Engineering Materials 1
An Introduction to Properties,
Applications, and Design
Fourth Edition
Michael F. Ashby
Royal Society Research Professor Emeritus,
University of Cambridge and Former Visiting
Professor of Design at the Royal College
of Art, London
David R. H. Jones
President, Christ’s College
Cambridge
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First published 1980
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Reprinted 1998 (twice), 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
Third edition 2005
Reprinted 2006 (twice), 2007, 2008, 2009
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,General Introduction
To the Student
Innovation in engineering often means the clever use of a new material—new
to a particular application, but not necessarily (although sometimes) new in
the sense of recently developed. Plastic paper clips and ceramic turbine blades
both represent attempts to do better with polymers and ceramics what had pre-
viously been done well with metals. And engineering disasters are frequently
caused by the misuse of materials. When the plastic bristles on your sweeping
brush slide over the fallen leaves on your backyard, or when a fleet of aircraft is
grounded because cracks have appeared in the fuselage skin, it is because the
engineer who designed them used the wrong materials or did not understand
the properties of those used. So, it is vital that the professional engineer should
know how to select materials that best fit the demands of the design—eco-
nomic and aesthetic demands, as well as demands of strength and durability.
The designer must understand the properties of materials, and their limitations.
This book gives a broad introduction to these properties and limitations.
It cannot make you a materials expert, but it can teach you how to make a
sensible choice of material, how to avoid the mistakes that have led to difficulty
or tragedy in the past, and where to turn for further, more detailed, help.
You will notice from the Contents that the chapters are arranged in groups, each
group describing a particular class of properties: elastic modulus; fracture
toughness; resistance to corrosion; and so forth. Each group of chapters starts
by defining the property, describing how it is measured, and giving data that we
use to solve problems involving design with materials. We then move on to
the basic science that underlies each property and show how we can use this fun-
damental knowledge to choose materials with better properties. Each group
ends with a chapter of case studies in which the basic understanding and the data
for each property are applied to practical engineering problems involving
materials.
At the end of each chapter, you will find a set of examples; each example is
meant to consolidate or develop a particular point covered in the text. Try to xv
, xvi General Introduction
do the examples from a particular chapter while this is still fresh in your mind.
In this way, you will gain confidence that you are on top of the subject.
No engineer attempts to learn or remember tables or lists of data for material
properties. But you should try to remember the broad orders of magnitude of
these quantities. All food stores know that “a kg of apples is about 10
apples”—salesclerks still weigh them, but their knowledge prevents someone
from making silly mistakes that might cost the stores money.
In the same way an engineer should know that “most elastic moduli lie between
1 and 103 GN m2 and are around 102 GN m2 for metals”—in any real design
you need an accurate value, which you can get from suppliers’ specifications;
but an order of magnitude knowledge prevents you from getting the units
wrong, or making other silly, possibly expensive, mistakes. To help you in this,
we have added at the end of the book a list of the important definitions and
formulae that you should know, or should be able to derive, and a summary
of the orders of magnitude of materials properties.
To the Lecturer
This book is a course in Engineering Materials for engineering students with no
previous background in the subject. It is designed to link up with the teaching
of Design, Mechanics, and Structures, and to meet the needs of engineering stu-
dents for a first materials course, emphasizing design applications.
The text is deliberately concise. Each chapter is designed to cover the content of
one 50-minute lecture, 30 in all, and allows time for demonstrations and
graphics. The text contains sets of worked case studies that apply the material
of the preceding block of lectures. There are examples for the student at the end
of the chapters.
We have made every effort to keep the mathematical analysis as simple as pos-
sible while still retaining the essential physical understanding and arriving at
results, which, although approximate, are useful. But we have avoided mere de-
scription: most of the case studies and examples involve analysis, and the use of
data, to arrive at solutions to real or postulated problems. This level of analysis,
and these data, are of the type that would be used in a preliminary study for the
selection of a material or the analysis of a design (or design failure).
It is worth emphasizing to students that the next step would be a detailed anal-
ysis, using more precise mechanics and data from the supplier of the material or from
in-house testing. Materials data are notoriously variable. Approximate tabula-
tions like those that are given here, though useful, should never be used for
final designs.
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