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70 Engineering Materials 1

Conclusions

The optimum material is CF'RP. The next best is polyurethane foam. Wood is obviously
impractical, but beryllium is good. Glass is better than steel, aluminium or concrete
(that is why most mirrors are made of glass), but a lot less good :!-tan beryllium, which
is used for mirrors when cost is not a concern.
We should, of course, examine other aspects of this choice. The mass of the mirror
can be calculated from eqn. (7.3) for the various materials listed in Table 7.1. Note that
the polyurethane foam and the CFRP mirrors are roughly one-fifth the weight of the
glass one, and that the structure needed to support a CRFP mirror could thus be as
much as 25 times less expensive than the structure needed to support an orthodox glass
mirror.
Now that we have the mass M , we can calculate the thickness t from eqn (7.2).Values of
f for various materials are given in Table 7.1. The glass mirrar has to be about 1m thick

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(and real mirrors are about this thick); the CFRP-backed mirror need only be 0.38 m thick.
The polyurethane foam mirror has to be very thick - although there is no reason why one
could not make a 6 m cube of such a foam.
Some of the above solutions - such as the use of Polyurethane foam for mirrors - may
at first seem ridiculously impractical. But the potential cost-saving (Urn5 m or
US$7.5 m per telescope in place of Urn120 m or US$180 m) is so attractive that they are
worth examining closely. There are ways of casting a thin film of silicone rubber, or of
epoxy, onto the surface of the mirror-backing (the polyurethane or the CFRP) to give an
optically smooth surface which could be silvered. The most obvious obstacle is the lack
of stability of polymers - they change dimensions with age, humidity, temperature and
so on. But glass itself can be foamed to give a material with a density not much larger
than polyurethane foam, and the same stability as solid glass, so a study of this sort can
suggest radically new solutions to design problems by showing how new classes of
materials might be used.

CASE STUDY 2: MATERIALS SELECTION TO GIVE A BEAM OF A GIVEN STIFFNESS WITH

MINIMUM WEIGHT

Introduction

Many structures require that a beam sustain a certain force F without deflecting more
than a given amount, 6. If, in addition, the beam forms part of a transport system - a
plane or rocket, or a train - or something which has to be carried or moved - a rucksack
for instance - then it is desirable, also, to minimise the weight.
In the following, we shall consider a single cantilever beam, of square section, and
will analyse the material requirements to minimise the weight for a given stiffness. The
results are quite general in that they apply equally to any sort of beam of square
section, and can easily be modified to deal with beams of other sections: tubes, I-beams,
box-sections and so on.
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Case studies of modulus-limited design 71

Fig. 7.4. The elastic deflection 8 of a cantilever beam of length I under an externally imposed force F:

Ana Iy si s

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The square-section beam of length 1 (determined by the design of the structure, and
thus fixed) and thickness t (a variable) is held rigidly at one end while a force F (the
maximum service force) is applied to the other, as shown in Fig. 7.4. The same texts that
list the deflection of discs give equations for the elastic deflection of beams. The
formula we want is

413F
6=- (7.5)
Et4

(ignoring self-weight).
The mass of the beam is given by

M = lt2p. (7.6)

As before, the mass of the beam can be reduced by reducing t, but only so far that it
does not deflect too much. The thickness is therefore constrained by eqn. (7.5). Solving
this for t and inserting it into the last equation gives:

(7.7)

The mass of the beam, for given stiffness F / S , is minimised by selecting a material with
the minimum value of the material index

(7.8)

The second column of numbers in Table 7.2 gives values for M2.
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72 Engineering Materials 1

Table 7.2 Data for beam of given stiffness

Material M2 p (UK tonne-') M3

(US$ tonne-')

Steel 0.55 300 (450) 165

Polyurethane foam 0.41 1500 (2250) 615
Concrete 0.36 1 60 (240) 58
Aluminium 0.32 1100 (1650) 350
GFRP 0.31 2000 (3000) 620
Wood 0.17 200 (300) 34
CFRP 0.09 50,000(75,000) 4500

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Conclusions

The table shows that wood is one of the best materials for stiff beams - that is why it
is so widely used in small-scale building, for the handles of rackets and shafts of golf-
clubs, for vaulting poles, even for building aircraft. Polyurethane foam is no good at all
-the criteria here are quite different from those of the first case study. The only material
which is clearly superior to wood is CFRP - and it would reduce the mass of the beam
very substantially: by the factor 0.17/0.09, or very nearly a factor of 2. That is why
CFRP is used when weight-saving is the overriding design criterion. But as we shall see
in a moment, it is very expensive.
Why, then, are bicycles not made of wood? (There was a time when they were.) That
is because metals, and polymers, too, can readily be made in tubes; with wood it is
more difficult. The formula for the bending of a tube depends on the mass of the tube
in a different way than does that of a solid beam, and the optimisation we have just
performed - which is easy enough to redo - favours the tube.

CASESTUDY 3: MATERIALS SELECTIONTO MINIMISECOST OF A BEAM OF GIVEN

STIFFNESS

Introduction

Often it is not the weight, but the cost of a structure which is the overriding criterion.
Suppose that had been the case with the cantilever beam that we have just considered
- would our conclusion have been the same? Would we still select wood? And how
much more expensive would a replacement by CFRP be?

Analysis

The price per tonne, p , of materials is the first of the properties that we talked about in
this book. The total price of the beam, crudely, is the weight of the beam times j3