What are your top 10 most commonly used materials?

nav

Hi @tristanpaine instead of having a long list of materials you should allow users to add custom materials, at the moment OS only use the density as input to calculate the mass and moments of inertia, not all mechanical properties of the materials so it might be less challenging to implement.

jakeramsley

nav said:

Hi @tristanpaine instead of having a long list of materials you should allow users to add custom materials, at the moment OS only use the density as input to calculate the mass and moments of inertia, not all mechanical properties of the materials so it might be less challenging to implement.

Because having additional properties is something we will implement, it is beneficial to implement things in such a way that is flexible enough to extend when the functionality is being added.  Likewise, the implementations need to be done in a way that makes sense for our system going forward.  As such, for the time being I would suggest posting materials that are needed here.

andrew_troup

I would like to see a few more steel choices, particularly if it's going to be a while before we can customise materials:

Medium tensile (eg 4340)
Duplex Stainless (eg 2025)

For the following classes, it seems to me there are far too many choices without clear leaders, so generic might be best in the meantime:

Tool steel (Cold work, shock resisting)
Tool steel (Cold work, wear resisting)
Tool steel (Hot work)
Case-hardening steel

3dcad

Custom materials to be able to build my own library, please.

And quick assign to favorite materials.

I use mostly MFC (melamine faced chipboard) - for example 16mm thickness is about 650kg/m3 but 36mm would be around 550kg/m3; it is not convenient to add this kind of material in standard library.

Also MDF (medium density fiberboard) and HDF (high density fiberboard) have different densities depending on manufacturer and quality.

Please keep in mind the request we all agreed that we sometimes need to set weight manually if modeling for example real world piece which has multiple materials in same part or standard parts like bolts/bearings.

EDIT: Didn't notice there was page 2..

Please add MDF, it will give me decent results for testing and I remember there was other requests on this too.. 

3dcad

Can you show density in kg/m3 (woods at least) since those exponential mathematic values in kg/mm3 always take extra thinking to convert into understandable units.

imagineered

The problem with defining a lot of materials particularly steels is that there are so many international standards.
If you're looking at an ISO std or an AS/NZ std or JIS, the codes are all different but there are some similarities or equivalents.
The range of Tool Steels for example range dramatically depending on the STD applied or even the manufacturer.
I noticed one request to even define the steel generally down to "case hardening steel" The range for this could be huge as even Mild Steel can be case hardened.
This is why ultimately custom lists are a necessity & as I understand are in the pipeline.

andrew_troup

For the moment, the rationale for a material called"case hardening steel" (or any other generic, like "tool steel") is to act as a reminder of what broad class of material is intended, when roughing out a design. It is not always self -evident, and it's undesirable leaving the material as "steel" and adding a comment for every such component (tools often have dozens or hundreds of parts)

As @imagineered points out: 
 It's not realistic to expect every type to be covered, especially at this early stage, but something more informative than "steel" is desirable.

imagineered

@andrew_troup I suppose the main thing is to address is why a material is needed to be assigned.
If for FEA, then every detail available should be entered to the specifics of the grade.
If for detail drgs then this could just be entered manually in the drg
If simply for weight calculation then an approximation ie steel, lead, aluminium, polymer with SG's should suffice.

dennis_20

I hope to see standard material libraries so we can select the standard (ISO, AS/NZ, JIS, whatever) and then go from there.  Similarly we should be able to select the unit system to use.  It would be nice if the standards we use are saved as part of our profile so we don't have to wade through the ones we don't use.

When I choose a material I expect it to have the properties and appearance of that material so this means density, strength, etc., and color/texture appearance as well including the correct cross sectional pattern.  We should be able to orient the texture as necessary (think wood grain).

We should also be able to override any of these parameters for our particular model and have the ability to reset the values to the standard.

I look for these material standards to be part of the Onshape system and not resident in my/my company's account.  However, we should be able to make a custom material by copying the properties of a similar material and making the necessary changes.  I expect that these custom materials would be private to me and my company unless I am willing to make them public.  Making these public should carry with it an asterisk (*) to indicate it is user submitted and not part of a standard or they should just be listed in a library of user-created materials.  These user-created materials then have the caveat that you use them at your own risk as Onshape takes no responsibility for the accuracy of their data (unless it then gets vetted and added to the set of Onshape standard materials).

jean_didier

MDF

lougallo

We added some additional materials in our last push: