Granta Design has announced a new release of Granta MI, the leading system for materials information management in engineering enterprises. Granta MI 4.0 focuses on key practical challenges faced by scientists, engineers, and designers in managing and using materials data. Meeting such challenges saves time, reduces risk, improves quality, and enables response to regulations in product design and development.
New features have been developed with input from users – for example, Granta consortia members such as Boeing, Emerson Electric, Eurocopter, GE, Honeywell, NASA, Rolls-Royce, and TRW Automotive. Key themes are: helping to manage and respond to changing information; tracking and using complex interrelationships between data; and tools for specialist data, such as the functional data often used to describe mechanical properties. New software tools and associated reference data extend capabilities in important application areas including: composites, restricted substances, steels, and medical devices.
For composites materials, the company says, designing a database to store test and design data is difficult, because these materials contain multiple components that are combined and processed in many different ways. The leading aerospace, defense, and energy enterprises in the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC) have helped to define an effective and efficient database structure. This is now available to any Granta MI user. And a new Composite Design data module means that users can augment in-house data with data from the widely-respected NCAMP, AGATE, and CMH-17 projects, providing further support for composite design.
For restricted substances, the company states that Granta MI helps organisations to identify the likely effect of regulations on product designs. A new tool provides alerts on any change to a relevant substance, material, or regulation, enabling proactive risk management. Another enhancement makes it easy for designers to navigate the relationships between substances, materials, and regulations – for example, to see which substances in a material are impacted by which regulations, and the nature of the impact. This supports materials choices that avoid costly problems with regulatory compliance or materials obsolescence.
For steels, the software now enables simple access to two sets of European reference data on steels, fully-integrated with in-house data. The StahlDat SX data is a complete Register of European Steels (known as the ‘Stahl-Eisen-Liste’ in German), associated specifications, and temperature-dependant properties. StahlDat SX is licensed under a new agreement between Granta Design and the Steel Institute (Stahlinstitut VDEh) of Düsseldorf, Germany. The second dataset is from the MI-21 ‘Metals Information for the 21st Century’ project, and includes two unique data collections – World Metal Index (WMI) Metals and The Welding Institute (TWI) Welding Consumables. These provide chemical, mechanical, and physical properties for thousands of metals, electrodes, fillers, and fluxes. Granta MI makes it easy to query, browse, and use this data.
For medical devices, the first release of a new Human Biological Materials data module provides mechanical property data for human bone. This is of great value in modeling orthopaedic devices. Separate data on the materials and coatings used in cardiovascular and orthopaedic devices has also been updated. This data, combined with Granta MI tools to manage proprietary data and new documentation and services to assist in the validation of in-house systems, creates a comprehensive materials information solution for medical device organisations.
