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Teaching Engineering Materials, with Professor Mike Ashby

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Who is the course for?

Professors, Lecturers, and Program Directors of university and college courses related to materials and manufacturing.  It is relevant to the following disciplines: mechanical engineering; production engineering; aerospace engineering; materials science and engineering; industrial and product design; polymer science and engineering; eco-engineering; chemical engineering; bio-engineering; and architecture and the built environment.

What is it about?

The course introduces and demonstrates the use of the world's leading supporting resource for teaching materials and manufacturing to engineering and design students, as used at 600 universities and colleges worldwide.  The CES EduPack package has been created by Professor Mike Ashby of Cambridge University and his colleagues over the past 20 years. Both the resources that it provides and the ideas that it implements are valuable to educators across a broad range of engineering-related courses, and from first to final-year teaching. They have been used to support and reinforce existing courses that use a variety of teaching approaches and texts, as well as in the design of new courses.

At the heart of CES EduPack is a database of materials and process properties, supported by textbook-style explanations of materials attributes and behavior. This provides a rich, interactive information resource that can engage students with the world of materials. The CES EduPack software applies the information in the database, enabling exercises and projects to analyze and compare materials properties, and to select materials for engineering applications. These computer-based learning tools are augmented with Powerpoint lectures, teaching resource books, student projects and exercises, and textbooks.

In this course, Professor Ashby will show, through lectures interspersed with hands-on tutorial sessions using the software, how such resources can assist materials teaching.

What will I get out of it?

The course will enable you to:

• Gain an overview of how CES EduPack can support interdisciplinary materials teaching across your university
  
  
• Find out how to use the CES EduPack:
  
  
  • Explore the CES EduPack software in interactive hands-on sessions
  • Learn how to create and apply materials selection charts
  • Access and use detailed scientific explanations of materials properties
  • See Professor Mike Ashby present the course lectures - and get the PowerPoint slides for use in your own teaching
  • Leave with new ideas for student exercises and projects
    
    
• Try CES EduPack 2008: new teaching possibilities with the latest version
  
  
• Each participant will take away:
  
  
  • A thirty-day evaluation license of the CES EduPack software
  • Mike Ashby’s new textbook: 'Materials: Engineering, Science, Processing and Design'
  • Course lecture notes

Course leader: Professor Mike Ashby

Mike Ashby is Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a world-renowned authority on engineering materials being the author/co-author of best-selling textbooks and of over 200 papers on topics including the mechanisms of plasticity and fracture, powder compaction, mechanisms of wear, methodologies for materials selection, and the modeling of material shaping processes. He is recipient of numerous awards and honours including Fellow of the Royal Society and Member of the American Academy of Engineering.

Course agenda

Courses are tailored to venues and attendees, but typical course modules are:

1. The world of materials and processes
2. Materials charts: mapping the world of materials
3. Translation and screening: optimized selection
4. Selecting processes: shaping, joining, and surface treatment
5. Ranking: refining the choice
6. Eco-selection: environmentally-informed material choice

Each module consists of a lecture followed by a hands-on tutorial and discussion session. The course begins with a review of the world of materials and processes and how essential information about this world is represented and explored via the CES EduPack software, including ‘drilling down’ to the fundamental science. It then moves onto an explanation of material property charts and how to generate them interactively in CES EduPack software.  Then we discuss how to move from design objectives to materials selection, showing how to teach students about this process.  Finally, we review further practical applications: more complex design scenarios and the teaching of eco-design.

Feedback from past courses

"It was a very useful course to appreciate the full potential of CES EduPack. It was enlightening to learn from the experts."
Dr Noreen Thomas, University of Loughborough

"The course provided an excellent introduction to the CES EduPack software. The day provided a very good balance between lecture-based and hands-on sessions."
Dr Alec Goodyear, The Open University

"It was great being able to use the software during the course."
Matthew Cavalli, University of North Dakota

"Got across well how much of a decision-making tool CES EduPack can be."
Chrys Demetry, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

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