Web design for the material selection for mechanical components (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Engineering - Mechanical Engineering, Andhra University (AUCE DEPT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING), course: MASTER OF ENGINEERING, language: English, abstract: Material selection is one of the major points that should be taken into account seriously in the engineering design stage. Each material has various properties such as mechanical, thermal, electrical, physical, environmental, optical and biological properties. However, it is a well known fact that only a limited number of design engineers have a thorough knowledge on all these properties of a specific material, which is planned to be used in the manufacturing of the product. Therefore, the design engineer should be guided in selecting the most suitable material.

In the scope of this thesis, the aim was to develop"Web Design" and a software package for material selection to help the design engineer in his decision making process. Since some materials is a widely used material in industry, it was selected as a material class among whole engineering materials, and a database covering all the necessary properties was constructed. These properties include chemical, mechanical, thermal, electrical and physical properties for some of the materials. The database developed by using "Visual Basic .Net' and also contains different material standards and can be updated if the user wants.3

It is expected that an information source such as the proposed database will provide all the necessary facts and figures to aid both designers and manufacturing engineers. Here in thesis we incorporated into the system are two main futures, browse and search. These allow the user to sift through information manually or enter multi-constraint criteria respectively. Retrieval of information is achieved by in-built queries and information is displayed.

The software package was developed for Windows environment by using Microsoft Visual Basic .Net in the program, materials can be searched for the list of suitable materials by entering application areas and properties such as chemical component, yield strength, heat capacity and electrical resistance. In addition to this, lists of materials can be created by selecting the appropriate material standards.