Getting the measure of materials: it may be old, but it's not out to grass yet. Clive Maier looks at the latest version of CAMPUS which has been updated with far more than just cosmetic and operational improvements.(software)

IT'S HARD to overstate the importance of materials data, both to cost and performance. It is not uncommon for materials to contribute half the cost of a finished product, so they need to be used expertly. But rational design is impossible without the figures for key properties. And efficient processing is out if you don't know how the material heats, flows and cools. Without the numbers, all we can do is over-design for safety, and experiment in search of the optimum. Both eat up time and money. They are the methods of the past and simply don't cut it any more, certainly not in high-cost developed economies.

The problem is acute in plastics because of the enormous choice of materials available. Commercial polymers for mainstream processing are numbered only in double figures but they form the foundation for plastics grades in their tens of thousands. Nobody, absolutely nobody, can cope unaided with this massive portfolio. Fortunately, standardisation and computer technology have come to our aid. Standardisation lets us compare and contrast materials on a common basis. Database technology lets us do that instantly and without mistakes, across a large number of candidate materials.

The standardisation and database pioneers for plastics materials were of course CAMPUS and the company closely associated with it, M-Base Engineering + Software. New versions of CAMPUS and the Material Data Center emerged recently so this is a good time to review developments and progress.

CAMPUS itself is almost 20 years old. The name stands for Computer Aided Material Preselection by Uniform Standards. Development started in 1988 as an initiative of a few leading plastics materials manufacturers working to a strict philosophy that guaranteed comparability between the materials data of different manufacturers. The idea was radical at the time. CAMPUS began as a European, indeed a German project, but has become an international multilingual resource with participating plastics manufacturers worldwide. With more than 300,000 copies distributed, CAMPUS can claim to be by far the leading information system for the international plastics industry.

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