Granta Design has announced the latest release of GRANTA MI™, the industry standard for materials information management. Version 7 is the most capable and robust yet. It focuses on helping user organizations to deal with engineering realities, drawing on Granta’s unrivalled experience of implementing materials information management at leading engineering enterprises worldwide. Version 7 enhances core tools for managing the materials data lifecycle. It reinforces GRANTA MI as the system to deliver materials information and associated applications to a uniquely wide range of engineers, scientists, and managers.
Enhancements to core features include a simplified web tool through which any authorized user can upload materials data, from anywhere. Advances in graphing and querying provide greater insight as users compare data from different sources – for example, test results and handbook data. Performance improvements further optimize what is already a robust, scalable, enterprise solution. Such capabilities help users to build and maintain a single, controlled, traceable source for corporate materials data, to manage the lifecycle of every property in that database, and to ease the workflow from test results to approved design data. These are key objectives for user organizations, such as those in the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC), the collaborative project with members including Boeing, GE, Honeywell, NASA, and Rolls-Royce. Recent new members are Doosan Babcock, Embraer, and Eurocopter.
In real engineering enterprises, it is not enough simply to build a great materials database. Data must be used. GRANTA MI is unique in the range of applications for materials information that it supports. This goes far beyond materials engineering and structural engineering to include design, simulation, environmental and regulatory teams, and teams making strategic materials decisions to optimize purchasing or global manufacturing. Most users are not experts in the system, so Version 7 enhances ease-of-use and interactivity, for example, during charting. And it’s now easy to configure a wizard user interface to provide engineers with guidance on materials choices based on their own company’s business rules.
A key technology in deploying materials data to engineers and managers is MI:Materials Gateway™. GRANTA MI Version 7 incorporates Version 2.0 of this technology, which enables users of CAD, CAE, and PLM to access and apply materials data directly within their host system. This provides an unprecedented level of integration for materials data with design, simulation, and product lifecycle management. It makes GRANTA MI a fully-embedded, consistent component across the user’s choice of software from leading providers such as ANSYS, Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, and Siemens PLM.
In practice, corporate materials data is often messy and rarely complete. GRANTA MI Version 7 recognises this reality, complementing proprietary data with a comprehensive library of authoritative reference data on metals, plastics, composites, and more. Enhanced tools make it easier to apply this resource to “fill the gaps” in in-house data, with full traceability. Updated data is available for Granta's unique MaterialUniverse™, which provides broad coverage of the full property set for virtually every type of purchasable engineering material. Updates to in-depth references for specific materials classes include the latest versions of MMPDS aerospace alloys, StahlDat steels from the German Steel Institute, MI-21 metals from World Metals Index and TWI, CAMPUS and IDES plastics, and composite data from Firehole Composites. New GRANTA MI packages combine the software and data needed for specific applications, smoothing implementation. These include new templates that combine a best-practice database design with tailored tools for a particular industry, material type, or use. There are packages for metals, composites, and plastics; for the aerospace, automotive, and medical device industries; and to support implementation of corporate materials strategies or restricted substances risk reduction.
“Over the years, Granta has supported many of the world’s leading engineering enterprises in effectively managing and using their corporate materials information”, explains Dan Williams, Product Manager for GRANTA MI, concluding that “this has allowed us to develop an unrivalled knowledge of real-world realities and challenges, and to design Version 7 to meet these needs.”
This story is reprinted from material from Granta Design, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.