BASICS OF MATERIAL SELECTION

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 INTRODUCTION
• The task of selection, is that of
1. identifying the profile of material attributes
that best meets the requirements of the
design, then.
2. comparing this desired profile with the
attribute profiles of available engineering
materials to find the best match.

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• The first step in tackling the task is that of translation,
examining the design requirements to identify the
constraints that they impose on material choice.
• The immensely wide choice of materials is narrowed, first,
by screening out the materials that cannot meet the
constraints.
• Further narrowing is achieved by ranking the candidates by
their ability to maximize performance.
• The materials property charts property Charts are designed
for use with these criteria.

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• Constraints and ranking criteria (objectives)
can be plotted onto them, isolating the subset
of materials that are the best choice for the
design.
• The whole procedure can be implemented in
software as a design tool, allowing computer-
aided selection.

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 Materials Property Charts
• There are so many materials and they have an awful lot of
properties.
• We need a way to display and compare them.
• One property can be displayed as a ranked list or as a bar-chart.
• Yet it is seldom that the performance of a component depends on
just one property.
• More often it is a combination of properties that matter:
• think, for instance, of the need for stiffness at low weight, or of
strength combined with toughness, or of thermal conduction
coupled with corrosion resistance.
• This suggests the idea of mapping material properties, delineating
the fields in property space occupied by each material class and the
subfields occupied by individual materials.

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• One way to display this is as a bar-chart like
that of Figure for Young’s modulus.
• Each bar describes one material; its length
shows the range of modulus exhibited by that
material in its various forms.
• The materials are segregated by class.

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The total range of modulus values is large – it spans a factor of
about 106 – so logarithmic scales are used to display it.

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• More information is displayed by an alternative plot,
illustrated in the schematic of Figure below. Here, one
property (the modulus, E, in this case) is
• plotted against another (the density, ). The range of the
axes is chosen to include all materials, from the lightest,
flimsiest foams to the stiffest, heaviest metals, and it is
large, again requiring log scales.
• It is then found that data for a given family of materials
(polymers for example) cluster together; the subrange
associated with one material family is, in all cases, much
smaller than the full range of that property.
• Data for one family can be enclosed in a property envelope
– it is the envelopes that are shown on this schematic.

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However, by choosing the
axes and scales
appropriately, more can
be added.
The speed of sound in a
solid depends on E and ;
the longitudinal wave
speed v, for instance, is

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• High tensile steel makes good springs. But so
does rubber.
• How is it that two such different materials are
both suited for the same task? This and
other questions are answered by Fig. 3.5, one
of the most useful of all the charts.

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• The Specific Stiffness–Specific Strength Chart (Fig. 3.6)
• Many designs, particularly those for things that move,
call for stiffness and strength at minimum weight.
• To help with this, the data of the previous chart are re-
plotted in Fig. 3.6 after dividing the values of modulus
and strength by the density, so it shows plotted
against.
• These are measures of ‘mechanical efficiency’, meaning
the use of the least mass of material to do the most
structural work.

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• Composites, particularly CFRP, lie at the upper
right.
• They emerge as the material class with the most
attractive specific properties, one of the reasons
for their increasing use in aerospace.
• Ceramics have exceptionally high stiffness per
unit weight and their strength per unit weight is
as good as metals but their brittleness excludes
them from much structural use.
• Metals are penalized because of their relatively
high densities.
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• The Fracture Toughness–Modulus Chart (Fig.
3.7)
Increasing the strength of a material is useful
only as long as it remains plastic and does not
become brittle; brittleness means a
vulnerability to failure by fast fracture initiated
from any tiny crack or defect it may contain.

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• As a general rule, the fracture toughness of
polymers is about the same as that of
ceramics and glasses.
• Yet polymers are widely used in engineering
structures; ceramics, because they are ‘brittle’,
are treated with much more caution. Fig. 3.7
helps resolve this apparent contradiction.

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 The Selection Strategy - Material
Attributes
• to select materials we first need a taxonomy – a way of cataloguing materials and
their attribute profiles so that we can find them when we want them.

Selection involves seeking the best match between the property-profiles of

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The Selection Strategy - Selection
Strategies

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• It is easier to begin with selection of a product.
• For Example, you need a new car.
• To meet your needs it must be a midsized, four-
door, family saloon with a petrol engine
delivering at least 150 horsepower– enough to
tow your power boat. Given all of these, you wish
it to cost as
little to own and run as possible.
• There are three constraints here, but they are not
all of the same type.

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• The requirements of four-door family saloon and petrol
power are simple constraints – a car must have these
to be a candidate.
• The requirement of at least 150 hp places a lower limit
but no upper one on power; it is a limit constraint –
any car with 150 hp or more is acceptable.
• The wish for minimum cost of ownership is an
objective, a criterion of excellence.
• The most desirable cars, from among those that meet
the constraints, are those that minimize this objective.

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• To proceed you need information about available cars (Fig. 4.3, righthand side).
• Car magazines, car makers’ web sites and dealers list such information.
• Now: decision time (Fig. 4.3, central box).
• The selection engine (you, in this example) uses the constraints to screen out, from
all the available cars, those that are not four-door, petrol-powered, family saloons
with at least 150 hp.
• Many cars meet these constraints; the list is still long.
• You need a way to order it so that the best choices are at the top.
• That is what the objective is for: it allows you to rank the surviving candidates by
cost of ownership – those with the lowest values are ranked most highly.
• Rather than just choosing the one that is cheapest to win, it is better to keep the
top three or four and seek further documentation, exploring their other features in
depth (delivery time, size of trunk, proximity of dealership, guarantee period …)
weighing the small differences in cost against the desirability of these features.
• At that point you are in a position to make a final selection.

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• This seems like a straightforward strategy.
What’s the problem in applying it to
materials? Selecting materials involves seeking
the best match between design requirements
and the properties of the materials that might
be used to make it.

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• On the left are the list of requirements that the material must
meet, expressed as constraints and objectives.
• The constraints are ability to be moulded and, of course,
transparency.
• The objective, of the visor is to protect the face, is that it must be as
shatterproof as possible.
• The comparison engine – you again – applies the constraints on the
left to the materials on the right, screening out materials that fail to
meet them, and delivering a list of viable candidates, just as with
cars.
• The list is then ranked by the fracture toughness.
• The three or so materials that meet the constraints and have the
highest fracture toughness are then explored in depth by
researching their background, the step labeled ‘documentation’.

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• NB: There is no one-to-one correspondence between the requirements in
the blue-shaded box on the left and the relevant attributes on the right,
even though all of these attributes are relevant.
• So the first step in selecting materials is one of translation: converting the
design requirements (often vague) into constraints and objectives that can
be applied to the materials database.
• The next task is that of screening, as with cars, eliminating the materials
that cannot meet the constraints.
• This is followed by the ranking step, ordering the survivors by their ability
to meet a criterion of excellence, in this case maximizing impact
resistance.
• The final task is to explore the most promising candidates in depth,
examining how they are used at present, case-histories of failures, and
how best to design with them, the step we called documentation.

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 The Selection Strategy - Translation
• How are the design requirements for a component (defining what it
must do) translated into a prescription for material selection?
• Any engineering component has one or more functions: to support
a load, to contain a pressure, to transmit heat, and so forth.
• This must be achieved subject to constraints: that certain
dimensions are fixed, that the component must carry the design
loads or pressures without failure, that it insulates or conducts, that
it can function in a certain range of temperature and in a given
environment, and many more.
• In designing the component, the designer has an objective: to make
it as cheap as possible, perhaps, or as light, or as safe, or perhaps
some combination of these.

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• Certain parameters can be adjusted in order to optimize
the objective – 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.
• We refer to these as free variables.
• Function, and constraints, objectives and free variables
define the boundary conditions for selecting a material and
– in the case of load-bearing components – a shape for its
cross-section.
• The first step in relating design requirements to material
properties is a clear statement of function, constraints,
objectives and free variables.

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E.g. Translation for the helmet visor
• To allow clear vision the visor must be optically transparent, the
highest level of transparency.
• To protect the face from the front and from the sides it must be
curved, requiring that the material can be moulded.
• We thus have two constraints:
– optical transparency and
– ability to be moulded.
• Fracture of the visor would expose the face to damage: maximizing
safety therefore translates in to maximizing resistance to fracture.
• The material property that measures resistance to fracture is the
fracture toughness, K1c . The objective is therefore to maximize K1c.

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 The Selection Strategy - Screening:
Attribute Limits
• Unbiased selection requires that all materials are
considered to be candidates until shown to be
otherwise using the steps in the selection strategy.
• The first of these, screening, eliminates candidates that
cannot do the job at all because one or more of their
attributes lies outside the limits set by the constraints.
• We refer to these as attribute limits.
• Applying these limits narrows the list of materials to a
viable subset all of which meet the constraints.

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 The Selection Strategy - Ranking:
Material Indices
• Attribute limits do not, however, help with ordering the candidates
that remain.
• To do this we need optimization criteria.
• They are found in the material indices which measure how well a
candidate that has passed the screening step can perform.
• Performance is sometimes limited by a single property, sometimes
by a combination of them.
• Thus the best materials for buoyancy are those with the lowest
density, ; those best for thermal insulation the ones with the
smallest values of the thermal conductivity, . It is not always the
smallest that we want; the best material for a heat exchanger, for
instance, is that with the largest value of .
• Here maximizing or minimizing a single property maximizes
performance.

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• But it is more usual that performance is limited
not by one property but by a combination of
them.
• Thus the best materials for a light strong tie-rod
or cable are those with the greatest value of the
specific strength, f/, where f is the tensile
strength.
• The best materials for a spring are those with the
greatest value of f2/E, where E is Young’s
Modulus
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• The property or property-group that
maximizes the performance in a given design
is called its material index.
• There are many such indices, each associated
with maximizing some aspect of performance.
• They provide criteria of excellence that allow
ranking of materials by their ability to perform
well in the given application.

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 Attribute Limits and Material Indices
• We saw that, constraints set property limits;
Objectives define material indices, for which we
seek extreme values.
• When the objective is not coupled to a constraint,
the material index is a simple material property.
• When, instead, they are coupled, the index
becomes a group of properties like we have seen.
• Where do they come from?

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• Lets begin with Minimum weight design.
• We consider the generic components and
typical loadings shown in Fig. 4.8: ties, panels
and beams.

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• Minimizing mass: a light, strong tie

• It must carry a tensile force without failure and be as

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• The design requirements, translated, are listed

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• first seek an equation describing the quantity
to be maximized or minimized.
• Here it is the mass m of the tie, and it is a
minimum that we seek.
• This equation, called the objective function, is

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• The length L and force F* are specified and are
• therefore fixed; the cross-section, A, is free.
• We can reduce the mass by reducing the
cross-section, but there is a constraint: the
section-area A must be sufficient to carry the
tensile load , requiring that

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• Eliminating A between these two equations
gives

The first bracket contains the specified load F*. The second bracket contains
the specified geometry (the length L of the tie). The last bracket contains the
material properties.

The lightest tie that will carry safely F* is that made of the material with the
smallest value of /f.

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• We could define this as the material index of
the problem, seeking a minimum, but it is
more usual, when dealing with specific
properties, to express them in a form for
which a maximum is sought.
• We therefore invert the material properties
and define the material index (subscript ‘t’ for
‘tie’), as

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• The lightest tie-rod that will carry the load
without failing is that with the largest value of
this index, the ‘specific strength’, /f, plotted
in the chart. A similar calculation for a light
stiff tie (one for which the stiffness S rather
than the strength f is specified) leads to the
index,

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Procedure

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• Minimizing mass: a light, stiff panel.

Its length L and width b are specified but its thickness h is free. It is
loaded in bending by a central load F. The stiffness constraint
requires that it must not deflect more than δ. The objective is to achieve
this with minimum mass, m.

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• The objective function

Its bending stiffness must be at least S*

Here C1, is a constant that depends only on the distribution of the loads – we don’t
need its value (see Appendix B, Ashby).
The second moment of area, I, for a rectangular section, is

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• We can reduce the mass by reducing, but only
so far that the stiffness constraint is still met.
Using the last two equations to eliminate in
the objective function gives

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• The quantities S*, L, b and are all specified; the only
freedom of choice left is that of the material.
• The index is the group of material
properties that appears in the equation which we
invert such that a maximum is sought.
• Thus the best materials for a light, stiff panel are
those with the greatest values of

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• Repeating the calculation with a constraint of
strength rather than stiffness leads to the
index

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• Minimizing mass: a light, stiff beam.

Consider a beam of length L and square section that may vary in size but not in
shape – it remains square.
The beam is loaded in bending by a central load F. It must not deflect more than δ
under the load F (a stiffness constraint). The objective is to minimize the mass.

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Objective function for mass:

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The second moment of area, , for a square section beam is

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the best materials for a light, stiff beam are those with the largest values of the
index Mb1 where

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• Repeating the calculation with a constraint of
strength rather than stiffness leads to the
index

This analysis was for a square beam, but the result in fact holds for any
shape, so long as the shape is held constant. for a given shape, the second moment
of area I can always be expressed as a constant times , so changing the shape just
changes the constant but not the resulting index.

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Minimizing material cost: cheap ties, panels and
beams.
• When the objective is to minimize cost rather than mass the
indices change but in a trivial way.
• If the material price is Cm $/kg, the cost of the material to
make a

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