4.1 Introduction and synopsisMaterial properties limit performance. We need a way of surveying them, toget a feel for the values design-limiting properties can have. One property canbe displayed as a ranked list or bar-chart. But it is seldom that the performanceof a component depends on just one property. Almost always it is a combinationof properties that matter: one thinks, for instance, of the strength-toweightratio, f/, or the stiffness-to-weight ratio, E/, that enter light-weightdesign. This suggests the idea of plotting one property against another, mappingout the fields in property-space occupied by each material class, and thesub-fields occupied by individual materials.The resulting charts are helpful in many ways. They condense a large body ofinformation into a compact but accessible form; they reveal correlationsbetween material properties that aid in checking and estimating data; and inlater chapters they become tools for tackling real design problems.The idea of a materials-selection chart is described briefly in Section 4.2.Section 4.3 is not so brief: it introduces the charts themselves. There is no needto read it all, but it is helpful to persist far enough to be able to read andinterpret the charts fluently, and to understand the meaning of the designguidelines that appear on them. If, later, you use one chart, you should read thebackground to it, given here, to be sure of interpreting it correctly.As explained in the preface, you may copy and distribute these charts
without infringing copyright.1
4.2 Exploring material properties
The properties of engineering materials have a characteristic span of values.
The span can be large: many properties have values that range over five or more
decades. One way of displaying this is as a bar-chart like that of Figure 4.1 for
thermal conductivity. Each bar represents a single material. The length of the
bar shows the range of conductivity exhibited by that material in its various
forms. The materials are segregated by class. Each class shows a characteristic
range: metals, have high conductivities; polymers have low; ceramics have a
wide range, from low to high.
Much more information is displayed by an alternative way of plotting
properties, illustrated in the schematic of Figure 4.2. Here, one property (the
modulus, E, in this case) is plotted against another (the density, ) on logarithmic
scales. The range of the axes is chosen to include all materials, from the
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