Materials

Material choice settles what a product can survive, what it costs, how it can be manufactured and what becomes of it at the end of its life. A3.1 covers how materials are sorted into families such as metals, polymers, ceramics and composites, and the properties that separate them, including tensile strength, hardness, thermal conductivity and density.

B3.1 turns those properties into a decision. Selection is rarely a matter of finding the best material, because the requirement is almost always a compromise between performance, cost, availability, appearance and the manufacturing process the material has to suit. The topic covers how designers weigh those demands against one another and defend the resulting choice against a written specification.