Delores Selections » Materials in design

Interactive material selection case studies

lesa — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 04:29:13 +0000

These case studies are based on the work of Professor Mike Ashby in the book Materials Selection and Mechanical Design and in CES EduPack. They have been made into interactive case studies that students can access via a web browser (if flash is enabled). This work has been supported by the UK Centre for Materials Education.

You can get access to these resources by registering for free. By registering on this page, you will receive a user name and password to download open access teaching resources. They are the ones with the blue OER logo next to them. The files are approximately 3MB and will take some time to open. The external links to other resources in the case studies will only work if your browser security settings allow that.
The open access teaching resources are aimed at undergraduates on materials-related courses across different science, engineering and design disciplines. Most do not require the use of the CES EduPack. They include interactive case studies, data booklets and material property charts.

[Description and screenshot taken from the Granta's Teaching Resource website. The case studies are made available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 License.]

Durability of materials

lesa — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:16:12 +0000

The Cambridge Engineering Selector EduPack 2009 Durability package is available for download as a pdf document. It provides source information on operating environments and their affect on materials.

Durability of Materials

View more documents from CORE-Materials

The performances of materials in the following types of environment are covered:
water and aqueous environments
acids and alkalis
fuels, oils and solvents
halogens and gases
built environments
flammability
UV radiation
thermal environments

Further reading references are also given.

Brittle fracture

lesa — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:31:48 +0000

This teaching and learning package (TLP) describes how and why materials break.
Prerequisite: You need not do it now, but you may want to look at the TLP on photoelasticity.

The consequences of something breaking can be a pest, or utterly disastrous, as when the pedal drops off one’s bike, but without it, biting and crunching, breaking into crisp packets, pulverizing coal, oil drilling and many other processes would be impossible. The most dramatic failures are catastrophic, but sometimes they can be very gradual even in the most brittle materials. This TLP discusses what determines when a material will break, and whether failure will be catastrophic or more gradual. The emphasis here is on brittle fracture, and although all of this is relevant to metals, the details of ductile fracture are not discussed.

On completion of this tutorial you should understand:
• that materials break by cracking;
• what determines whether a material will crack or not;
• what determines whether cracking is catastrophic or more gradual;
• the concepts of the fracture energy, strain energy release rate, fracture toughness and stress intensity factor.

Questions and links to further reading are also included.

[Description and screenshot taken from the DoITPoMS page for this TLP. (c) University of Cambridge used under the terms of their CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.]