As an aerospace designer, we appear to have many choices when looking at materials. Yet in order to create a lightweight, low-cost, and safe aerospace vehicle, we must optimize our design at every step along the way.

One of these steps is to ensure we optimize our materials design such that we select the best materials for the structure at hand. To do so, we must know the material properties, or characteristics as we like to call them, of each material. Among material characteristics we include properties such as strength, ductility, density, thermal behavior, etc.

As the list of characteristics is way too big to learn by heart, engineers often make use of materials characteristics tables. To assist you in this MOOC, we have created a tab at the top of the course that lists the material characteristics for a number of relevant aerospace materials. When doing small calculations or comparisons of different materials, please feel free to consult this tab.

To further assist you, we have also created a glossary of most used terms in this course and added that as a separate tab. If you are unsure of the meaning of a certain term used in this course, you can easily look it up. Please do let us know via the discussion forum if you feel certain terms are still missing.