Life’s biggest lesson – the Sustainable Development Goals
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda, adopted in 2015, marked a historic moment for international collaboration, when 193 member states agreed on a strategic plan for the future health of our planet. Built around 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), its vision was for a more peaceful and prosperous world by 2030.
Providing a wider context
Students are more than ready to be part of the change, as powerfully demonstrated by Greta Thunberg whose grassroots activism has shown that “No one is too small to make a difference”. By using the SDGs as inspiration within the engineering curricular, student engagement could be easily improved by simply providing a wider context.
Consider the iron-carbon phase diagram for example. It is a fundamental concept which most engineering students will encounter…but why do engineers need to learn about it?
Well, in the context of the 7th Sustainable Development Goal ‘Affordable and Clean Energy’, steel plays a critical role in renewable energy. In 2018, it was estimated that almost 20% of the UK’s electricity was generated through on- and offshore wind farms and structural steels (e.g. S355) make up a large proportion of a turbine. In the case of the supporting tower, the material must be hot rolled in sections and then welded together, so that heights of 100+ meters can be achieved. Without a fundamental understanding of how the structure, processing and properties are all interrelated, i.e. interpreting the phase diagram, engineering feats such as the this would not be possible.
What’s more, accreditation bodies such as ABET now require some degree of sustainable thinking e.g. criteria 4 which states that students must have “an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts”.
Where to find support and inspiration?
Sustainability is within Granta’s DNA and as such, the Education Team work tirelessly with the engineering community to provide inspiration for educators and students throughout the world. In a recent webinar led by Dr. Bridget Ogwezi, we saw how CES EduPack can be used to introduce various aspects of the SDGs, either through its core data, Materials Selection and Eco Audit Tools, or via a 5-step Sustainable Development Assessment; the framework of which is freely available using the Active-Learning ToolKit – Sustainable Development.
With over 350 teaching resources available on Granta’s Education Hub, educators can find further support through Case Studies, Exercises and Lecture Units, some of which have been designed specifically for sustainable development. For example, one of our most popular resources explores the environmental impact of the materials used in water bottle containers and suggests a fun activity which can be achieved within the classroom. This was successfully demonstrated during a recent workshop run by Prof. Claes Fredriksson, just ahead of the 11th International Materials Education Symposium.
Along with these recent events, Granta was also present at SusCritMat which is an EU-funded project, bringing together technical and pedagogical expertise of leading educational institutions and business partners. Working with EIT Raw Materials (and other partners), Dr. Tatiana Vakhitova delivered a stimulating workshop, once again inspired by the 5-step Sustainable Development Assessment. Addressing challenges associated with the circular economy and critical materials, the short course provided an exciting taster for the upcoming Summer School.
To learn more about our sustainable development work, or to receive a recording of the recent SDG webinar, please contact our Education Team who will be happy to help.
Restricted substances – it’s a challenge that touches every level within an engineering enterprise, from the team concerned with corporate liability to the design engineers making materials choices. The cost of non-compliance includes significant financial fines, loss of market share, delays, and potentially irreversible damage to brand reputation.
With new substances being added to the restricted list each year, how can enterprises de-risk their products – especially if those products have a long life? Take an aerospace enterprise wanting to understand the impact of a new regulation on your products in-service, as an example. And what if those materials decisions could have a more immediate impact on human life? Imagine you’re a medical device manufacturer who needs to know which of your surgical products contain nickel so that front-line medical staff can operate with confidence on patients with allergies.
Helping you wade through the ‘alphabet soup’ of 100+ rules and regulations such as the European Union’s REACH directive, the US’ TSCA, EU and China RoHS, ELV, IAEG AD-DSL, etc., is the new release of GRANTA MI:Restricted Substances. Part of the GRANTA MI portfolio of materials information management software, this solution enables fast compliance analytics for products or product designs. It has been developed in collaboration with the EMIT Consortium – a project involving enterprises including Boeing, Bombardier, Emerson Electric, Honeywell, NPL, and Rolls-Royce. So what exactly does it do?
How will this help me?
GRANTA MI:Restricted Substances helps you to answer compliance queries quickly, efficiently, and reliably, by capturing and linking all of the relevant data – such as materials, processes, specifications, regulations, substances, and product/design ‘Bills of Materials’ (BoMs) – in one place. What makes this solution unique is its ability to handle specifications and manufacturing processes – a must if you want to understand whether at-risk chemicals are being used during manufacturing or maintenance. Moreover, you can fill any gaps in your in-house information with regularly-updated data from Granta on materials, substances, and regulations.
What else do you need to know? Well, there is a new capability to store product part and assembly data in GRANTA MI which makes it much easier to run and re-run compliance reports on products/designs. Dubbed the GRANTA MI:BoM Store, this capability is particularly useful for anyone running analyses across multiple parts and products. Also included is our latest version of MI:BoM Analyzer, the tool for creating/editing Bills of Materials within GRANTA MI. Run compliance reports, and visualize results “at-a-glance”; then perform ‘what if’ studies by changing materials or specifications and re-running those reports. One further addition accompanying the software release is the latest version of the Granta Restricted Substances Data Module which contains updated information on 11,000+ substances and ~ 120 regulations.
The bottom line
Minimize your risk with GRANTA MI:Restricted Substances. Answer compliance questions quickly and easily – and indeed design with compliance in mind. Save time, identify and mitigate risks in your product or supply chain, and avoid costly liabilities and disruptions to product delivery.
Read success stories from leading manufacturing enterprises like Rolls-Royce, and Boeing >
Contact one of our application engineers to schedule a hands-on demo of GRANTA MI:Restricted Substances >
Class of 2019 – what challenges do educators face today?
Imagine you’re 18 years old again. It’s the start of your undergraduate degree and you have no idea where your first class is being held. Instinctively, you reach for your smart phone and with two clicks you’ve found it’s in the Engineering Building, lecture hall 2 … et voilà!
Students starting university in 2019 have vast amounts of information at the end of their fingertips. For courses which have changed very little over the years, its plausible to think that much of its content could now be found online … should a student decide they no longer want to attend that 5 pm lecture on a Friday afternoon.
Yet the role of an educator remains critical to a student’s learning, it’s just a matter of adapting the pedagogy.
We encourage our students to collaborate, so why don’t we?
Universities have always been a catalyst for new and exciting ideas, both in terms of research and education. Many of the ‘grand challenges’ we face today will require the next generation of change-makers to think laterally i.e. taking what they have learned and applying it.
Communicating thoughts and broadening one’s knowledge is best achieved through group work, hence why collaborative projects are an excellent tool for nurturing these transferable skills. By working with peers from a variety of backgrounds, students naturally develop a holistic way of thinking and, consequently, bring fresh insights to particular problem.
So why then would we not practice what we preach and adopt this collaborative approach to teaching?
A problem shared is a problem halved
Sharing our experiences should be integral to the role of an educator, since you can learn a lot about yourself by simply opening up a dialogue. Over time, certain tasks become second nature to us and it’s easy to overlook the value of this experience. Something that seems trivial to you, may in fact seem incredibly difficult to someone else.
What’s more, many of our departments are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary making it easier for collaboration to exist across disciplines. For example, a materials engineer may find support from a bioengineering specialist when teaching students about medical devices. Of course, working with colleagues outside of our department may encounter a number of logistical hurdles but when successful, the results can be impressive; take the Impact of Materials on Society course taught at the University of Florida (mentioned in a previous blog).
Materials Education Symposia
Building and maintaining an active community is tricky, particularly when there are so many other demands as an academic. 24 hours in a day is just simply not enough when you need to run seminars, supervise students, publish papers, write grant proposals and deliver scholarly programs. However, the good news is that all the hard work has already been done for you.
For the last 11 years, the Materials Education Symposia have been fostering a vibrant community of educators who care about teaching. With three annual events held at various locations across the world (UK, North America and Asia), the unique 2-day symposium has seen the growth of a global community which continues to flourish. Designed to stimulate productive discussions relating to materials teaching, the event is now a firm favorite in many attendee calendars. On the 10th Anniversary of the International Materials Education Symposia (IMES), Dr. Javier Orozco-Messana was one of three award recipients, recognized for their outstanding contributions to education. Having attended all 10 events, he explains:
“For me, the Materials Symposium in Cambridge represents an unparalleled opportunity to meet with some of the most representative world figures in the academic world of materials whilst also allowing me to be up-to-date with the most innovative experiences in teaching.”
The 2019 Materials Education Symposium in Cambridge is set to be the biggest to date and for those who will be joining us this week, we look forward to seeing you there!
Take a look at last year’s IMES for a taster of what’s to come:
https://youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DAnXgN0UOt8
Why is materials knowledge important?
Understanding the science behind materials is a valuable skill for engineers. Choosing the right material for a particular application can improve the performance of a product, make it more sustainable or even give it a competitive edge. The materials paradigm is an important relationship which helps explain how a material’s history (its processing) influences its structure, which in turn affects its properties and performance. Grasping these fundamental aspects is a useful skill that students should learn but in introductory courses, where competition for curriculum space is high, how can we engage students in the topic of materials science and engineering?
Improving student engagement
The 2019 release of CES EduPack sees the introduction of a new Materials Science and Engineering (MS&E) Edition which has been designed to support beginner-level materials courses.
Tricky topics, like the Lever Rule, find support from an Interactive Phase Diagram Tool which visually guides students through the problem. Cooling paths for three of the main binary systems help illustrate the change in microstructure and an accompanying glossary graphically defines new terminology e.g. eutectic point. To understand how properties can be manipulated, the effects of heat treatment, solid solution strengthening and precipitation hardening (amongst other techniques) can also be investigated through Property-Process Profiles.
“The Phase Diagram Tool is an extremely valuable interactive simulation that effectively demonstrates, to users, the interpretation of phase diagrams and how this information may be applied to understanding the development of microstructure.” – Bill Callister
To reflect the diversifying nature of the discipline, the MS&E Edition also contains a broader range of materials including data on biological materials, functional materials and natural fibers. Now it is easy to make a materials selection which compares traditional engineering materials to more specialized ones.
Want to know more?
- Join Prof. Mike Ashby on the 7th of March to hear how the new MS&E edition can be used to engage students on introductory material-related courses. A repeat webinar will also be given on the 9th of March.
- For educators who already have a CES EduPack Licence, join Dr. Claes Fredriksson on the 13th March for his Quarterly Case Study. In it he will be exploring how ‘Structures and Properties’ can be introduced to students, using stainless steels as an example.
For more information, or to arrange a demo, please get in contact with our Education Team.
Congratulations to Prof. Kevin Jones, from the University of Florida, on receiving the NAMES (North American Materials Education Symposium) 2018 award for Outstanding Contributions to Materials Education for his course “Impact of Materials on Society” (IMOS).
Introduced at the start of the 2012/13 academic year, IMOS is an innovative cross-disciplinary course at the interface of engineering and the social sciences. By exploring the relationship between the discovery of new materials and the development of technologies and social structures, it teaches students that engineering shapes – and is shaped by – social and cultural variables.
Speaking in a 2015 interview with the Materials Research Society (MRS), Prof. Kevin Jones explained that “you don’t create something in a vacuum, you create in a society. So, society is influencing what your creation is as much as your creation is influencing society”. Understanding this ‘entanglement’ is a fundamental aspect of the course.”
In recognition for his exceptional contributions to the field of materials science and engineering, Prof. Stephen Krause was awarded the ‘Michael Ashby Outstanding Materials Educator Award’ at this year’s ASEE conference in Salt Lake City.
Nominated by Dr. Cynthia Waters, she explains: “Steve has been described as the “Pied Piper” of Materials Active learning. He continually and with excitement shares his “Music” and many follow. This music includes methods and tools to increase learning in a Material Science classroom. One cannot find a more genuine and sharing mentor and Engineering Education leader.”
Pioneering Materials Engineering Education
A worthy winner of this year’s award, Stephen has long been instrumental in many engineering education initiatives, not least the Materials Concept Inventory. Co-developed with Prof. Richard Griffin, of Texas A&M University, the strategy is an interesting methodology which can be used to measure students’ conceptual changes. By exploring common misconceptions, which he has termed the ‘Muddiest Points’, Stephen has been able to quickly identify key topics, which his classes find most challenging.
Further explained in his 2013 ASEE paper, titled ‘Muddiest Point Formative Feedback in Core Materials Classes with YouTube, Blackboard, Class Warm-ups and Word Clouds’, Stephen reviews the effectiveness of four different feedback modes, based on the Muddiest Points responses. The first method looked at restructuring notes and placing them on Blackboard; the second method explored Class Warm-ups; the third method resulted in the creation of YouTube tutorials ( e.g. Phase Diagrams); and the fourth supplemental approach looked at creating Word Clouds, such as the one presented below based on the topic of atomic bonding. The bigger the word, the more students highlighted it as one of their Muddiest Points.
Overall, he has found that by closely monitoring the students’ understanding of certain concepts, their attitude, achievement and retention positively improves.
Read more about how this two-way formative feedback has been implemented in the Just-in-Time-Teaching with Interactive Frequent Formative Feedback (JTF) project, which ran at Arizona State University, North Carolina A&T, Oregon Institute of Technology, and Oregon State University.
What do his students say?
Whilst writing this blog I happened upon reviews written by students who had taken his Structure & Properties- Materials (MSE250) class. Ominously named ‘rate my professor’, it unsurprisingly contained many glowing reports. Writing that ‘this professor actually cares about student learning’ and that ‘not many instructors can make you learn so much but still make the class fun and easy’, it is clear that Stephen’s contributions to student learning, really have resonated with his classes. Specifically, in recognition of his end-of-class reflections, one respondee explains that ‘he goes over what was not clear [in] the previous lecture. VERY HELPFUL’.
Congratulations also to Dr. Alison Polasik
This year at ASEE, Dr. Alison Polasik also received the New Materials Educator Award, for her exceptional achievements as an early-career professional. I had the pleasure of sitting in on Alison’s Technical Session in Salt Lake City and enjoyed hearing about how she has tackled active learning in small- and large-sized classes.
What does it mean to define a material as we move along the product lifecycle, from concept, through to engineering design, simulation, prototyping, manufacture, and distribution to the customer? A ‘material’ means one thing to a material engineer, something else to a CAD designer, and another to someone in manufacturing. Companies can spend weeks of wasted effort ensuring consistency or attempting to find or verify data.
Tests and analyses are repeated (at cost), and bills of materials need to be re-mapped. Risks and errors creep into the product due to inaccurate specifications, and ineffectual simulation results. This can lead to an increase in product failures, warranty issues, and product recalls, and the processes that ensure regulatory compliance, version control, and consistency across CAD and PLM breakdown.
Does this sound familiar? If you’re not managing materials data effectively and consistently across your design and development process by integrating singular materials definitions within your PLM, that’s exactly what you’re doing too. And at the very least, these inconsistencies will be stifling innovation, and increasing the time-to-market. So how can we avoid playing materials jeopardy?
Well, we first need to appreciate the nature of the data we want to capture, analyse, use, and re-use. Materials data is vast. The inter-connections that exist between data are complex to manage and navigate, and the data itself needs to be paired with understanding. Maintaining a strict level of consistency of materials definitions is often made more difficult by that data being stored in disconnected databases. And, materials data is not static – it evolves, and does so independently of the product lifecycle.
These challenges can be addressed through a “materials intelligence” view of the data. With this approach, a consistent materials information strategy comprising a single, corporate “gold source” of materials data, integrated with all design and simulation tools is implemented across the company. The GRANTA MI materials information management system, for example, handles the depth of materials information – including all its inter-relationships. Integration options mean that this data can be accessed within CAD, CAE, and PLM systems, with full traceability. Materials are connected to product data, and companies can cost-effectively maintain digital continuity throughout the design and development process.
Of course, whether to use a materials information management system like GRANTA MI or not is a decision that should be made after careful consideration of the options. In the meantime, the bigger picture here is that more companies need to starting thinking about the issues outlined above, especially the consequences and missed opportunities arising from inconsistent materials definitions. However you choose to handle your vital materials information, do so as part of a carefully thought-out materials information strategy.
The management of materials information is just one piece of the ‘materials intelligence’ puzzle. Discover how to reduce design cycles, minimize risk, improve product quality, aid compliance, and much more, by taking these five steps to increasing your Materials IQ.
Organizations make big investments in Additive Manufacturing. AM machines, new materials, experts in AM processes, testing, analysis, and simulation – no expense is spared. These costs feel justified in the light of the benefits that AM can bring – parts that can be printed-to-order, new lightweight components with previously unachievable shapes, or reduced manufacturing lead times.
But, there is one aspect we might be forgetting. Will anyone think of the data? Specifically, are we investing enough into managing the complex data created from our AM projects and, if we do, are we thinking about it early enough?
It’s an important consideration, as the success of Additive Manufacturing is more dependent on the exact process parameters than most other, more traditional, manufacturing methods.
To really understand and optimize processes, we need to collect and analyze data from a variety of sources:
- An AM machine operator recording machine parameters during a build
- A materials engineer recording the composition and properties of the powder
- A test technician recording the properties of the resulting part
- A simulation expert generating modeled properties for several scenarios
In a lot of cases, this data is recorded and kept within their respective departments. But, if our data is kept in silos, we put ourselves at a disadvantage. There is simple efficiency: what if our test technician needs quick access to powder property data when the materials engineer isn’t available? Then there is the fact that it is often useful to see the data in the right context: can the technician see which batch of powder was used for the particular test they are analyzing?
As well as problems with accessibility, unmanaged data makes it hard to achieve full traceability, or a “digital thread”, through our AM process. For example, could the simulation expert seek to validate a model against experiment trace everything back to the composition of the powder that was used?
So, how do we solve this?
Well, first, it’s important we find a system that can capture every piece of data we generate and make it readily available to anyone who should be authorized to see it. Second, we need to make sure we have complete confidence in this system, which we get if we have full traceability – i.e., related data is automatically linked so that we can follow analysis results back to their source. To achieve these two things, we need a database system with good AM-specific data structures, so that we know what data to capture and how to link it.
Finally, with all our data in one, centralized location, we’ll want to make the most of this by having tools that can give it context. For example, having ways to visualize and understand the relationships between our material properties and process parameters, or graphs that would allow us to visually compare data from our experiments and simulation.
GRANTA MI:Additive Manufacturing is one approach to this problem. It was developed from the experience gained in our involvement with several leading AM projects and is a direct answer to all of the questions that we posed above.
If you want to find out more about how you can use GRANTA MI to manage your Additive Manufacturing process data, visit our website.
Speaking at a recent webinar, experts from Honeywell Aerospace, Saudi Aramco, and Burberry presented the benefits of systematic materials selection.
With roots in fashion, oil and gas, and aerospace, these organizations are not only diverse in their focus, but in their experiences of using the CES Selector software. The Tempe site within Honeywell Aerospace has been using the software since 2001. Principal Materials Engineer John Perek presented two examples of how it reduced selection time, and minimized cost. The first was a materials substitution project for a pressure regulator housing that was experiencing delayed cracking after molding. The second example involved the necessary replacement of a Be-Cu pitot tube to comply with the restriction of hazardous substances (RoHS) legislation.
Thibault Villette, Material Modeling Group Leader at Saudi Aramco, discussed the benefits the organization has experienced in the two months since deploying CES Selector. Of note was the technical dialog that the software facilitated between the oil and gas company, and its external partners. Thibault commented that CES Selector acts as a ‘neutral expert’ that can be used to help consider all material options, and avoid costly dead-ends. “We are very new in our use of the software,” he added, “but in this very short time it has brought some very beneficial results.”
Fashion icon Burberry faced the issue of routinely selecting from a very limited palette of materials due to cost, availability, or limited materials knowledge. Through CES Selector, the organization has been able to assess both the materials and manufacture routes, and develop alternatives. Raw Materials Engineer Richard Waudby discussed the development of hardware for use in swimwear clasps, cord ends, and embellishments. He commented that CES Selector allowed Burberry to speed up the material identification time to around 30 minutes, and that “if you did that without CES Selector, you’d have to acquire the data, vet it, and that could take weeks,” Richard added.