books on material cost and it's mechanical properties

I know this is a very basic question in terms of mechanical design. But where to go if I want to know these information. What websites or what books should I go to? I'm currently only googling individual materials to find it's properties, but it gets very tiresome. If someone can shed some light in some great ways to compare and contrast materials in a book/ website tables, it would be great. Thanks a lot for reading.

 

You won't find specific costs unless you go to try and actually buy the material. Most places don't list this sort of thing on websites because it depends how much you're buying to what price breaks you will get and how much revenue you are giving that company per year to what deals they are going to offer. (It also helps if you are nice on the phone to them )

As for properties, there are various programs you can get that have a material database and you can search for the particular properties you want and it'll pool together the materials in it's database that match what you are looking for, or are similar. Then you can choose the compromise you want to make to select a material.

Granta are meant to be good at this and I think it's them that are built into the new Inventor, although I haven't had chance to use it yet. As usual we are waiting for suppliers to catch up before we install new software.
There was another one we used at Uni, but I've forgotten the name of it now. Sorry.

Here's an article about Inventor and Granta
http://www.dpaonthenet.net/article/4303 ... -tool.aspx

 

Thanks, I'll look into it soon.

 

The Granta products came out of work at Cambridge University by Michael Ashby and co-workers. There are lots of books by Ashby (Ashby MF), but the two classics are Engineering Materials 1 and Engineering Materials 2. You'll find lots of examples of so-called "Ashby diagrams" on the web - broadly, these plot one property against another so you can compare materials. Cost can and does appear!

 

The site I found most useful as far as materials is http://www.matweb.com/. Almost any material can be found on this site.
Pricing changes on a daily basis for many engineering materials so your best bet is to find materials that meet your design needs, and get quotes on them. Sometimes the price may decide if a project is a good one or not, but never sacrifice your design material needs for cost, unless it fits within your specifications.

Dave

 

Wow, some more great info. You guys are awesome! yea, as a designer, I won't sacrifice spec to meet cost, unless the spec is lowered and is accepted by the customer. I hold my integrity to a high standard.

 

Concerning mechanical/physical properties, If you want maximum allowable stress values and you're working in specific regulated industries (such as boiler and pressure vessel design), you'll need to use their specified allowables. In general, materials are fabricated to a specification (such as an AMS spec.) which specifies certain acceptable criteria. You will see on some vendor's websites references to these specs, and they may post allowable stress values based on their adherence to these requirements. If a vendor posts "Typical" allowables, these are not useful for design if catastrophic failure is not acceptable. Beware of using values posted to a website (or anywhere else) not referencing a material specification.

You can find Mil-HDBK-5 on line for free (http://www.everyspec.com/MIL-HDBK/MIL-HDBK+(0001+-+0099)/MIL_HDBK_5J_139/) - this is a good source of mechanical properties for metals used in aerospace. Mil-HDBK-5 was replaced by MMPDS - I doubt you'll find it for free. Another good source is http://www.matweb.com. Limited access is free, premium access is $75/year. Also, a good resource I recently found is http://www.azom.com/default.aspx - they have supplier info, general material info, etc.

 

I am not sure you will find any book that will give you the information for all materials but you choose a class of materials such as metals or palstics you may find publication by the relation association such as ASM or SPE that could give you the information you seek. Many years ago a Machine DesignMagazine published special issue on Materials that had a good compendium of information on a whole variety of materials. I do not how you find it now. I happen to have a 20yr old copy.

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ASM can be very helpful. There are other societies which publish guides (usually expensive). But remember it isn't really as simple as that. Mechanical properties depend MOSTLY on material processing and service environment!

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Hi, I normally have a look at http://www.matweb.com/ when im after mat properties.
You can register for free, but if you really need to compare materials on the screen at one time then it will cost you $99
Cheers
Clive

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