5501ICBTAE

Automotive Materials & Manufacturing

Processes

Lecture 3-Selection of Materials I

Ms. Sanjana Dias

Introduction
Why selection of material is
important???

• To design a successful and durable

product

• To overcome failures
Evolution of Engineering material
usage
•Case Study 1
Vacuum Cleaner
That was a doctor, writing about 100 years ago. The
Victorians and their contemporaries in other
countries worried about dust. They were convinced
that it carried disease and that dusting merely
dispersed it when, as the doctor said, it became yet
more infectious. Then they invented the vacuum
cleaner
Vacuum cleaners: (a) the hand-powered
bellows cleaner of 1900, largely made of wood
and leather; (b) the cylinder cleaner of 1950;
(c) the lightweight cleaner of 1985, almost
entirely made of polymer; and (d) a centrifugal
dust-extraction cleaner of 1997.
Materials & Product Design

Fig. 1: Materials selection in mechanical design: the interaction

between function, material, process and shape.
Material Selection

• The selection process lies under two factors,

1. Identifying the desired attribute profile
2. Comparing it with those of real engineering
materials to find the best match.
Material Selecting Strategy
There are 4 main steps in the Material
selection strategy.
1. Translation
2. Screening
3. Ranking
4. Supporting information
The strategy for materials selection
Step 1 - Translation
Initially discuss the design requirements for a
component and translates the requirements
into a prescription for a material.
“What are the main requirements??”

The requirements are further classified into;

✓ functions
✓ constraints
✓ objectives
✓ free variables
Step 1 - Translation

1. Function: “what does the component do?” or

the application of the desired product
• Any engineering component has one or more
functions:
Ex:- to support a load, to contain a pressure, to
transmit heat, and etc.
2. Constraints: “What non-negotiable
conditions must be met?
What negotiable but desirable conditions?” or
the limitations related to the expecting
functions.
• The functions must be achieved subject to
constraints.
• Ex:-fixed dimensions, carrying design loads or
pressures levels without failure, insulates or
conducts, function in a certain range of
temperature and in a given environment etc.
3. Objective: “What is to be maximized or
minimized?” to achieve the desired
product with the required constraints
and high quality.

• Ex:- to make it as cheap as possible, or as

light, or as safe, or perhaps some
combination of these.
4. Free Variables: “What parameters of the
problem is the designer free to change?”
or the changes that can be done by the
designer without another's involvement or
restrictions to optimize the objectives.

• The designer is free to vary dimensions that

have not been constrained by design
requirements and, most importantly, free to
choose the material for the component.
These are referred as free variables.
Step 2 - Screening
• In Screening, first consider all the material
types available with their attributes in order
to correlate with the constraints of the
product design.

• Then eliminates candidates that cannot do

the job at all because one or more of their
attributes lies outside the limits set by the
constraints.
The taxonomy of the kingdom of materials and their
attributes
Step 3 - Ranking
• Once the screening isolate candidates that are
capable of doing the job, ranking identifies those
among them that can do the job best.
• Maximizing or minimizing a single property
maximizes performance. The property or property-
group that maximizes performance for a given
design is called its material index.

• Examples: The best materials for a light stiff tie-rod

are those with the greatest value of the specific
stiffness & E, where E is Young’s modulus.
Step 4 – Supporting Information

At this stage, a ranked short-list of

materials is chosen that meet the
constraints and that maximize or
minimize the criterion of excellence,
whichever is required.

Supportive Information???
Attribute limits & Material Indices
• Constraints set property limits.
• Objectives define material indices, for which
we seek extreme values.
• When the objective in not coupled to a
constraint, the material index is a simple
material property.
• First, there should be a proper
understanding about the types of materials
and material attributes.
Types of Engineering Materials
 Material Property Charts
1. Property chart for Thermal conductivity

A bar-chart showing thermal conductivity for families of solid. Each bar shows the range of
conductivity offered by a material, some of which are labeled
 2. Material property chart for Young’s modules against
Density

longitudinal
wave speed v,
Observations of Young’s modulus vs
Density property chart????
Young’s Modulus vs Density Property chart for Engineering materials
• The spread of density comes mainly from
that of atomic weight
• Young’s modulus describes “how stiff a
material is” and depends on two factors:
bond stiffness, and the density of bonds per
unit volume
Example design problem 1
• Designing a frame of a bicycle
Find the best material/s to produce a frame of a
bicycle. What are the selected attribute conditions??
3. Material property chart for Strength against Density
3. The Modulus vs Strength Property chart
• a bond is broken if it is stretched to more than about 10
percent of its original length. So the force needed to
break a bond is roughly

• yield strain, (meaning the strain at which the

material ceases to be linearly elastic), appear as a
family of straight parallel lines

• for some polymers, the failure strain approaches the

above value
• The design guidelines help with the selection of
materials for springs, pivots, knife-edges, diaphragms
and hinges
4. Facture toughness vs Modulus Property chart
5. Strength vs Cost Property chart
6. Thermal conductivity vs Electrical resistivity
Property chart
7. Thermal conductivity vs Electrical resistivity
Property chart
8. Strength vs Maximum service temperature
Property chart
9. Wear-rate constant vs Hardness Property chart
10. Cost per unit vs Material class Property chart