Service 03
Material Innovation
Choosing what a part is made of is an engineering decision, not a catalogue lookup. We narrow the field against your load case, environment and process.
- Polymers
- PA12 · PETG · ABS · TPU
- Composites
- Carbon fibre · Glass fibre · Filled nylon
- Metals
- Aluminium · Steel · Titanium
The exchange
What you send, what you get back
Formats and artefacts, stated up front. If a job cannot be described this way it is not ready to start, and that is a cheaper conversation than the first revision.
What you send
- Load case and duty cycle
- Operating environment
- Geometry or envelope
- Regulatory or process constraints
What you get back
- Ranked material shortlist
- Trade-off rationale
- Process compatibility notes
- Sample coupons where useful
Method
How the work runs
Four steps, in this order. The sequence is the point: each one is there to make the next one cheaper to get wrong.
Frame the case
Loads, temperatures, chemicals, UV, cycle count, and what failure would actually mean. A material choice is only as good as the case it was chosen against.
Shortlist
The candidate field is narrowed by property fit and by whether the material can survive the process that has to form it.
Trade off
You see the shortlist with its compromises stated — stiffness against mass, cost against durability, ideal against manufacturable.
Prove it
Where the decision is close or expensive, we build coupons or a test section rather than deciding on datasheets alone.
Qualifiers
What we will and won't claim
Read these before you brief us. They are the parts of the job we cannot promise away, so we say them first rather than last.
- Published material properties are supplier figures measured under supplier conditions. Your part is not a test coupon.
- We name the compromise rather than selling the material.
Also from Proto
The rest of the process
These are written up separately because they are briefed separately — not because they run apart.
Send us the part
A brief, a sketch, a scan or a STEP file is enough to start. Tell us what it has to do and we will tell you what we would need to do it.