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A person can look at any engineered product and see that it is made of a wide variety of materials that have been manipulated into a wide variety of shapes for the purpose of enabling specific features of a product. Just consider an automobile with its painted steel body, plastic knobs, rubber tires, and glass windows. Or a computer mouse with its plastic shell and buttons and rubber tracking ball and wheel. Or a bicycle with its painted aluminum frame, steel gears and chain, and foam padded and plastic covers seat. In fact, a product can be considered as being a collection of materials such as metals, polymers, ceramics, composites, and semiconductors. Furthermore, the materials used in a product account for up to 60% of the total cost to produce a product. Based on both of these facts it seems that the engineering processes for selecting the materials used in a product and the means by which the properties of the materials are controlled are of the utmost importance to the success of a product.

Even though the materials used in a product have a huge impact on its performance, reliability, and cost, the importance of proper materials engineering considerations for product development and manufacturing decisions is vastly undervalued by many companies. Consequently, these companies struggle with problems such as new products that are behind schedule, cost over runs, poor supplier quality, poor manufacturing quality, and products that do not work as expected. These struggles do not have to be accepted as a normal part of doing business. In many cases, product development and manufacturing problems, and their costs, can be avoided if certain materials engineering considerations are employed when making certain design and manufacturing decisions.

This blog will be devoted to product development and manufacturing from the materials engineering perspective. This may seem like a narrow perspective, but after I get going I think you’ll see that proper engineering of the materials used in a product can have a significant impact on many decisions throughout the entire life cycle of a product.