CES Selector 2012
CES Selector 2012 makes it quick and easy to tackle a key practical issue facing materials engineers and product designers—the need to compare materials alternatives, often with the objective of replacing or substituting existing materials that have become obsolete, hard to source, expensive, or that no longer satifsy performance objectives. In addition, this new release extends the CES Selector eco design tools and adds new information resources that will be of particular interest to users of steels and continuous fiber reinforced polymer composites.
"What does CES Selector 2012 do for me?"
| Your interests | Benefits | Key new features |
| Materials replacement / substitution | Easily compare the performance of two or more materials. Quickly identify potential replacements or substitutes for a given material. Highlight differences between materials, avoiding the risk of overlooking critical criteria. | - Comparison tables - Reference records |
| Eco design | The Eco Audit Tool remains a uniquely quick and easy method to estimate the environmental impact of a product early in the design phase—but it now considers some key additional factors, based on user feedback. Manufacturing waste and secondary / finishing processes are now included, as are of end-of-life scenarios for material recovery. | - Enhanced Eco Audit |
| Composite materials | New Firehole Composites data supports design using composite materials and enables easy comparison between composites and traditional materials. | - Firehole Composites |
| Steels | New StahlDat SX data provides a comprehensive source of European steel designations. | - StahlDat SX
- MaterialUniverse |
| General use of CES Selector | Every user of CES Selector will benefit from new, easy-to-use data comparison tools and updates to the core MaterialUniverse data as well as CES Selector's specialist data for plastics, metals, and composites. | - Comparison tables - Reference records - Miscellaneous features - MaterialUniverse - Data updates |
New software features
Comparison tables
A new comparison table, available in the Basic Edition, makes it easy to compare the performance of two or more materials in tabular form. The materials to be compared may be identified via a CES Selector selection project, via screening using property constraints, or simply chosen from the browse tree. This feature supports use cases from simple exploration of materials data to detailed analysis of the results of a rational selection project. It is also possible to highlight differences in performance relative to a specified reference materials (see Reference record below). This can be particularly useful in materials substitution or replacement exercises, when it can help you to avoid the risk of overlooking critical criteria. The image shows a table in which a wrought Aluminum is the reference material and is compared with a glass filled PA66. Note perfomance indices computed by CES Selector (such as "mass per unit of strength") are listed together with properties drawn from the CES Selector database. Differences of greater than 10% are highlighted.
Reference record
You can now choose a material in your CES Selector database as a 'reference record'. When setting limit constraints in a materials selection project, the value for the reference material for that particular property is shown, making it easy to focus your choice on materials with similar performance. The reference material can be shown on charts and in comparison tables, with the properties of other materials shown as values relative to the reference. Combined with the new comparison tables feature, these capabilities make it much easier to identify potential replacements or substitutes for a chosen material.
The image shows part of a materials property chart in which two materials are highlighted. The reference material is the material in red. The new "tooltip" feature, which interactively displays property data when you hover over a specific material on a chart, is also shown.
Enhanced Eco Audit Tool
The Eco Audit Tool remains a uniquely quick and easy method to estimate the environmental impact of a product early in the design phases. But it now produces a more detailed analysis, including some key additional factors that have been added based on user feedback.
- Manufacturing waste is included in the calculation
- Secondary processes (machining, joining, and finishing) can be included in the calculation
- End-of-life scenarios for the product can be investigated by specifiying a percentage recovered for each material specified (Potential energy/CO2 to recover at end-of-life potential is shown on the charts, right, as the last bar)
- Analysis of electronic products is made easier by including batteries, electronic components, materials, systems, and subsystems in specifcying the product
Miscellaneous enhancements
- Tooltip added to graph labels—shows range and average values for labelled record, enables chart values to be identified without the need to open up the datasheet. Also identifies design rescaling factors when used in combination with the ‘reference record’
- Highlight of user-defined records—User-defined records were added for the last release, new button added to the graph stage toolbar that readily highlights the location of all your user-defined records on charts
- New ‘Eco audit’ & ‘Synthesizer’ buttons added to the main application toolbar, providing quick and easy access to these important add-on tools
New data
Firehole Composites
Compiled by Firehole Technologies, this new CES Selector data module covers over 300 continuous fiber reinforced polymer composite grades. Data is drawn from manufacturers, leading testing labs, and research institutions. Around 1,000 records describe different test conditions (e.g. room temperature dry, elevated temperature wet, etc.) with information on the composite constituents (fibers, matrix materials etc.), suppliers, and forms, plus unidirectional and multi-axial laminate properties derived from testing. Firehole Composites supports design using composite materials and enables easy comparison between composites and traditional materials, helping you to choose the right materials and find replacements.
Firehole Composites is available with CES Aero Selector »
StahlDat SX
StahlDat SX provides the complete Register of European Steels (known as the ‘Stahl-Eisen-Liste’ in German), their specification data, and temperature-dependent properties. This new CES Selector data module is licensed from the German Steel Institute (Stahlinstitut VDEh). The European Steels Registration Office is part of the Institute. StahlDat SX provides data for over 2,500 steels in the Register (chemical composition, mechanical properties, material forms, suppliers) plus temperature dependent properties for over 450 of these from the publication SEW 310. It wil be useful for European steel selection in design and procurement; as input data for design, analysis, and processing; and for research.
MaterialUniverse
The core MaterialUniverse data module, provided with the CES Selector (Basic Edition) has been updated and extended, enhancing its wide-ranging coverage of commercially-available engineering materials:
- Further coverage of steels, including the addition of 17 automotive steel grades to the data
- Extended coverage of cast steels and aluminiums
- Revised environmental data, including new primary process data and additional data on electrical components
- A new attribute for Galvanic potential will help with the selection of materials for applications where corrosion is a concern
MaterialUniverse is designed to support effective materials comparisons across the full range of materials options, with consistent, comparable data and no missing properties.
Data updates
A number of the key CES Selector data modules have been updated, providing the latest information on plastics and metals:
- CAMPUS Plastics—latest version of this resource containing 5,000 plastics grades measured to comparable ISO standards.
- IDES Plastics—latest version of the data module with nearly 80,000 plastics property datasheets from 725 suppliers
- ASME—the new 2010 version of the ASME Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code: materials data for power & process industries
- MMPDS—now offers the MMPDS-05 version of the standard reference of alloy data for aerospace component design (previously Mil-Hdbk-5)
Previous versions: CES Selector 2010 | CES Selector 2009 | CES Selector 2008 | CES Selector 2007