelligence — transforming that data into usable design knowledge.
Together, they create a closed loop between experiment, model, and simulation.
Looking Ahead — Smarter Materials, Smarter Design
The collaboration doesn’t stop here. MIRICAL and EXPERTA | TESTING are now expanding their joint work into areas such as:
- Non-linear viscoelasticity and temperature-dependent plasticity
- Thermo-mechanical coupling for multi-load environments, and
- Automated calibration pipelines for high-throughput materials testing.
Their shared vision is to make digital material twins standard practice — enabling every engineering decision to be based on verified, predictive models instead of static datasheets.
In today’s competitive engineering world, insight is what drives better materials, better products, and better performance …
Conclusion
By joining forces, EXPERTA | TESTING and MIRICAL SOFTWARE have built more than a joint research project — they’ve created a complete solution for clients who need trustworthy, simulation-ready material data.
- EXPERTA | TESTING delivers the experimental truth.
- MIRICAL turns that truth into predictive intelligence.
- Together, they give clients speed, accuracy, and confidence in every design decision.
In short: where others deliver raw data or complex code, this partnership delivers insight.