What is a material property chart?

Material property charts are a convenient way of presenting property data to facilitate comparisons between material classes or variants within a material class.

By plotting two properties against one another, design trade-offs may be assessed and the competition between materials can be clearly identified. The charts also provide a basis for highlighting the way material properties relate to the underlying physical behaviour (and hence composition and process history). The graphical form of the charts makes property data much easier to interpret than tables of numbers.

Almost all of the data used to construct the material property charts in aluMATTER has been provided by Granta Design Ltd, Cambridge UK. The provision of data, and the material property chart concept due to Prof.M.F. Ashby of Cambridge University, are gratefully acknoweldged.

It is important to note that while the data shown are representative of the materials, any actual design should be based on data provided by the material manufacturer.

Here is a typical material property chart, showing yield stress against density.

The following section describes how these charts are constructed. The various uses of charts are then illustrated.