A database management system for selection of steel

Selection of an ideal material for a given application will be a relatively simple matter, if perfect or near perfect materials are available. Such a material will have high strength, high toughness, good ductility and good fabricability. These properties would not necessarily
be compatible in an existing material. Compromises and trade-offs among various properties become inevitable. On the other hand, infinite number of possible materials in various forms and its usage are so intertwined in all industries that a person can have no real comprehension
of the characteristics of all the materials. A computer assistance either in the form of a software or a database is therefore unavoidable. A database is developed to assist in the selection of steels for scientific and engineering applications. A program is written in Foxpro
to identify the ideal steel based on its tensile strength, elongation, toughness and hardness. The program can select the suitable steels and can generate the forging temper-ature, heat treatment procedure, etc. The input data are obtained from various handbooks and textbooks. A Pentium-586 with FOXPRO is used to build the prototype database
management system in DOS environment. Human interface with the system is enhanced by the user-friendly menus. The database can be made compatible easily to a wide variety of micro, mini and mainframe computers.