New tools build on best practice, save time, support complete material property lifecycle 

Cambridge, UK – Granta Design today announced  new GRANTA MI tools for the management of vital material property data relating to  welds and other joining techniques. This data is very valuable for Automotive organizations seeking to ensure accurate design or simulation, but is rarely systematically managed, leading to inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and risk. Granta is working closely with leading OEMs and suppliers through the  Automotive Material Intelligence (AutoMatIC) Consortium to create a new, ready-to-go, extensible information system that can ensure proprietary data related to welds or other joints is captured, traceable, searchable, and accessible. User organizations will save time and maximize returns from important intellectual property (IP). More information will be available at a  web seminar on April 26.

AutoMatIC members such as  General Motors, PSA Peugeot Citroën, and Jaguar Land Rover use GRANTA MI™, the leading system for materials information management in engineering enterprises, to manage their corporate materials information. At this week’s  SAE World Congress in Detroit, Granta is announcing an extension to its  GRANTA MI:Metals Template ™, based on advice from these key consortium members on best practice in managing welding and joining data. The Template will provide the data structures and tools that any organization will need to quickly develop a ‘gold source’ for its metals property data within GRANTA MI.

Adding intelligence on welding and joining to such a resource is important, because understanding the behavior of vehicles, whether for crash, durability or other purposes, is highly dependent not just on the mechanical properties of the materials from which they are made, but also on the joining techniques employed. Whichever of the vast array of techniques is used (e.g., spot welds, friction stir welded seams, bonded joints, or self-piercing rivets), their effective joint properties must be measured and made available to the engineers who need accurate joint performance data for design, simulation, and durability analysis.

As materials technologies change, particularly to support mixed-material designs for weight reduction, automotive companies are faced with growing complexity in joining technologies and joint performance data.

• Data complexity—modeling a joint might need to take account of factors such as multi-cycle behavior for durability analysis, non-linear plasticity, strain-rate dependent behavior, and subtle mesh-dependent parameters for the relevant CAE code.

• Data quantity—OEMs may have tens of thousands of material cards for spot welds, covering all permutations of materials in the joining stack, the welding process, and final post-processing (such as paint baking).

• Connection of data ‘authors’ to ‘consumers’—materials expertise is required to generate material models for joints, but consumers of this data in the CAE community cannot always use these models correctly without appropriate metadata. A material model is useless without, for example, an understanding of the joined materials, process parameters, or tested joint geometry.

The updated GRANTA MI will meet all these challenges, providing a systematic and efficient means to capture large quantities of complex data and their inter-relationships, and enabling integration with third-party CAE and model-fitting tools, so that users of those systems have full traceability and context for the data.

Dan Williams, who coordinates the AutoMatIC Consortium for Granta Design, comments: “It is great to be able to capture the expertise of the Consortium in a way that will provide value to all members and to other users of materials information management. We are meeting the Consortium’s goal of supporting the  complete material property lifecycle—testing, process qualification, product design, durability/crash simulation—with the right data, for the right people, in the right format.”

About Granta Design Ltd

Granta are the materials information technology experts.  The company develops market leading software for managing materials and process information in engineering enterprises, and a series of tools for applying that data to key materials and product design decisions.  Granta serves sectors as diverse as aerospace, defense, energy, medical devices, automotive, motorsports, manufacture of consumer and industrial equipment, materials production, and publishing. Customers realize multi-million dollar benefits in reduced cost, enhanced product performance, improved quality, and faster design turnaround.

Granta was founded in 1994 as a spinout from the University of Cambridge and the work of Professors Mike Ashby and David Cebon.  For further information go on line to  www.grantadesign.com.


Contact:    

John Downing
Technical Communications Specialist 
Granta Design Limited 
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