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Choosing Between Different Materials

The document discusses the key considerations for selecting materials, emphasizing performance requirements, ease of processing, and aesthetic properties. It highlights the importance of using material selection charts to visualize trade-offs between properties like stiffness and density, aiding in the decision-making process. The tutorial also notes that while aesthetic choices are less common, they can be significant for certain applications, such as art.

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31 views2 pages

Choosing Between Different Materials

The document discusses the key considerations for selecting materials, emphasizing performance requirements, ease of processing, and aesthetic properties. It highlights the importance of using material selection charts to visualize trade-offs between properties like stiffness and density, aiding in the decision-making process. The tutorial also notes that while aesthetic choices are less common, they can be significant for certain applications, such as art.

Uploaded by

sitesshady01
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

TUTORIAL

Choosing between different materials

There are three main things to think about when choosing materials (in order of importance):

1. Will they meet the performance requirements?


2. Will they be easy to process?
3. Do they have the right 'aesthetic' properties?

We deal with the processing aspects of materials in a different part of the tutorial. For now it is
sufficient to note that experienced designers aim to make the decisions for materials and
processes separately together to get the best out of selection.

The choice of materials for only aesthetic reasons is not that common, but it can be important:
e.g. for artists. However, the kind of information needed is difficult to obtain and we won't deal
with this issue further here.

So that leaves us with performance requirements...

Most products need to satisfy some performance targets, which we determine by considering
the design specification.e.g. they must be cheap, or stiff, or strong, or light, or perhaps all of
these things...

Each of these performance requirements will influence which materials we should choose - if
our product needs to be light we wouldn't choose lead and if it was to be stiff we wouldn't
choose rubber!

So what we need is data for lots of material properties and for lots of materials. This
information normally comes as tables of data and it can be a time-consuming process to sort
through them. And what if we have 2 requirements - e.g. our material must be light and stiff -
how can we trade-off these 2 needs?

The answer to both these problems is to use material selection charts.

Here is a materials selection chart for 2 common properties: Young's modulus (which describes
how stiff a material is) and density.

On these charts, materials of each class (e.g. metals, polymers) form 'clusters' or 'bubbles' that
are marked by the shaded regions. We can see immediately that:

metals are the heaviest materials,


foams are the lightest materials,
ceramics are the stiffest materials.

But we could have found that out from tables given a bit of time, although by covering many
materials at a glance, competing materials can be quickly identified.

Where selection charts are really useful is in showing the trade-off between 2 properties,
because the charts plot combinations of properties. For instance if we want a light and stiff
material we need to choose
materials near the top left
corner of the chart - so
composites look good.

Note that the chart has


logarithmic scales - each
division is a multiple of 10;
material properties often
cover such huge ranges that
log scales are essential.

There are a selection charts


for many combinations of
material properties, e.g.
'strength - toughness' and
'electrical resitivity - cost'.
The next section shows how
we can take selection chart
further...

Next: Using the charts

Back: Goals of the tutorial.

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