Investigation on Material Selection for the Columns of Universal Testing Machine (UTM) using Granta’s Design CES Edupack

Abstract

Material selection is the most critical and increasingly complex task in the product design process. Product life cycle is majorly dependent on the choice of material selected. Digital tools are extensively used in material selection phase. Among huge list of available materials, selection of most compatible material is challenging due to wide range of design properties. It is difficult and time consuming for engineers and designers to manually evaluate each material and to select best fit materials as per design requirement. More than three hundred digital tools are available for material selection such as MatMatch, MatWeb, IDES Prospector, idemat etc. Granta’s design CES (Cambridge Engineering Selector) EduPack software is one of the software package used for materials ranking and selection. It has library of more than 4000 materials. It clarifies the product functional & design requirements and then select appropriate materials while considering certain design constraints. The purpose of this software-based study is to select the optimal choice of material for support columns of Universal Testing Machine (UTM) using CES EduPack software. Support columns are critical & major load bearing elements in UTM. Using CES software, suitable & best fit material is identified for support columns while considering functional and design requirements. It is revealed that stainless steel is the most promising material that meet the design requirement of UTM support columns