Welcome to this Ansys how to series video for Ansys Granta EduPack. In this video, we'll
be using some of the features in our chart/select function to help you do a basic material selection.
Our objective? Select a material for an airplane wingspar. We want a material that is stiff, strong,
tough, and light. If our material isn't stiff enough, the wings will be too flexible. Not strong enough?
The wings will yield. Not tough enough? The wings will break. Not light enough?
The plane will be too heavy to get off the ground. Granta EduPack can help us narrow
down our material selection using these criteria. Let's use the level 1 database for this example.
Once open, click the chart select button in the main toolbar to open the selection project panel.
We want to consider all materials for this selection problem.
First, we want to compare stiffness with strength. Click the chart/index button to
open the chart creation window. For the y-axis, select Young's Modulus
Using the tab at the top of the window, change to the x-axis and select yield strength.
Click ok to generate the chart. We have now created a chart of Young's modulus and yield strength.
We can see in the results window of the selection project panel that currently all
69 materials in Level 1 are visible in our chart. We have not applied any selection criteria yet
Not all of these materials are suitable for our airplane wing and making the chart is not
a selection. The results window simply shows all materials when a chart is made and no selection
criteria has been applied. We want to investigate the stiffest and the strongest materials which
are located in the upper right hand corner of our chart. To narrow down our material options, we can
use the box selection tool from the chart toolbar and draw a box in our upper right hand corner.
After drawing this box, multiple things occur. First, the bubbles outside our selection box turn gray.
This means these materials no longer meet our selection criteria.
This is also reflected in our results panel, where we now only have 22 materials that pass.
For easier viewing we can remove the grey bubbles using the
hide failed records button and auto scale to zoom in on our current candidate materials.
We can see from our results window that most of the materials that pass are metals or composites.
There are a few materials that do not make sense; for example, the yellow bubbles which
indicate ceramics such as tungsten carbide or the pink bubble indicating silica glass.
To further narrow down our candidate materials we need to look back at our selection criteria.
We have considered stiffness and strength so far; the next is toughness. We can apply this criteria with
a limit stage. Click Limit under selection stages to add a second stage to our selection project
and go to mechanical properties. We can see from the small graph icon next to fracture toughness
that metals and composites have the highest fracture toughness of our available material
families. Let's select a minimum of 10 megapascals for our fracture toughness
and click apply
We can already see in our results window we went from 22 to 16 materials passing
all stages. Going back to our chart Stage 1 using the tabs at the top of the screen
we can see that the ceramics and glasses have been removed from our chart. We have
now considered three of our criteria: stiffness, strength, and toughness. The last consideration
is materials that are lightweight or have a low density. To consider density, let's create another
chart within the same project to look at our candidate materials against different criteria.
For the y-axis, select density. If we were going to manufacture this plane, another consideration would
be price. So using the tabs at the top of the chart window again, choose the x-axis and select price
click ok to generate the chart
Automatically all materials, including the ones that do not pass our previous selection stages, are
shown. We can once again hide these failed records and auto scale. At this stage in our selection we
are trying to optimize our results and we can look at this trade-off between density and cost on this
chart. If we are mainly concerned with low density, carbon fiber composites are our best material
candidate. If we are mainly concerned with low cost, cast iron would be our best material candidate.
If we want to balance, we can select the material in between which is aluminum alloys.
Opening this data sheet by double-clicking the record shows us some example uses at the top
one of which is an airplane. This gives us additional confirmation that we have selected
a sensible material. In this how-to tutorial, we've demonstrated how the materials selection tools
within our Granta EduPack software can be used for material selection based on
product criteria. For more information on Granta EduPack, check the link in the description.
Be sure to check out our channel for more Ansys learning videos and thank you for watching