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March 2008 Granta Material News Welcome to Granta Material News, our quarterly update for anyone who creates, uses, or manages materials information in industry. In this edition:
New product - GRANTA MI 2.0The latest version of GRANTA MI introduces the next generation of materials information management. GRANTA MI 2.0, available to customers in early April, is faster and more robust than ever, with a fresh new look and major new features. GRANTA MI 2.0 helps you to:
Further information is provided in the news items below, or on the Granta website. GRANTA MI 2.0 information at the Granta website Arrange a demonstration of GRANTA MI 2.0 Rolls-Royce case study is seminar highlightThirty attendees from industries including aerospace, energy, marine, and automotive joined Granta for a one-day event exploring materials information problems in the engineering process, and information technology to aid their solution. The event was held at Brooklands Museum, 20 miles west of London, site of the world's first purpose-built motor racing track and the location of many pioneering feats of aviation. The highlight of the discussions among today's engineering innovators was a talk from Dr Malcolm Thomas, Materials Fellow and a former Director of Materials and Mechanical Behavior at Rolls-Royce. Dr Thomas described a major project to introduce an integrated materials property data management system at Rolls-Royce, based on the GRANTA MI software. His talk outlined some of the major issues faced in such an exercise, and how they are being addressed. Read a full report of the seminar, including the Rolls-Royce case study Next materials information technology seminar - Paris, April 2Effective management and use of materials information is vital to engineering enterprises. This latest in our series of materials information seminars will feature presentations from companies that recognize this fact and use materials information technology to help increase productivity, enhance innovation, and reduce risk in their engineering process.
Granta will also present, with discussion and demonstration of the latest software and approaches for materials data management, analysis, and decision-support. The events is free and lunch is provided, but space is limited. Register now to secure your place. More information and registration Materials strategy seminar - Milwaukee, May 7Join an open seminar on the latest software-based approaches to materials strategy - enabling optimum materials decisions based on function and cost. The event will be relevant to anyone who uses or specifies materials in manufacturing or engineering, and to product managers and technical marketing personnel from materials producing enterprises. We will discuss and present software approaches to issues such as:
As with previous materials strategy seminars, the event is being run immediately after the six-monthly meeting of the Materials Strategy Forum, a collaborative project that guides the development of software to address these issues. It will thus provide an opportunity to network with Forum members, as well as other seminar attendees.
Previous seminars have attracted managers from companies such as: Airbus, Alcoa, Autoliv, Benteler, Boeing, Brush Wellman, Caterpillar, Daimler Chrysler, DePuy, Emerson Electric, Federal-Mogul, Ford, GE - Aviation, General Motors, Goodrich, Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Kohler, Medtronic, Morgan Carbon, NASA, NIST, Pratt & Whitney, Rocketdyne, Raytheon, Siemens Power Generation, Ticona, TIMET, Timken, Visteon, and Whirlpool. More information - includes registration details and reports from previous meetings Raytheon joins the Material Data Management ConsortiumThe Eleventh Material Data Management Consortium Meeting was held in Greenville, SC, January 15-17. The Consortium meeting, hosted by GE - Energy, welcomed Raytheon as the newest member organization. The meeting reviewed the GRANTA MI 2.0 release (see next item) and prioritized development work for future releases. An accompanying seminar provided a venue for non-members to hear about the work of the Consortium and meet members, including NASA and Rolls-Royce, who presented on their use of materials information technology. Version control and data quality ratings enhance materials data managementThe MDMC prioritized two major features which have been delivered in GRANTA MI 2.0 - version control and data quality ratings. GRANTA MI is unique in offering formal version control for materials information management. This feature provides a systematic approach to updating data, captures information explaining changes, and stores all previous versions of any item of data. The system can thus help to control the release of data, capture the full context for all information in the database, and allow recovery of past versions. Data quality ratings help to ensure that, while the system stores all of an organization's materials information (regardless of its provenance or accuracy), only the most appropriate data is delivered to specific users, or applied to specific applications. These are major benefits, particularly for organizations with highly-regulated or safety-critical data. These advances have been delivered along with improvements in the speed of the system (especially for larger databases) and in the ease of configuring its security. Crucially, it is also easier to deploy the information in the system to suitably authorized users (see next section). Details of GRANTA MI 2.0 new features Integration with engineering designProviding appropriate materials information to support engineering design and simulation can be a major challenge. Organizations need to:
A new feature on the Granta website discusses these issues, with links to related technical papers and product information. New developments in GRANTA MI 2.0 are key - these include a new Abaqus plug-in (see next item) and data export to Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire. These integration capabilities are driven by Granta’s partner program. Granta partners with a range of leading engineering software providers in order to optimize interaction with their systems for the benefit of mutual users - other partners include ANSYS and Siemens PLM (formerly UGS). Engineering design website feature & technical paper Granta Abaqus Plug-inThe new Granta Abaqus Plug-in enables users of the Abaqus/CAE software from the SIMULIA brand of Dassault Systèmes to directly access and use materials property data from a GRANTA MI database, while working in their familiar simulation environment. By using this Granta-provided plug-in, Abaqus/CAE users are able to easily find and apply any data from their corporate materials database for which they have the appropriate authorization. Additionally, they will now be able to directly access and apply data from Granta’s premier reference databases. The plug-in greatly improves the speed and reliability with which Abaqus users can access the correct data, and avoids the risk of transcription errors while importing this data. In addition to 'off-the-shelf' plug-in products such as this, GRANTA MI can be similarly integrated with other third-party or in-house applications through its Application Programming Interface. Abaqus Plug-in product information Advances for aerospace, energy, and beyondGranta provides extensive reference data covering the alloys and other materials used in aerospace, nuclear engineering, chemical process plants, and other applications where operating conditions are extreme and safety critical. It is vital that such data is authoritative, traceable to its source, and the best available. Two key references have now been updated: MMPDS-03 is the latest version of the pre-eminent reference (previously known as MIL-Handbook-5) for design allowable data on aerospace alloys. MMPDS-03 includes 11 new alloys and additional data on properties such as strain controlled fatigue, SCC, and modulus of rupture. Granta's ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code module provides data from the authoritative data source on materials used in power plant components (nuclear and conventional) and process industries (chemical, oil, and gas). It now provides a database of 450 materials, and tools enabling easy data export to engineering software. Granta's Aerospace & Energy Data Series Polymer progress - transparent & medical plastics, elastomersGranta's extensive library of data covering plastics and elastomers includes widely-used and respected references, such as CAMPUS and IDES, which provide detailed data on 70,000 grades of plastic. A new version of each is provided with GRANTA MI 2.0. Granta has also made substantial updates to data to aid materials selection and positioning in several industrially-important areas: Transparent plastics - data has been substantially updated, with new information and materials added. Elastomers - the rubber section of this data module has been completely revised and a number of new elastomer chemistries added. The thermoplastic elastomers (TPE) section was first released in 2007 and is now updated. Medical polymers - an updated dataset enables selection of polymer materials for medical devices, identification of medical or food contact grades, and investigation of properties that are important in medical applications: sterilizability, durability to chemicals and UV light, and permeability. More new data - materials prices, eco design, stainless alloysIn addition to the new aerospace, energy, and plastics data described above, Granta's own MaterialUniverse data module has been enhanced with:
Details of the updated eco data Details of the new stainless alloys data Conferences - see Granta at:MMPDS Coordination Meeting, Las Vegas, Mar 31 - Apr 3
JEC Composites and SAMPE, Paris, Mar 31 - Apr 3
Plastics in Medical Devices, Brussels, Apr 9-10
SPE ANTEC 2008, Milwaukee, May 4-8
Abaqus Users' Conference, Newport, RI, May 19-22
PLM Summit, Toulouse, June 23-25
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