Computer Aided Material Selection

Over the last few years considerable amount of effort has been directed towards producing databases of material properties. These databases are not necessarily material-selection systems and much interest has been directed to providing systems, which will undertake material selection using the classical functional-analysis and property-specification procedure.

It is not possible, legitimately, to computerise the imitative procedure because no organisation can be expected knowingly to provide another, possibly competing organization, with access to programmes intimately concerned with its own design philosophy and development programme.

There is, however, no difficulty in computerising the comparative procedure of materials selection. A computer program which will select the optimum material for a specific application can easily be produced if

(a) The materials involved is from a very closely related family with very similar properties,

(b) No novel and unforeseen failure mechanism takes over, and

(c) The properties of the candidate material have been determined comprehensively.

Two such programs are known to exist: ICI (EPOS), for the selection of polymers; and a Sandwik program for selection of cutting tools. These are knowledge-based systems dealing with families of essentially similar materials.

A computer program for selecting process-plant materials would be equally straight forward, provided the requirements could be met by steel and no unforeseen failure mechanism exists.