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CES EduPack Bulletin, Apr 2010
Hints and Tips
In this edition:
Tip 1—Accessing teaching resources
The CES EduPack teaching resources include PowerPoint lectures, teach yourself guides, student projects and exercises, white papers, and more—all designed to help your teaching of materials and processes. Any academic with a valid CES EduPack license is entitled to download resources and to use them in their teaching. You can, for example, take individual slides or images from the PowerPoint lectures and integrate them into your own slides.
Here is how to access these resources.
From within the CES EduPack software—click the "Help" button and select "Teaching Resources on the web" (below)
From your web browser—go to www.grantadesign.com/education/ and select "Get teaching resources" in the "EDUPACK COMMUNITY" section of the left-hand menu.
Provided that you have an active Internet connection, both of these roots will take you to the "Download Teaching Resources" page on the Granta website.
The teaching resources are divided into three categories:
| CES EduPack resource books & lectures | The main EduPack teaching resource "books"—providing lectures, charts, projects, and exercises. Book 4 allows you to download the EduPack lecture units as individual PowerPoint files. |
| CES EduPack supplementary resources | Additional downloads provided as part of the EduPack product—'Teach yourself' guides, white papers, sample project files, recordings of web seminars... |
| CES EduPack community—resource sharing | Resources provided by users of EduPack or created during projects by Granta staff, sponsored students, or collaborators. They are not part of the EduPack product, but are provided as a service to the EduPack community. |
Follow the links to browse the resources and download them.
At some point before you download a resource, you will be asked to enter a user name and password in order to proceed. You will only be asked for this information once in any browser session.
User names and passwords are distributed to anyone registered to use the teaching resources. Registration usually occurs when you buy or renew your CES EduPack license.
If you are entitled to access the resources and need to register, or need a reminder of your username and password, please contact Granta »
Do you:
- have teaching resources that you would be happy to share via the EduPack Community resource sharing pages?
- have feedback on, or suggestions for, the teaching resources? Granta will be making a significant investment in adding to these resources over the next 12 months and your input on the best way to do this would be gratefully received.
If so, please e-mail teachingresources@grantadesign.com with your resources or suggestions.
Tip 2—Links to reference sources
It can be important to know where the data shown in CES EduPack has come from—particularly for more advanced project work or teaching. Here we find out how to view references to data sources. We use the example of the Nuclear Power Edition, but the process applies to all CES EduPack editions and to the CES Selector software.
Make sure that Browse is selected in the main CES EduPack toolbar. In the left-hand panel click Change... alongside the Database name, and choose "CES EduPack 2010 Level 3 Nuclear Power". If you don't have this database, select another one and apply the principles of the following exercise.
The database contains detailed records describing materials of relevance to nuclear power systems. Navigate the tree view of these records (right) as shown:
Metals and alloys
> Non—ferrous
> Titanium
> Titanium alpha-beta alloy
> Ti-6Al-4V
> Annealed
Double-click on this record name and the record will appear in the right-hand pane. Browse the record to view properties. Note, for example, the section "Properties vs temperature", which appears as follows:
Click on the "Show/Hide" icon at the top of the record: 
This exposes the graphs underlying the data above, for example:
This information on the temperature-dependance of mechanical and other properties is particularly valuable when considering the use of a material in a nuclear power system. But how reliable is it? Where does the data in the record come from?
Go to the bottom of the record, where you will see a series of links.
These links take you to other information stored in the database that is relevant to the current record. Click on "Reference...".
This returns a 'tree' view of all of the sources for the data in the Ti-6Al-4V alloy record. Opening up all of the folders provides the view shown, right.
You can now browse this list of references—double click on any one to view the correct reference for that data source.
For example, double-click on "ASME BPVC-IID database" returns the reference:
ASME BPVC-IID database—2007 Edition
This is the source for the temperature-dependant data displayed above.
Note that, by navigating back to the alloy record and following other links, you can access other information of relevance to that specific alloy—for example, which processes in the associated ProcessUniverse data can be applied to the alloy, which materials producers produce the alloy, what nuclear power systems it is used in. This is possible because of the relational database structure of CES EduPack and CES Selector, which stores not only a very large amount of data about materials and processes, but also the relationships between items of data. The Level 3 database in CES EduPack contains 3,500+ materials, 230+ processes, 24 shapes, 450+ producers and 750+ reference sources. So maintaining this body of data and the web of relationships within it is a very large task. Every CES EduPack user can benefit from the results of this work.
Tip 3—Links to online information sources
CES EduPack contains an enormous amount of information about materials and processes. But no data source can contain everything you may need to know. For project work, advanced teaching, and research it is often necessary to find out more. Help is at hand through the Search Web button in CES EduPack and CES Selector. Try the following.
Use the same alloy record as in Tip 2. If you did not follow this tip, or don't have the Nuclear Power Edition, you can find the record for this alloy in Level 3 of the the standard CES EduPack database, as follows (this record is similar to that in the Nuclear Power edition, with the exception of some properties of particular relevance to nuclear applications).
In the main materials tree, browse as follows:
Metals and alloys
> Non—ferrous
> Titanium
> Titanium alpha-beta alloy
> Ti-6Al-4V
> Annealed
To search the web for information resources relating to this material, simply click Search Web in the CES EduPack toolbar.
Provided that you have an active Internet connection, this will open the following web page:
The Search Web tool uses a material search engine called MatData.net, maintained by Granta Design, which indexes a number of leading sources of materials data on the Internet. These include online resources from ASM International, The Welding Institute (TWI), the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and NIMS (Japan). Some of these sources are free to access, others require a subscription. In either case, MatData.net will link you to records within these sources relevant to your query. The CES EduPack Search Web tool automatically constructs and runs this query for you—so all that you have to do is click one of the "Go to Results" buttons shown above in order to access relevant results from the selected information source.
For example, selecting "ASM Handbook" provides a list of relevant handbook entries. If you have the required subscription, clicking on one of the articles listed would take you through to a screen like the one below.
Many Universities already have subscriptions to resources such as the ASM Handbooks, enabling any academic or student on the University network to access the electronic version. Campus-wide subscriptions are also available from Granta.