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University of Cambridge spin-out company Granta Design has announced the latest major release of GRANTA MI™, its materials information management system for engineering enterprises.
GRANTA MI has been developed in collaboration with industry leaders such as Boeing, Emerson Electric, Eurocopter, GE, Honeywell, NASA, Rolls-Royce, and TRW Automotive.
In addition to enhancing core materials data management capabilities, the release includes new software to tackle a key business issue for many manufacturers, materials substitution; new tools to address restricted substance regulations; enhanced support for engineering design software; and information resources covering composites, steels, aero alloys and plastics.
Granta Design works in close collaboration with industry, particularly through our three consortium projects, to ensure that we deliver the new software features and data that our customers need.
Dr David Cebon
GRANTA MI Version 5 helps materials and process teams to control and deploy varied business-critical materials information. A typical implementation might house a company’s databases for composite and metal test data, its source of approved materials property data for designers, and its library of external reference data. This release includes enhancements to the user experience and database administration that make it more efficient to manage and use multiple databases in a single, central system, while ensuring that individual users can quickly find and view the data that they need.
The new GRANTA MI:Substitute software helps companies that need to replace existing materials, for example, because of cost, performance, supply chain issues, or changing environmental regulations. Such substitution projects are often costly, disruptive, risky, and difficult to implement. MI:Substitute enables a fast, controlled response, helping engineers to identify candidate replacement materials, and to review and fully understand the implications of substitution, avoiding potential problems.
GRANTA MI helps aerospace and other businesses to assess and avoid risk due to restricted substance regulations. Companies often have incomplete data on these substances and their use within the organization’s products or materials and process specifications. Version 5 makes it possible to report on these specifications in a routine manner, and provides tools that use Granta reference data to enable analysis, even where there are significant gaps in in-house data. This reduces the burden of collecting substance declaration information from supply chain partners. This release also produces reports that support compliance with Article 33 of the European Union’s REACH directive.
GRANTA MI can provide approved, up-to-date, accurate materials data in the input formats required by Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) systems. Version 5 also upgrades the GRANTA MI:Materials Gateway technology, which makes it possible to browse, search, and apply managed corporate materials data from directly within CAD or CAE. This saves time and removes the risk of error for design engineers and analysts. New implementations are available for the Pro/ENGINEER® CAD software and the Abaqus®/CAE system.
GRANTA MI also delivers a wide range of new and updated reference data directly to the desktops of materials engineers and designers. This includes the Firehole Composites data on continuous fiber reinforced polymers; new composite design data from the NCAMP project; new data on automotive steels; MMPDS-05, the latest version of the standard reference for aerospace alloys; the 2010 version of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code materials data; and the latest CAMPUS and IDES plastics data. Granta Design has extensively reviewed and enhanced data on environmental properties and materials prices.
“Granta Design works in close collaboration with industry, particularly through our three consortium projects, to ensure that we deliver the new software features and data that our customers need,” commented Dr David Cebon, Managing Director at Granta Design. “GRANTA MI Version 5 shows the benefits of this approach, delivering enhanced solutions for materials data management, decision support, restricted substances, and engineering design software.”
Image: Man inputing data on laptop and holding mobile phone in another hand.