Material selection criteria across mechanical, thermal, and environmental requirements plus cost, availability, and manufacturability, Ashby-style material property charts as a selection tool, and the strength-versus-weight-versus-cost tradeoffs every real selection decision runs into.
Picking the strongest, lightest, or cheapest material in isolation is not material selection — it is optimizing one variable while ignoring the rest. This module builds a complete selection process: defining requirements across mechanical, thermal, and environmental categories, bringing cost, availability, and manufacturability in as real criteria, and using material property charts and material indices to rank candidates against a specific engineering objective rather than a generic property lookup.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why steel, aluminum, titanium, and a carbon-fiber composite are each the correct answer for a different combination of requirements rather than one dominating the others outright — and how a failure traced back through Module 13 to an inadequate material choice becomes a direct input into re-running this exact selection process.