New Matereality/Nastran Interface Opens Material Database
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New Matereality/Nastran Interface Opens Material Database

Matereality, a provider of IT infrastructure for secure, global materials information storage and exchange has cooperated with UGS PLM Software, a division of Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D) and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, to develop an interface for importing material properties from Matereality into UGS NX Nastran software. Matereality has also released "MIRO for Nastran", a search wizard that extracts relevant Nastran-ready material data from its databases.

"The primary impetus for the creation of this interface was to position the massive MMPDS-02 Properties for Aerospace/Design database for use by the Nastran community. Both Nastran and MMPDS-02 are used heavily by the aerospace community. Coupling Matereality with UGS PLM Software’s NX Nastran will ensure proper representation of materials in aerospace CAE" say Hubert Lobo, Matereality President.

MMPDS-02 is recognized as the most reliable source for verified design allowables needed for metallic materials, fasteners, and joints used in the design and maintenance of aircraft, missiles, and space vehicles. In addition to MMPDS-02, Matereality contains the largest repository of CAE-suitable data on plastics, metals, rubber, foam and composites, including stress-strain curves; rate-dependent data; tensile, compressive, creep and fatigue data, plus the NIST lead-free solder database for the electronics industry. All data can be viewed using cutting edge visualization tools, subjected to instant unit conversions and CAE/FEA export capabilities.

In addition to offering individuals access to public data, enterprises can use Matereality's Material Data Server to warehouse proprietary properties of all their materials and deploy it to CAD/CAE/PLM. Data used in a product or PLM can be easily traced to its pedigreed source on Matereality.

According to a statement from UGS PLM Software, today’s announcement enhances access to relevant material data for users of UGS PLM Software’s NX Nastran. The use of Matereality to store materials information as part of an enterprise IT system, will lead to more readily available and accurate material data for simulations.

Commentary By Jeffrey Rowe, Editor

OK, so material data isn’t as enticing as, say, advanced surface modeling, but if you’ve ever had to deal with detailed material data for a lot of different materials, especially for CAE purposes, then Matereality has a lot to offer.

Matereality was founded five years ago with a charter to create an architecture for storing and disseminating material property data for any material. This obviously was an ambitious project and arose from frustrated experiences of material scientists and engineers who found their work hampered by a lack of all but the most simple digital material data. This sad state of affairs contributed to countless hours of lost time and effort, finding and archiving material information in less than ideal formats, such as paper, in filing cabinets, and electronically as PDFs, Word, and Excel documents on individual computers.

The first version of Matereality was released in 2003 as a Web-based product that provided a solution to the aforementioned problems, plus had the advantage of allowing users to isolate information for their use while making it available to others authorized to use it.

The second release of Matereality in 2004 brought a number of new technological advances including the introduction of MIRO (an extensible data-mining technology), and data export to third-party applications such as ABAQUS, ANSYS, and Matlab. Matereality was also the first to start using MATML (a new XML data exchange standard for material properties).

In 2005, Matereality v. 2.1 was released with the introduction of two new product lines: Material Data Server and Material Databases. Last year, Matereality introduced the Metallic Materials Properties Development and Standardization Database (MMPDS-02) and formerly Mil-5 Handbook, recognized as THE reference source for aerospace component design, on its TrueDigital platform.

The release of this electronic version of MMPDS-02 brought a number of advances to product design engineers in the aerospace and defense industries. MMPDS-02 complemented Matereality’s existing content of over 10,000 data sets of non-linear material properties, with a collection of statistically-based design allowable properties for metals. This collection of over 30,000 datasets includes stress-strain data, fatigue, creep and thermal properties in addition to conventional single-point properties. The Handbook is recognized as the most reliable source for verified design allowables needed for metallic materials, fasteners, and joints used in the design and maintenance of aircraft, missiles, and space vehicles.

Today, Matereality serves a diverse user base, including defense, aerospace, automotive, appliance, tier-one, electronics, medical device and consumer product verticals with Web-based solutions to securely store any kind of material properties on what the company calls a TrueDigital system that allows plug-in of materials information into a PLM system and workflow. Matereality's TrueDigital format allows such things as the ability to search and locate data from the collection, view dependencies and data trends, analyze and interpret complex data, and the ability to export data for analysis using CAE programs, such as NX Nastran, ABAQUS, and ANSYS.

Material properties, being extremely varied, have been notoriously difficult to store in a digital framework, often making material data unavailable when critical decisions are being made. Matereality provides a system for handling all material data where any material and any property can be completely and digitally integrated into a CAE and PLM platforms. For example, all properties for all materials in a car or an aircraft can be stored in and accessed from one place. Matereality provides different types of users with data specific to their needs. CAE groups, for example, can locate and export CAE-specific data into their applications.

When I was I engineering school many moons ago, one of the toughest core classes was materials. I considered it a sort of “weed-out” class that separated those who were suited to go on with the curriculum from those who weren’t. For teaching materials, I’d like to see an educational version of Matereality developed and added as part of the expanding digital toolbox for making tomorrow’s engineers more competitive.

The Week’s Top 5

At MCADCafé we track many things, including the stories that have attracted the most interest from our subscribers. Below are the five news items that were the most viewed during last week.

CoCreate Ranks High In Electronics Industry
CoCreate Software announced its widening footprint across some of the world's largest electronics companies based on recently published electronics industry rankings. The “2006 Electronic Business 300” recently published by Electronic Business magazine tallied the largest electronics companies in the world based upon electronics revenue. CoCreate customers account for 4 out of the top 10 electronics companies. CoCreate's customer base includes 8 of the top 20 electronics companies and over 25 percent of the top 150 companies. Companies are using the CoCreate OneSpace Suite for its ability to deliver results in a time pressured and changing industry like electronics. Particular solution strengths for 3D product development and lifecycle management processes include:
IBM Acquires Watchfire
IBM announced that it completed the acquisition of Watchfire Corp., a privately held security and compliance testing software company. The acquisition extends the IBM Governance and Risk Management strategy by broadening security and compliance management capabilities in the software development lifecycle. Successfully managing IT governance and risk management as a lifecycle is critical as businesses today are facing increasing globalization, staggering regulatory complexity and an ever-evolving security threat landscape. Watchfire helps customers manage web application security and web content quality and compliance to help ensure the business integrity of their online businesses. The combination of Watchfire and IBM will help customers integrate web application security and compliance management early on and throughout the software development process -- effectively allowing them to define, test and track the compliance of their applications with security, legal and corporate guidelines. IBM is integrating its Rational software quality management solutions with Watchfire's security and compliance testing services to enhance and simplify the web application development process.

Engineering Fluid Dynamics for Education
Flomerics announced that it has received a positive response to its offer of providing its Engineering Fluid Dynamics (EFD) simulation software for teaching and research purposes. Due to the response, Flomerics has announced that it will provide all 3 versions of EFD at $380 for a 3-year license to universities and technology colleges around the world. The EFD product family provides full-featured general purpose fluid flow and heat transfer analysis software combining all simulation steps, starting with reading CAD data, model definition, mesh generation, solving, post-processing, through to the generation of result presentations within a single software environment:

 

Cimmetry Releases AutoVue Visualization for Electronics and High Tech Markets
Cimmetry Systems, a provider of enterprise visualization products and a subsidiary of Agile Software Corp. (recently acquired by Oracle), announced AutoVue v.19.2. The new release furthers Cimmetry's presence in the electronics and high-tech market with new EDA-centric product offerings that address the specific requirements of printed circuit board design and contract manufacturing. New AutoVue product offerings for the EDA marketplace include:


Delphi Announces New Plan Framework Agreement
Delphi Corp. announced that it has accepted a new proposal for an Equity Purchase and Commitment Agreement with affiliates of lead investor Appaloosa Management L.P.; Harbinger Capital Partners Master Fund I, Ltd.; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc.; UBS Securities LLC; Goldman Sachs & Co.; and Pardus Capital Management, L.P. (collectively the "Plan Investors") to invest up to $2.55 billion in preferred and common equity in the reorganized Delphi to support the company's transformation plan and its plan of reorganization. Delphi earlier reported that it had formally terminated a prior Equity Purchase and Commitment Agreement and a related Plan Framework Support agreement but that it expected to enter into new framework agreements with plan investors by the end of July 2007. The company said the new investment agreement is supported by both of Delphi's Statutory Committees as well as GM. The proposed Equity Purchase and Commitment Agreement, which is subject to Bankruptcy Court approval, outlines the terms of the investment and the expected treatment of the company's stakeholders in its anticipated plan of reorganization and provides a framework for several other aspects of the company's Chapter 11 reorganization.

Jeffrey Rowe is the editor of MCADCafé and MCAD Weekly Review. He can be reached at Email Contact or 408.850.9230.

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