Proposal for a multi-material design procedure

•Reasons to use a multi-material are explained.•A definition of a multi-material is given with the corresponding design parameters.•Different approaches are described for the determination of these parameters.•Tools are proposed for the choice of components and their morphology.•Materials selection methods are extended to multi-materials.

This paper describes a proposal for a multi-material design procedure. First, the context of the study and the requirements of the multi-material must be clearly defined in order to specify the parameters that the designer must select or optimise in order to produce the design: the components and their volume fraction, the architecture and morphology at different scales, etc. The general design procedure proposed here starts with the reasons why the designer has turned to multi-materials, from which a multi-material concept with fixed parameters can be defined. In this first stage the design problem can be made less complex by reducing the number of unknown parameters and guiding the designer towards the appropriate selection or optimisation tools: (i) subdivision of requirements, guided by applying statistical analysis tools to the materials database to search for appropriate multi-material components, (ii) tools to filter the materials database and search for multi-material components and their volume fraction, (iii) optimisation tools to search for the appropriate architecture when components are known or to search for architecture and components simultaneously. The paper demonstrates how these tools can be applied to different design concepts.