Connected workflows benefit your business and the planet
Mastering materials and material information management is crucial in modern business.
- Regulatory Compliance: Companies must adhere to increasingly stringent environmental and safety regulations, REACH, RoHS, and more. Failure to comply can lead to legal penalties, product recalls, and damage to the brand’s reputation.
- Customer and Market Demands: Directives and standards, such as CSRD and ESRS, impose reporting requirements that affect the entire supply chain. Consumers and clients increasingly demand products that are safe, sustainable, and ethically sourced.
- Sustainability and Environmental Responsibility: With the growing emphasis on sustainability, businesses are under pressure to minimize their environmental impact. Being able to track and reduce the environmental footprint of products is critical for competitiveness.
- Product Innovation, Cost and Quality: Accurate and accessible material information is vital for product development. Engineers and designers need detailed material data to innovate, optimize product performance, CO2 footprint and cost, and ensure quality.
Ansys Granta is a product family that offers solutions to these challenges. PDSVISION is a partner of both Ansys and PTC. We have designed connected workflows that bring the benefits across the entire company, from requirements management to product design and validation and reporting.
The Ansys Granta family
Before jumping directly to “What’s new and cool on Ansys Materials in the 2024R2 release”, let’s first go through the Ansys Granta applications briefly. The Ansys Materials product line consists of four products in three application areas:
- Two Ansys Granta MI products: Ansys Granta MI Pro and Ansys Granta MI Enterprise. These are server-based materials information management platforms, which manage material data, help with materials selection, promote preferred materials, and support your engineering, analysis and reporting tools.
- Ansys Granta Selector: This is a desktop application for analytical materials selection. It helps designers to find the best material candidates by screening them with physical properties, manufacturability and economical filters.
- Ansys Granta MDS: MDS is an acronym that stands for Material Data for Simulation. It contains a wide range of material data for simulation application use. This helps your design teams to find good quality material property data for their simulation use.
What’s new and cool in the 2024 R2?
On the Granta MI area of the 2024 R2 release there are improvements in core functionality like ability to share searches, you can run multiple Granta MI stacks behind a load balancer, and there are extensions to server monitoring and reporting. These server-side capabilities support ease of use, robustness and speed of services.
The interoperability and workflows in the Granta MI products have been enhanced with:
- Easier access to datasheets
- Ability to subscribe/unsubscribe Favorite lists, which can be used to distribute the company’s preferred materials or materials for particular project among the users
- Ability to include/exclude components from Windchill BOM (Bill Of Materials) before running it for sustainability or restricted substances report
Granta MI Sustainability add-on
The Granta MI Sustainability add-on has taken great steps forward. One of my favorite enhancements is the ability to compare BOMs and create analysis baselines.
In the 2024 R2 release of the Granta MI the support for plasticity material models in Material Calibration tool for Ansys Mechanical has been improved. It now covers also rate independent plasticity models. The 2024 R2 also supports the scenario, where you can derive a corporate specific material definition from your measured in-house data and distribute it to your design teams as fully functional material model. We at PDSVISION talk a lot about digital thread. In my opinion, this is kind of traceability from a material item to the computational material model and all the way to the source data is an excellent example of digital thread.
The core data for MDS and Granta Selector have been extended too, now with new datapoints like “Embodied Energy” and “Climate Change (CO2-eq)”. This supports environmental considerations in material selection and optimization. The Advanced Materials add-on databases for Selector has been extended with fatigue data and enhanced capabilities of data exporters respectively.
In my opinion, the tools included Granta MI that support design for sustainability have developed with this release to a level where they are easy of use, and can support decision-making in the early in design stages. The integration of sustainable design principles to a company’s heartbeat are supported by material data Gateways from Granta MI to the major PLM, CAD and CAE platforms, such as PTC Creo and Windchill PLM. This makes interoperability of applications better, faster and smoother.
Conclusion
The Ansys Materials 2024 R2 release includes excellent enhancements and new capabilities that help you grow your business in the world where mastering materials and material information management is crucial. The connected workflows will help you in designing products that consume less energy and to optimize their BOM for a lower CO2 footprint. The interoperability and integrations help remove the data and application silos between material research and development, engineering and reporting. You can use the material intelligence that you have on the Granta MI seamlessly in compliance reporting for RoHS restricted substances, CO2, LCA, sustainability and to drive operational efficiency. This benefits your business, and it benefits our planet too.
Would you like to give your organization an opportunity to try and experience the features of Ansys 2024 R2? Get in touch with me and our Ansys team here.
Talk to an Expert
Mikko Hinkkanen, Customer Success Manager
