Paper to the Second International Materials Engineering Conference, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London,  5th-7th November, 1985

Proceedings of the I.Mech.E. 229 ISBN 085298 586.
S F Bush

Introduction

The variety of commercial polymeric materials is now so great, and still increasing, that it has become difficult for engineers concerned with the design of systems and artefacts to discern the dominant trends which should guide their choice of materials. This paper is essentially concerned with the thinking involved in a major redesign of an artefact and therefore with trends in materials cost and processing technology which display themselves over a period of up to a decade or more. This timescale is seen as important: companies contemplating a major change in a product design will look to this length of time to recover the costs involved in the purchase or substantial modification of equipment and the retraining of staff in new materials, production and servicing technologies.

While the word plastics has become embedded in everyday language to describe a familiar class of wholly or partially synthetic materials, there is in fact a continuum based on the synthetic polymer principle which embraces synthetic rubber, man-made fibres, film and sheet, GRP, composites, thermoplastics and thermosets. Oddly, the familiar term glass reinforced plastic (GRP) refers to glass embedded in a rigid crosslinked thermoset matrix which is anything but plastic. The term Synthetic Polymeric Material (SPM) will be used to describe the whole family.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a number of the basic principles which ultimately govern the application of SPMs, and to indicate how these principles might be organised into a system for optimising design choices in the sense of the first paragraph. The organising framework is that part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as an Intelligent Knowledge Based System (IKBS).

See also the section on Systems Design & Control.