Three related projects realize material property databases and software tools developed for Windows 98/NT/2000 environment primarily for use in preliminary engineering design and for material trade-off studies.

In addition to the many advanced features for storage, retrieval, editing of scalar property information such as Military Handbook (MIL-HDBK-5) Material Property data, a diversity of features were incorporated to facilitate the retrieval, manipulation and comparison of information represented in pictorial form (i.e. Stress-Strain curves, Da/Dn crack growth data, Fracture Toughness Data, Temperature Dependent Data, S/N Fatigue Data).

This information is essential in design trade studies where new materials are compared with the existing baseline material. In most cases large OEM's use their own derived properties for design allowables, crack growth and fatigue allowables, etc. For this reason the software tools have advanced graphic manipulation features such as:

• importing pictorial data or x-y data;
• converting pictorial data to x-y data using the Digitizer program, developed for this purpose, or conversely,
• converting imported x-y data to pictorial;
• plotting data and comparing plots of data between materials;
• fitting routines to estimate the Modulus of Elasticity, Ramberg-Osgood parameters, and Voce parameters for the true stress-true strain representation; and
• pictorial searching through a specially developed interface.

Also, a “point and click” advanced search feature was developed to browse or locate materials. Finally, a material comparison module was developed to compare properties between materials. Though the projects are closely related and have a lot of common features, each of the projects is dedicated to own problem area and contains some specific program tools, data tables and fields.

Databases: personal and shared access via LANs for workgroups (up to 10-12 users).