Introducing a novel method for materials selection in mechanical design using Z-transformation in statistics for normalization of material properties

Abstract

Optimum materials selection is a very important task in design process of every product. There are various materials selection methods like Ashby’s method or digital logic methods such as DL and MDL. In the present research work the Z-transformation method is proposed for scaling the material properties to overcome the shortcoming of MDL method. The results show that despite the simple scaling function used, the ranking procedure is as powerful as MDL method and even it is superior to MDL when it ranks the less important materials existing among a list of candidate materials.