Chapter 1
Introduction and reader's guide
This is a book about the use of materials information in engineering design and manufacture, and how computerized CAD/CAM systems change the ways in which this information has been, and should be, effectively used.
The importance of new materials to future industrial competitiveness is widely appreciated but the problems of assimilating and using effectively the materials we already have are much less well known. These are the problems of managing the process of measuring, abstracting and using materials information and are the subject of this book. As will be shown, there are difficult and complex technical issues to be solved which require combinations of expertise in fundamental materials engineering and materials physics, engineering design practice, and several diverse software technologies.
Materials are a common thread running through much of routine, innovative and creative engineering design, never quite appearing important enough to devote a great deal of attention to, but also never unimportant enough to completely ignore. This lack of immediate impact has led designers of computer aided design software systems to assume that materials information is all more or less available: in databases, from handbooks, at low cost, in simple representations and in stable, standard form. None of this is true.
It is a fact that despite extensive efforts to make materials property data available by providing access to materials databases, it is not an exaggeration to say that in general, practising designers make absolutely no use of these resources because they do not match their needs.
Nevertheless, the volume and complexity of information on engineering materials, their processing, properties and identification, is such that there is no alternative to increasing computerization. Materials selection, materials databases and materials models of behaviour are all enabling technologies that must be developed if computerized engineering techniques are to fulfil their true promise. It is the challenge of producing appropriate, correct and useful databases, models, knowledge-based systems and integrated CAD/CAM concurrent engineering design environments that this book addresses.
Materials and design
The processes of materials selection and other uses of materials information form only a small part of the entire design and manufacturing process, but it is an unavoidable part and its study displays in microcosm problems of breadth, completeness and complexity which are more general in their implications.
If a materials information system is to be useful, it must (a) relate to real world materials using the names and designation systems currently in use, and (b) hold appropriate data on all possible candidate materials. The problem is not just one of breadth, but of size too. The number of engineering materials is such (estimated at 80,000 or so) that in most cases no single organization can reformulate all the information necessary into some simple, universal form (the approach taken by expert systems projects), but must be able to use incoherently and diversely created databases in a sensible way, complete with their inconsistent and conflicting naming schemes and categorizations.
Materials information is most important to mechanical, electro-mechanical and production engineering and design. These are the activities central to manufacturing, automotive and aerospace industries, and the examples in the book are taken from these three sectors.
Design and manufacture
Materials information has been causing trouble for years. Misunderstandings between engineers, materials scientists, physicists, database managers, programmers and knowledge engineers have led to an high degree of wasted, and repeatedly wasted, effort. Much of the problem stems quite simply from the multifarious nature of materials information: raw data, experimental results, reference data, scientific data, standards, legal requirements and specifications etc. which do not form a single, connected theme.
Materials information is crucially important to industry and will be seen to be so over the next 10 years as companies computerize their data holdings. There are large publicly funded development programmes underway under the direction of the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) in Europe [Krö85, Krö87b, Swi90], the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Materials Property Data Network (MPDN) in the USA [Wes82, Gra86, Kau89, Rum89], and the Versailles Agreement on Materials and Standards (VAMAS) world-wide [Krö87b, Krö88, Eri90]. Also several CAD companies are extending their design-bases into areas which need materials data [Srdc89]. Large high-technology companies see their own proprietary materials information as 'the crown jewels' in their future competitiveness but also wish to cut unnecessary costs by trading valuable but non-critical materials information [Bam89].
The importance of materials-related problems in product development is seen to be increasing and the current focus on manufacturability and life-cycle issues in design means that increasingly these are problems with existing, rather than with new, materials. Hence there is a growing interest in the correct use of materials information as well as in developing new materials.
A number of international engineering conferences and workshops were held throughout the 1980s on the computerization of materials property data and among the relatively small number of engineers involved there is complete agreement that a world-wide attitude is the only feasible approach [Krö87a, Kau88]. Not a single nation, or continent, is sufficiently self-contained in its needs for materials that it could attempt to force a single approach to handling materials information. This lends a special character to systems which are likely to succeed since they must be developed by consensus and with the attitude that it is the developers' responsibility to ensure that users can make several diverse systems work together.
There are already probably several thousand materials databases (loosely speaking) in Europe alone, set up entirely independently of each other in companies, universities and research institutes. They have grown up without reference to developments outside their own immediate interests, which include useful new ideas in computer science, human-computer interface studies, materials modelling, knowledge-based systems and database engineering. The VAMAS task group for materials databases estimates that the number of large databases will increase by a factor of 10 within the next decade.
Unfortunately a general feature of materials databases is that they are rarely used effectively by design engineers. It is the more detailed production engineering aspects which have been most appreciated: the most heavily used of the eleven databases which participated in the European Commission's five-year Materials Databank Demonstrator Programme was INFOS, a database of the machining properties of alloys [Swi90]. It is true that engineers are not generally interested in materials science, but those managers responsible for keeping their engineers within the law, given recent developments in both European and American product liability, certainly are. There is thus great scope for, and a great need for, effective materials data and knowledge systems.
This book is intended to supply the technical bases from which future appropriate materials information systems can be developed which will fit well into their global role.
How this book is organized
The early part of this book is intended to be read through from the beginning. The last few chapters contain more specialized material that could be skimmed at first reading but which may be useful for reference in the future. The final chapter draws conclusions and attempts to predict the future.
Basics
The book begins by considering the problem of materials selection which is assumed by many to be the only use of materials information in engineering design. The chapter sets this small core problem of selection in its wider context and introduces through concrete examples some of the fundamental problems of materials designations and the use of property information. This is followed by a chapter which reviews techniques for representing materials information in ways that are appropriate and useful, given the practical problems previously outlined.
Specialist themes
The next four chapters are largely independent of each other and can be read separately. They cover the transfer or exchange of materials information, management science decision techniques applied to materials selection, a comprehensive review of data quality, and a commentary on knowledge-based systems in materials engineering.
Data interchange is subtly important in ways that might not be expected, so this chapter should be studied by anyone contemplating setting up a materials database. It discusses technical and organizational issues in transferring materials information from one organization to another. This builds on the earlier chapters by explaining the consequences for interchange of representing materials information in the ways described beforehand, and the need for interchange based on the uses to which information is put, in the engineering design context previously outlined.
The chapter on decision techniques will be of use to anyone attempting to systematize their organization's use of materials data in its internal procedures, and will be of interest to anyone who uses databases which purport to rank materials according to their fitness for some purpose. It could be required reading for anyone attempting to construct decision support systems using materials information.
Issues of quality in materials information are universal, they apply to all kinds of computerized or manual repositories and design or maintenance methods. The chapter on quality reviews techniques and metrics for both ensuring and measuring the quality and appropriateness of information.
Knowledge-based systems, especially object-oriented expert systems, are sometimes viewed as a panacea for hard problems involving complex information representation and manipulation. This chapter shows that they are affected by the same considerations of quality, maintainability, need for knowledge transfer and fitness ranking as are other types of software. They do add, however, the capability to present significantly more case-based information from extensive historical or experiential records and the capability to present information only implicit in the facts they contain. More important, they perform these functions without overwhelming users with unwanted detail.
Advice and predictions
Finally there is a concluding chapter which discusses the prospects for integrated computer-aided engineering design environments and advises on procedures for setting up materials information systems.
The book finishes with a glossary of terms and acronyms, a list of references and an index.