Granta adds composite data to its materials information management system
23 November 2014
Granta Design has added Wichita State University’s National Center for Advanced Materials Performance (NCAMP) composite design and test data to its MI materials information management system.
Granta Design has announced an agreement with Wichita State University’s (WSU) National Center for Advanced Materials Performance (NCAMP), Wichita, KS, USA, under which NCAMP’s comprehensive resource of composite design and test data will be available to users of the GRANTA MI materials information management system.
Granta already provides NCAMP data to the leading engineering enterprises that use its software, particularly in the aerospace and defense sectors. The new agreement will deliver more in-depth data to these user organizations, as well as securing access to future updates and ensuring fast delivery of data updates.
These companies will be able to further build up their resources of composite test and design data, enabling comparison and analysis alongside in-house data, and thus faster and more reliable qualification of composite systems.
Composite specification and design values developed using the NCAMP process are accepted by the Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Agency per FAA Memorandum AIR100-2010-120-003 and EASA Certification Memorandum CM-S-004. NCAMP stemmed from NASA's 1995 Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiment (AGATE).
Instead of qualifying an entire material system, aircraft manufacturers can pull a system from the NCAMP database, prove equivalency and gain certification in a quicker and cheaper manner than a typical qualification approach. Material suppliers can work with NCAMP to qualify material systems without having to be linked to an ongoing aircraft certification program.
Granta Design provides GRANTA MI, the leading system for materials information management in engineering enterprises. GRANTA MI has been optimized for the challenges of managing complex composite data, in collaboration with industrial partners in the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC).
NCAMP data can be delivered within GRANTA MI, where it is fully integrated not only with material property reference data on composites, metals and plastics from a wide range of other respected materials data sources, but also with an organization’s own proprietary composite data from testing, QA, research and production. User organizations experience significant productivity benefits, since materials engineers and product designers have just one place to go to find the data that they need.
The system also makes it easy to search and compare data from different sources, easing analysis and supporting innovation. For example, your own test data can instantly be compared with NCAMP property values during qualification.
Restricted substances
In another development, the Environmental Materials Information Technology (EMIT) Consortium has announced technology upgrades that are being delivered in a new version of the GRANTA's MI:Restricted Substances software.
This collates input from Consortium member organizations on how to refine the underlying data structures (known as the ‘schema’) of the system. The resulting new template database can be applied by any users of the software to improve existing implementations or quickly create new ones.
The EMIT Consortium is pioneering an effective approach to managing restricted substances risk — a problem which, left unmanaged, can result in multi-million dollar implications including: product redesigns due to material obsolescence, diversion of resources to meet reporting obligations, and even costly legal liabilities for non-compliance.
Members include Airbus Defense & Space, Airbus Helicopters, Boeing, Honeywell Aerospace, NASA, Rolls-Royce, and United Technologies Corporation. Granta provides the GRANTA MI software system used by members.
Designers and product stewards can run queries that quickly provide insight into the risks associated with materials, designs, or products. But the complexity, dynamic nature, and inter-relationships of the data involved makes building and maintaining the right data structures a major challenge. This challenge can only be overcome with a deep insight into the practical application of the system. This insight is precisely what the Consortium enables.
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