Other Specialised Databases and the Use of Computers

This chapter has only scratched the surface of the multitude of databases and data reviews that are now available. For instance, more than 100 materials databases of many kinds are listed by Wawrousek et al. (1989), in an article published by one of the major repositories of such databases. More and more of them are accessible via the internet. The most comprehensive recent overview of Electronic access to factual materials information the state of the art is by Westbrook et al. (1995), This highly informative essay includes a taxonomy of materials information , focusing on the many different property considerations and property types which an investigator can be concerned with. Special attention is paid to mechanical properties. The authors focus also on the quality and relutbility of data, quality of source, reproducibility, evaluation status, etc., all come into this, and alarmingly. 

Materials selection is as much an art as a rigorous science, and another computational approach to it, based on ideas of artificial intelligence, has been proposed by Arunachalam and Bhaskar (1999). They call their approach bounded rationality and exploit it to analyse the background to some notorious disasters based on material failure. We can always learn from failure as well as from success. 

ASM (2000) Directory of Materials Property Databases, supplement to Advanced Materials and Processes, August. 

ASTM (1993) Manual on the Building of Databases (ASTM, Philadelphia). 

(1992) Materials Selection in Mechanical Design (Pergamon Press, Oxford). 

---