Open the Door for Material Optimization

The world is evolving at a quantum speed with transforming technology. The human life cycle has enriched to tend towards advancement in every sector. Businesses have adopted the transformation & obtained the benefits of technology involved in their mainframe process to become multi-billion companies. Making the product a hero in every story, Engineering the product or designing a physical product demands focus on four major factors; Design, Analysis, Manufacturing, and Materials. Though the first three factors are digitally transformed, the materials field is still lagging. This article exclusively focuses on optimizing your right material choices.
Let’s start with an example of a company facing a similar conundrum.

Background:

Referring to the case of an OEM, that manufactures an industry renowned product.

Due to the stringent industry standards and to stay ahead of the competition, the company decided to optimize their existing product and its performance. Following the advancement, they relied on simulation results for quick feedback from different design iterations. Furthermore, parametric optimization yielded them even better results compared to the manual design iterations. Overall, they were able to achieve a 9% Reduction in Weight and a 5 % Increase in Efficiency through Design Optimization.
Much to the Team’s surprise, the product manager wasn’t satisfied with this result. Hence, he assembled his team to initiate an experiment with different material types.

The broader idea of this activity was to understand how he could improve his product and cut down cost to the company, thereby naming this activity as Material optimization.

Optimized Product = Design Optimization + Material optimization

Following the superior’s directive, the team started dedicating their efforts to bring the best out of current results, in terms of cutting costs, reducing development time & raising standards of performance. Four of his team members heading the R & D were investigating the case study with different ideas as below.

The first member tried to use the existing available material data with him to see if he can get the best possible combination;
The second member tried to use the materials preferred by his company to avoid supply chain issues;
The third member tried to reach out to suppliers/consultants for a piece of advice on material choices; and
The fourth member tried to browse on the internet for material data.

However, none of the above approaches answered the below questions

This is where companies need a tool like, Granta Selector which does answer the above questions.
Granta Selector is a tool for optimizing your material choices, which not only has material properties
of metals, plastics, polymers, ceramics and various other classes of materials but also has features
like search, plot and compare your choice of materials as shown in the pic.

Apart from the features mentioned above, Granta selector has:

Using all the above-mentioned tools, explore more here to understand how Tecumseh, a global leader of commercial refrigeration compressors used Granta Selector to reduce development time by three-fold and saved millions of euros of cost savings from making the right materials decisions.

Please feel free to connect with us at marketing@cadfem.in or +91-9849998435, for a quick Demo on this Product.