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Specific Stiffness
Specific modulus is a materials property consisting of the elastic modulus per mass density of a material. It is also known as the stiffness to weight ratio or specific stiffness. High specific modulus materials find wide application in aerospace applications where minimum structural weight is required. The dimensional analysis yields units of distance squared per time squared. The equation can be written as: : \text = E/\rho where E is the elastic modulus and \rho is the density. The utility of specific modulus is to find materials which will produce structures with minimum weight, when the primary design limitation is deflection or physical deformation, rather than load at breaking—this is also known as a "stiffness-driven" structure. Many common structures are stiffness-driven over much of their use, such as airplane wings, bridges, masts, and bicycle frames. To emphasize the point, consider the issue of choosing a material for building an airplane. Aluminum seems obviou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Materials Property
A materials property is an intensive property of a material, i.e., a physical property that does not depend on the amount of the material. These quantitative properties may be used as a metric by which the benefits of one material versus another can be compared, thereby aiding in materials selection. A property may be a constant or may be a function of one or more independent variables, such as temperature. Materials properties often vary to some degree according to the direction in the material in which they are measured, a condition referred to as anisotropy. Materials properties that relate to different physical phenomena often behave linearly (or approximately so) in a given operating range. Modeling them as linear functions can significantly simplify the differential constitutive equations that are used to describe the property. Equations describing relevant materials properties are often used to predict the attributes of a system. The properties are measured by standardi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
