Granta is working with OEMs and suppliers through the Automotive Material Intelligence Consortium (AutoMatIC) to create an information system that can ensure data related to welds or other joints is captured, traceable, searchable, and accessible.
Adding intelligence on welding and joining to such a resource is important, because understanding the behaviour of vehicles, whether for crash, durability or other purposes, is 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 techniques is used, 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.
For example, modelling a joint might need to take account of factors such as multi-cycle behaviour for durability analysis, non-linear plasticity, strain-rate dependent behaviour, and subtle mesh-dependent parameters for the relevant CAE code.
The updated GRANTA MI is claimed to provide 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, said: “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.”