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CES Selector 2013

Building on CES Selector's graphical charting and selection capabilities, the latest release provides particular support for:

Engineers looking for similar or equivalent materials—meeting the demand for, in particular, global metals equivalency
Lightweight design—extended coverage of materials used for lightweighting, including composites, Al and Mg alloys, and high strength steels
Environmental design—enhancements to the Hybrid Synthesizer™ and Eco Audit™ Tool

"What does CES Selector 2013 do for me?"

Your question	Relevant new features
How can I find alternative materials? (E.g., due to supply disruption, obsolescence, supplier changes, or for global manufacturing).	New ‘Find similar’ tool: ranks materials based on nearness to reference material. Quickly find similar / equivalent materials without needing to specify properties or design requirements. New improved search engine: faster, greater accuracy, ranked results, search all tables in one go.
How do I get information on specific metal specifications and designations?	New CES Metal Selector, including global standards and specifications in MI-21 and StahlDat SX, linked to MaterialUniverse records. 'Comparable and similar grades' added to MaterialUniverse datasheets.
How can I quickly assess the environmental impact of different material and process choices? OR How can I lightweight my design?	New Eco Summary Charts and guidance notes on design strategies for improved performance. Helps you rapidly evaluate and compare eco-impact for different designs and explore 'what-if' scenarios to find improvements. New MaterialUniverse records increase the coverage of materials used in lightweight design: aluminium alloys, magnesium alloys, high strength steels, glass reinforced polyesters and polyamides. New Hybrid Synthesizer models including multi-layer materials and short fiber reinforced composites. Model the properties of a wider range of hybrid materials.
What will make my general use of CES Selector faster and easier?	Usability, productivity, and presentation improvements—e.g., tooltips, finding materials in the browse tree... New improved search engine: faster, greater accuracy, ranked results, search all tables in one go. Data updates to MaterialUniverse and reference data. New data for light alloys, steels, plastics, and more.

New features

Find Similar Tool

CES Selector 2013 is now ideally suited to the broader challenges of materials comparison, replacement, equivalency, and substitution. The new 'Find Similar' tool allows you to easily identify drop-in replacement materials in cases of material obsolescence, restricted substance legislation, or simply rising costs.

Find the material you want to replace in the database, click 'Find Similar'. Similar materials are instantly identified and ranked by 'nearness'. A comparison table then makes it easy to compare the performance of possible candidates in tabular form. By following the button to open a selection project, additional constraints (such as geographic region) can be included.

Metals

A new metals edition, CES Metal Selector, helps engineers and materials experts who need to use information on specific metals specifications and designations. It combines the core functionality of CES Selector with two specialist datasets.

MI-21 provides access to 100 years-worth of the World Metals Index's (WMI) metals data and a unique compilation of information on metal joining and surface treatment consumables from The Welding Institute (TWI).

StahlDat SX is the official compilation of all registered and maintained European Standards for steels according to EN10027-2, the European Register of Steels or Stahl-Eisen-Liste.

Records in MI-21 and StahlDat SX are linked to corresponding records in the MaterialUniverse data module. This makes it easy for you to use the generic materials data in MaterialUniverse to find the right material type for your application, and to then follow the links through to specific metal grades as you finalize your design. Combining this global and historical metals data with graphical selection charts and the new 'Find Similar' tool helps to identify alternative materials. This is particularly useful in light of supply disruption and material obsolescence, as well as supporting manufacturing across different regions.

Faster Searching

A new search engine in CES Selector 2013 makes it quicker and more intuitive to search for the materials data that you need. Optimized for designation searches, it now includes a new wildcard option and an improved search algorithm, for example, accounting for minor spelling variations (e.g., American-English versus British-English spellings). You can now search all available data tables simultaneously, and see the results sorted accordingly.

Hybrid Synthesizer

5 new Hybrid Synthesizer models make this add-on tool more representative of real-life hybrids and structures:

Multi-layer materials (2,3,4,5,6,7-layer)
note, this is not for modelling multilayer continuous fiber composites with different fiber orientations
Short fiber composites (aligned & random fiber)
Closed-cell foam
Honeycombs (expanded & extruded)
Dual material lattice (controlled thermal expansion)

Comparison Charts in the Eco Audit Tool

CES Selector 2013 allows you to compare multiple products and use scenarios, dynamically displaying the energy or CO2 footprint across the life phases. The relative impact of any changes can be instantly assessed from the '% Change' chart, complementing detailed reports on the environmental impact of each material and process. The new Eco Summary chart (pictured, right) makes it even easier to demonstrate the benefits and limitations of different product designs and life scenarios.

These charts also provide interactive guidance notes (pictured, right) that suggest techniques to reduce environmental impact, helping students explore how best to improve a design.

Improving usability, productivity, and presentation

User feedback has helped define a program of ongoing improvements to the usability of the software, making it even more intuitive, and reducing the number of mouse-clicks to perform useful tasks:

Automatic titles of selection stages—makes it easier to identify stages. When combined with the 'enable/disable stage' feature this makes it easier to examine and demonstrate the impact of design constraints.
Tooltips added to limit and tree stages—find out what's been set by hovering the mouse over the stage list, without the need to open up the stage.
Create custom subsets based on favorite records—a quick way to focus a selection project on a group of preferred materials, or to visually compare a new material to a specific set of alternatives.
Locate in Browse Tree—Right click on a material on a chart or datasheet (pictured, right), and access additional information on material type and classification. Helps with identification of similar materials.
'Functional' data values added to Comparison Tables — now shows properties at a specified value (e.g., Young's modulus at specified temperature)

Automatic titles of selection stages—makes it easier to identify stages. When combined with the 'enable/disable stage' feature this simplifies the examination and demonstration of the impact of design constraints.

locate in browse tree

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:

New equivalency / designation fields (listed under ‘Identification’ header)
Revised, more informative, tree structure for metals
59 new wrought Al records (11 alloys + tempers)
9 new cast Mg alloys (AE, AJ, Elektron)
6 new steels (2 HSLA, 3 boron press hardened, 1 structural steel)
14 new GFRP records (8 polyester, 6 polyamide based)
9 new fillers (8 particulates + basalt fiber)
Number of ‘Electrical components’ increased from 22 to 43

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. In addition to the MI-21 and StahlDat SX data introduced above, the following have been updated:

CAMPUS Plastics—mechanical, rheological, thermal, electrical, processing and other properties for over 6,000 plastic resin grades from 20 raw material producers. All data is measured according to strict CAMPUS ISO standards.
IDES Plastics—by far the largest collection of ASTM datasheets, currently containing 88,000 datasheets from 870 suppliers; 68,000 datasheets listing ASTM standard properties and 39,000 datasheets listing ISO properties.
ASME—an authoritative source of property data relating to materials for power plants (nuclear and conventional) and the process industries (chemical, oil, and gas).
MMPDS—over 2,000 records of statistically-derived design data for aerospace alloys and a complete fastener database comprising over 1,000 sheet metal/fastener combinations.

Previous versions: CES Selector 2012 |CES Selector 2010 | CES Selector 2009 | CES Selector 2008