Assignment 3

Material Selection

While designing a product, be it the outer case of a pen or the wheel of a large turbine, identifying a suitable material which satisfies the environmental and usage conditions, available for manufacturing and within the budget is very important. It becomes even more helpful if you can find a material based on the properties you require to create something new. But there are thousands of materials with variations in properties that it is very difficult even for an expert to know and remeber all of them. So, there have been a few softwares developed to compile all these materials and categorize them based on there properties. One such software is CES Edupack.

CES EduPack 2005

CES EduPack™ is the world-leading teaching resource for materials in engineering, science, processing, and design. Originating in the work of Professor Mike Ashby and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, EduPack has been extensively developed by Granta Design in collaboration with Professor Ashby and a growing community of educators at 1,000 universities and colleges around the world.

The software can be downloaded by following the stepwise process as mentioned in this CES installation pdf .

Assignment 3 - Material Selection

Assignment-3 consisted of tasks for identifying the suitable material that can be mass manufactured for the following products -

  1. Body of an electric switch/plug
  2. Coffee mug
  3. Cover for mobile phone


The assignment can be found in a pdf format here.

Conclusion

This assignment made the procedure for selecting a material for any product easier and fun.Also, because of using this software I got familiar with many new materials and their important properties.