Material properties in IFC

In IFC 4 it is possible to export material properties to IFC - but there are a few things to keep in mind when doing this.

Let's take a look at this in Revit - material properties are basically the properties that we see in the material editor (e.g. in the tabs Identity, Physical or Thermal).

However, it is also possible to add your own properties to the materials:

All these properties can be exported to IFC:

Now comes the catch - unfortunately, these properties are not visible in every IFC viewer, especially not for composite components (e.g. multi-layer walls). Here is the result in the KIT Viewer:

I would therefore always recommend checking the properties in a text editor first - here you can easily see whether a particular property has been exported.

Material properties are usually evaluated by other systems anyway, e.g. for performing calculations - so the display in the viewer is probably not as crucial as it may seem at first.

What do you think, did you know that and do you use the material properties in IFC?

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