Material selection for design, manufacturing and application

Developing a new engineering material product or changing an existing one requires new design selecting material and choosing appropriate and economical manufacturing processes. These three main factors play a great role on the performance of the product in service. These items are independent and should not be performed in isolation from each other. With the great advancement of technology in the last decade and with the greater number of engineering materials which are now available, together with the increasing pressure to produce more economic and get reliable products an integrated approach which considers design, material selection and the appropriate manufacturing process makes it easier to achieve the optimum product that combines the functional requirements with the reliability at competitive cost. These diverse activities or items are interdependent; therefore should not be considered in isolation from each other, for example, it is not sufficient that design of the product should satisfy the technical, safety and legal requirements, it must also be possible to be manufactured economically and to be sold at a competitive price and easily disposed at the end of its working life cycle. In this paper, the interaction of these items together in order to arrive to the optimum solution for a particular application are given and discussed. (author)