Components for Composite Material Customization System

With the advancements of composite materials and research in nano-composites, designers have the flexibility to select materials from a wide range of properties to meet their specific design needs. Even with all these advancements, the material selection process during design follows a very conventional approach. The conventional approach to material design is to select a certain material from a given pre-set material list that allows the attainment of nearest properties required for the product. One of the disadvantages of this approach is that the trade-off inherent in the selection of material, when multiple properties are targeted, can be cumbersome to achieve or addressed at all. In this paper we present an approach to select and design composite materials, where the designer will have flexibility to select multiple properties of materials during the design of a new product. This approach employs an index for selection combined with heuristic optimization techniques to select the optimized combination of composite materials that could meet closest possible property goals. In the case study presented in this paper, we did not perform any optimization; rather, emphasize is given to the explanation of material selection technique, and an RMS value is introduced as an index for the selection.