Home > Products > CES Selector > Basic Edition

CES Selector - Basic Edition

CES Selector, based on the Cambridge Engineering Selector (CES) technology, is a unique tool for the rational selection of engineering materials – metals, ceramics, polymers, composites, woods – and of manufacturing processes – shaping, finishing, joining, and surface treatment.

The Basic Edition package is described on this page. Specialist editions combine its core features with targeted data and tools for: eco-design (CES Eco Selector), plastics selection (CES Polymer Selector), medical devices (CES Medical Selector), and high performance engineering (CES Aero Selector).

With CES Selector you can:

Support early-stage design, where materials and processing options are open
Advance detailed design tasks when coupled to your own proprietary data or to specialist databases such as MMPDS (Mil-Handbook-5) or CAMPUS plastics
Redesign components, selecting materials for lower “cost per unit of function”
Find equivalents or substitutes for a redundant or withdrawn material
Find substitutes for a material that has failed in use
Validate a design approach, demonstrating that no material or processing option has been overlooked
Communicate and gain support for new material and processing ideas
Improve the design process by encouraging early consideration of material and manufacturing issues in new product design

Find out who uses CES Selector...

CES Selector combines information on materials and process properties with software offering a series of powerful tools for analyzing that information and using it to select materials.

Materials information

At the heart of every CES Selector implementation is a database of materials and process properties. You can populate this database with your own proprietary data, or with data products from Granta Design. Of particular value for CES Selector analyses is the Universe data series, which provides property data for virtually every purchasable engineering material. The strength of the Universe data series is that there are no 'holes' in its data - property values are either populated with known, referenced data or with values estimated using Granta technology. The result is that you can screen the complete 'universe' of potential candidate materials for your application, without excluding the many materials for which you may not have complete data.

The MaterialUniverse and ProcessUniverse data modules are provided with the CES Selector Basic Edition.

More on Granta's reference data products | The Universe data series.

Note: The focus of CES Selector is its powerful graphical selection tools, designed for intensive materials selection and analysis tasks. It also allows individuals or small groups to browse and search materials property databases. For a more complete multi-user materials information management solution, and for web deployment of materials selection capabilities, see GRANTA MI.

Software tools

CES Selector's powerful selection and analysis tools are based on the Ashby materials selection methodology. Key concepts in the following product description are linked to explanatory text - or you can read an overview of the Ashby methods.

CES Selector provides a range of tools to let you browse and search materials information and a powerful graphical analysis environment for applying the world-renowned Ashby methods for materials and process selection. These enable a systematic and rational approach to choose or justify the use of a particular material or process for a specific application.

With the software's Browse facility, you can locate the materials or processes that interest you in simple-to-use tree hierarchy (left hand panel in image below). Material or process records can store property data as text, as single numbers, as a range of numbers, or even as functional data - e.g., a graph showing the temperature dependance of Young's Modulus.

Viewing MaterialUniverse within CES Selector

Viewing the MaterialUniverse data module within CES Selector

With Search, you can find materials and processes by name, trade name, application, or other key words.

Most powerful of all are the systematic Selection tools. You can apply a range of numerical and graphical selection criteria to identify materials that meet a specific design objective. The most powerful of these are material selection charts (sometimes called Ashby charts).

Materials selection charts

Materials selection charts in CES Selector - each elipse represents the range of possible values for one material

Ashby materials selection charts plot one property - or a combination of properties - against another, with every material in the database shown as a point or (more typically) as an ellipse representing the range of its possible values. You can plot any combination of properties and, because the system handles functional data that define how a property varies with a parameter such as temperature, you can even generate different plots for different operating conditions.

The charts allow you to explore which materials provide the best properties for a design application. A useful concept is 'performance indices'. These describe the relationship between properties that gives optimal performance for a specific application - for example, maximizing the value of E^(1/3)/r delivers the best performance for a panel in bending. CES Selector makes it easy for you to identify the appropriate performance index using a simple graphical selection menu (below). For more advanced use, you can define your own index. You can then plot performance indices on your Ashby Chart and combine them with other selection criteria to identify candidate materials.

Choosing the appropriate performance index in CES Selector

The Performance Index Finder is a graphical tool that helps you to specify your design application

The charts not only help to find and rank such candidate materials, they also help you to fully understand the relative performance of materials, to see and explore alternatives that may be screened out by a less nuanced numerical analysis. Finally, selection charts help you to present your results with clarity and authority to colleagues or customers.

Business impact

Rational selection approaches are useful tools for materials experts and engineers. With CES Selector, they become extremely powerful. You can quickly analyze any combination of any properties, for any material, under any conditions, and interact easily with the results. So it becomes very simple to ask, and answer, questions like "What materials will perform the same job at lower cost?", "Which materials minimize environmental impact?", or "What alternative materials are available that might meet these new regulations?".

CES Selector is a valuable tool for businesses that need to make materials decisions in design and manufacturing, particularly where those decisions involve selection or substitution. The benefits of applying the Selector method can range from quickly making simple design decisions, such as replacing an existing grade of polymer with a cheaper option, to creative leaps, such as realizing that a composite could be used to replace a metal, at a fraction of the weight.

Find out what's new in the latest CES Selector release...