Built a small tool that traces every material property back to its source — looking for honest feedback from real engineers

[u/Any_Place_2339]

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Hey all,

I've been building a small reference tool for aerospace alloys — right now it's just one material (Ti-6Al-4V) done in depth, not a full database yet. The idea: every property (yield strength, tensile, etc.) is tagged with its exact condition (annealed vs. STA vs. wrought) and linked to its real source (ASTM B348, AMS 4928, MMPDS-17, ASM Vol. 2), instead of one averaged number that hides which spec/condition it came from.

I'm not trying to sell anything — genuinely want to know: is this a useful way to present material data, or does it not actually solve a real problem you have? What's missing or wrong?

Link: [your link here]

Appreciate any honest feedback, good or bad.

[u/luffy8519]

Every aerospace company already has their own internal database that does this for data they've generated internally and any external data they consider high enough quality to use. I think you're unlikely to find any users for your tool.

Edit to add: also, you forgot to paste your link into your ChatGPT output.

[u/rsunds → u/[deleted]]

I'd guess they can find whatever they need online and would not need a tool for it, much less a tool they would be ready to pay anything for.

[u/Any_Place_2339 → u/rsunds]

That's really useful to hear, thanks. Can I ask — when you (or people you know) need a property like fatigue strength or a specific condition (annealed vs. STA) for something like Ti-6Al-4V, what does that process actually look like? Is it usually a quick Google/datasheet search, or does it ever take real digging across multiple sources to get something you trust? Trying to understand if the pain point is real or if I'm overestimating it.

[u/deuch → u/Any_Place_2339]

For design purposes, if a property is given in the design code, use that value. e.g ASME BPVC IID, or the value in the national standard specified by the code . Sometimes industries have data repositories of data e.g. MMPDS . Materials data is held by information companies such as Total Materia, and can be applied by users to design and other work.

Companies will have documents detailing values to be used for design where these are not drawn from standards or where the standards have only informative data which needs to be adjusted to be used in design.

Manufacturers and users of materials create data for use in design work where this is not available. Sometimes this is proprietary data, often this is done as part of a collaborative piece of work. e.g. spring design data. Sometimes regulators fund work to create data for design purposes.

For fitness for service work data may be available in standards such as API or the design codes, but where materials properties change over time in service or are not characterised in the design code they have to be generated by users or manufacturers. Users of equipment that may need fitness for service calculations will have documents detailing what data to use for fitness for service calculations. This will typically refer to the source of the data.

Environmentally assisted cracking data is generally gathered by industry groups over long periods of time.

Some comments on mechanical properties, Steels cannot always be assumed to meet the minimum strength in the supply standard. Tests may only apply in certain locations and directions. Properties may change during manufacture, properties may change in service. If you need an upper bound for yield or tensile strength this is generally not specified in the standard. Statistical variation in properties is often not specified. Creating data suitable for design work is very expensive, if you need to have an estimate of the lower bound creep properties of a steel after 250 000 hrs service at elevated temperature you need to run a lot of tests for a very long time and / or test several parts that have been in service for a long time..

Much design work is done in software and sometimes people just use data suggested by the software, often this is Ok but sometimes can be badly inaccurate, e.g. using data outside the thickness range for which it is valid.

[u/Any_Place_2339 → u/deuch]

Really appreciate the detailed context — that's genuinely useful. Total Materia obviously already covers a lot of this ground at the enterprise/institutional level.

One follow-up, since a couple of people mentioned individuals wouldn't pay but a university or small team might: if there were a much cheaper, narrower tool — say $100–200/year instead of Total Materia's $1600+ — focused only on aerospace alloys but going deeper on sourcing and condition-specific data than free tools do, is that something you think a small research group, small aerospace startup, or university lab would actually consider, or does Total Materia (or an existing institutional subscription) already make that redundant for most people?

[u/deuch → u/Any_Place_2339]

Legal liability would totally kill this idea in my part of the world. What does liability insurance look like for the seller of this product? What does it look like for the user?

Aerospace (airplane) is very highly regulated, aerospace (Satellite) used to be rigid QA but I dont know these days. Also heavily regulated are pressure equipment, nuclear, structural, oil/gas at least in my part of the world.

Cheaper tools are always attractive, but the cost of maintaining and selling even small databases / software is surprisingly high (a previous employer did sell a small database of materials data with a small piece of software to perform calculations in a specific field, the cost was whatever they needed to charge as the product was needed by a small group of companies in that specific field). A lot of old data sources have gone out of business as they could not compete. Those that survive have scale or work in fields that can pay. e.g. look at the cost of buying access to some of EPRI's reports, (if you dont have the appropriate membership). https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002026454

Structural calcs often rely on software defaults but for steel at least the data in software is usually close enough, I have seen quite a few issues caught on parts that are over thickness for the specified standard, or on temperature ranges outside normal usage for the material.

Contractors who just use software default properties do exist in all of these, often picked up in QA / authorised person sign off. Some get through e.g. using thickness of finish machined part for materials data when the part is in reality machined from a much thicker stock bar. A very small number cause failures e.g. I remember a bursting disk failure during commissioning due to miscalculation from incorrect materials data.

[u/rsunds → u/Any_Place_2339]

I work at a research institute but am also a PhD student.

As a researcher I rarely have to look it up, it would be my clients who work in various industries that look it up themselves or have internal databases for their own alloys.

On the few occasions that I have needed to (in one case, for a literature review and another case to look up whether the alloy we were using for a fixture was sufficiently heat resistant), it has been sufficient to just find datasheets online. In some cases it was necessary to go to multiple sources and also books.

As a PhD student it would be more interesting to have such a tool, but at least for my alloy (nickel base) I can just find some literature references for comparison and it is almost always good enough. I would personally not pay anything to use the tool you are suggesting, but maybe my university would.

[u/Any_Place_2339 → u/luffy8519]

Fair point, and I get why that's the first thing that comes to mind. To clarify though — I'm not really targeting big aerospace companies with existing internal databases. I'm aiming at independent engineers, grad students, and small teams/startups who don't have access to something like Granta MI and currently just piece things together from datasheets and Google. Does that change your take, or do you think even that group wouldn't bother using something like this?

[u/luffy8519 → u/Any_Place_2339]

I think those people just use MatWeb tbh.

[u/Any_Place_2339]

Really appreciate the detailed context — that's genuinely useful. Total Materia obviously already covers a lot of this ground at the enterprise/institutional level.

One follow-up, since a couple of people mentioned individuals wouldn't pay but a university or small team might: if there were a much cheaper, narrower tool — say $100–200/year instead of Total Materia's $1600+ — focused only on aerospace alloys but going deeper on sourcing and condition-specific data than free tools do, is that something you think a small research group, small aerospace startup, or university lab would actually consider, or does Total Materia (or an existing institutional subscription) already make that redundant for most people?

[u/tea-earlgray-hot → u/Any_Place_2339]

If the attention to your AI database matches your attention to this AI generated post without a link, it is owrthless