MATERIAL SELECTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
§ Material selection remains a crucial
part of the product design and engineering process
§ But with thousands of potential
material choices for product developers, picking the perfect one seems like a
huge task
§ Fortunately, new online tools like
Matmatch help make the selection process much easier than it used to be
Too much choice can be paralysing.
Just think if you went to a shop to
pick up some glue and there were thousands of different types to choose from,
all with slightly different properties.
That is the choice that you face
when having to select a material in the modern world. There is a plethora of
options.
This has its advantages in some
respects, as it means you’re more likely to get an exact match to the
properties you need. But, it makes finding that perfect material much more
difficult.
A brief history
of materials
Prior to the 19th and
20th centuries, there wasn’t a great deal of choice when it came to
materials. You were pretty much limited to the naturally occurring ones; wood,
base metals, clay, etc.
Then came the industrial revolution
and the spread of academia, and suddenly more and more materials were being
invented and developed. By the start of the 20th century, most
universities that offered engineering courses had a metallurgy department which
led to metal alloys and other discoveries.
Then came the age of the polymers
which propelled different types of plastic to become widely used materials.
In the 21st century, the choice
is staggering. There are tens of thousands of metals alone. This has made
material selection a very complex undertaking, unless you get some expert
assistance.
The
consequences of poor material selection
The wrong material choice can be
costly, or even catastrophic.
In fact, one of the most well-known
disasters of the 20th century could have been caused by poor material
choice.
Rivets recovered from the hull of
the Titanic, which sank in 1912, have been analysed by experts and they believe
that they may have contributed to the disaster. When the ship collided with an
iceberg, the hull may have ripped apart, not only due to the force of the
impact but the weakness of the rivets.
At the time of manufacture, the
standard rivet used in shipbuilding was made from No. 4 iron, known as
“best-best”. The 48 rivets collected from the Titanic were made from No. 3
iron, simply known as “best”.
This poor choice of material may
have been responsible for the sinking of the ‘unsinkable ship’ and the loss of
1503 lives.
There are plenty of other examples
of poor material selection that has caused damage or loss of life, such
as this example of a sprinkler that failed to discharge due
to the use of copper pipe, causing over $1,000,000 worth of damage.
How to select
the right material
When designing a product, selecting
the right material is crucial. But the decision involves many different
interlinked factors, including function, design, manufacturing and cost.
Material selection alone is no easy
task with such a wide range of choice, as mentioned earlier.
A popular tool when assessing
materials are Ashby charts (see example right), which compare different
materials of certain types on a scatter graph. So, if the designer needed a
lightweight, strong material, the aim would be to get a material with high
strength and low density (and often at the lowest price possible).
But as more materials have been
invented, different industries have come up with their own methods for
selecting materials. Some still rely on using dozens of charts. Others have
come up with industry-specific software.
Increasingly, designers and product
developers are turning to the internet to select their materials.
Matmatch offers a huge searchable database of materials
that can be filtered for a wide range of properties, including elastic modulus
and density.
Another handy feature of the
Matmatch database is that it allows application tags to be attached to
materials, showing which industries or applications have successfully used a
given material. These tags are searchable, so if you wanted to find an ideal
material for the automotive industry for example, you could select this as a
filter in the search bar.
Also, one of the main benefits of
using charts was that you could compare different materials in one place.
Matmatch allows you to compare material properties side by side, making your
selection much easier.
Summary
Material selection in the
21st Century isn’t a simple matter. There are tens of thousands of metals
available and hundreds of polymers and ceramics, with more and more advanced
materials being developed every year, such as graphene and tethonite.
The easiest way to get the best
match for your requirements is to use a searchable database such as Matmatch , which
allows you to filter and compare dozens of different properties and even search
by application.
Call:
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Mail:learnerspointinfo@gmail.com
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