Ashby Diagram Software Software Is An

Optimizing complex combinations of technical and price properties is a hard process to achieve manually, so rational material selection software is an important tool.

Materials Selection in Mechanical Design, 3rd edition, Burlington, Massachusetts: Butterworth-Heinemann.

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An important aspect of design for mechanical, electrical, thermal, chemical or other application is selection of the best material or materials.

Systematic selection of the best material for a given application begins with and costs of candidate materials.

For example, a thermal blanket must have poor in order to minimize heat transfer for a given temperature difference.

Systematic selection for applications requiring multiple criteria is more complex.

If the rod will be pulled in tension, the, or modulus divided by density E, will determine the best material.

But because a plates bending stiffness scales as its thickness cubed, the best material for a stiff and light plate is determined by the cube root of stiffness divided density.

Ashby plots An Ashby plot, named for Michael Ashby of Cambridge University, is a scatter plot which displays two or more properties of many materials or classes of materials.

Using a log scale on both axes facilitates selection of the material with the best plate stiffness.

The first Ashby plot on the right shows density and Youngs modulus, without a log scale.

Metals are represented by blue squares, ceramics by green, and polymers by red.

The second plot shows the same materials attributes for a database of approx 100 materials.

The most straightforward way to weight cost against properties is to develop a monetary metric for properties of parts.

For example, life cycle assessment can show that the net present value of reducing the weight of a car by 1 kg averages around 5, so material substitution which reduces the weight of a car can cost up to 5 per kilogram of weight reduction more than the original material.

Of course, cost per kg is not the only important factor in material selection.

For example, if the key design objective was the stiffness of a plate of the material, as described in the introductory paragraph above, then the designer would need a material with the optimal combination of density, Youngs modulus, and price.