![]() Material selection can be a guessing game. If your application lives at room temperature, it doesn’t have appreciable loads, and you’re willing to make a few parts and whack them with a hammer to see if they’re strong enough for your use, look for the simplified suggestions for selecting materials at the bottom, called “Don’t Make Me Do the Math.” However, many of Protolabs’ customers who design parts are not engineers, and many applications of Protolabs manufactured parts are quite benign and are expected to stay well within the performance envelope of common plastics. If you look through this paper and see the many factors involved and how environment and application influences material selection, you can understand why an engineer will be very reluctant to recommend a specific material for someone else’s part. If life safety is involved, or reliably or efficacy are absolutely required, every part should be engineered and materials selected accordingly. This guide to thermoplastics and injection molding material selection is aimed at an engineer who plans to quantitatively analyze a part, determine loads, stresses, strains, and environments and make an optimal material decision based on the analysis.
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