mrfoulkes / material-properties-interchange

Database of engineering material properties with python interface

Material Properties Interchange

Do for material properties what STEP files do for 3D geometry.

I've only made a rough demo so far. If you would find it useful please leave a comment or message me.

Current Status

Check out tutorials/xplane_airframes.ipynb for a demonstration of how to use the package and why it's useful for engineers.

So far, I've implemented the following:

• A prototype of a material database record in YAML: materials_data/Al_6061.yaml. So far this is only a limited subset of properties for a single material.
• The core datastructures + logic for representing a material property, and doing interpolation for state-dependent properties: materials/property.py.
• The core logic for loading material data from a YAMl file into a python object: materials/material.py.
• Some unit tests for the above.

Project Proposal

Provide for the interchange of information on material properties between CAD software, FEA software, and custom analysis scripts. I spend a lot of time manually transcribing material properties from MatWeb or MMPDS into SolidWorks and my own python scripts. This process is tedious and error prone - I'd like to make it better, and I imagine other engineers would appreciate this too. It would be valuable for a project to have a single (verified) database of material properties, which all of the project's computational tools (CAD, FEA, analysis scripts) reference.

Core components

Database

Format for recording properties of a material. Use a standard syntax (YAML)?

Interchange Programs

Import from MatWeb.

Convert to/from formats used by major CAD/FEA packages.

API

Access material properties from python, MATLAB, Excel(?).

Similar Products/Projects

Granta MI and the Material Data Management Consortium