Materials selection in conceptual design

Information on material properties is essential to engineering design. The breadth and precision of the data that the designer requires depend on the stage the design has reached: at the start (the ‘conceptual’ stage), low level data for all materials; at the finish (the ‘detailed design’ stage), data at a high level of precision for one or a few materials. In this paper, a procedure for materials selection in mechanical design is described which allows the identification, from among the full range of materials available to the engineer, the subset most likely to perform best in a given application.MST/1064