Cambridge, November 14, 2006

Ashby Design Award Winner Announced

Granta Design has announced the winner of the Ashby Design Award for 2006. He is Eduardo Avancini Alves of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol, Brazil.

Granta sponsors this annual award as part of its commitment to encourage innovation in teaching and learning about materials and processes. Each year, Professor Mike Ashby sets a materials selection problem that can be addressed by students in disciplines including:

• General, mechanical, manufacturing and aerospace engineering
• Materials science and materials engineering
• Industrial and product design
• Polymer science and polymer engineering
• Eco-engineering
• Architecture and the built environment

This year's challenge focused on the choice of a material for a medical application.

Professor Ashby comments "This year's Materials Selection problem was the most challenging to date. It stimulated an excellent response: 30 submissions from a number of countries. The winner, by a narrow margin, was selected for his innovative exploration of tubular structures in nature as a source of inspiration and for his competent analysis and use of the CES EduPack software to devise a steel-mesh reinforced polyurethane composite tube that meets the design requirements. Congratulations to Eduardo and to Professor Wilson Kindlein Jr. who guided the project."

The prize for the Award winner includes a personal copy of CES EduPack 2006.

CES EduPack is the leading software for inspiring students in the study of materials and processes. Originally authored by Professor Mike Ashby of Cambridge University, and continually developed by Granta Design, it offers a unique browsable database of the technical and economic characteristics of materials and processes, together with a structured methodology for selecting and relating them, and graphical tools to aid analysis and understanding of these subjects. The software and associated teaching resources are used at over 550 universities and colleges worldwide.

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

More details of this year's Award competition...

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