Since its first publication in May 1943, Light Metal Age magazine has been collating the progress and the economic ups-and-downs of magnesium, the lightest of the commodity light metals. Starting with the first issue of Light Metal Age, its founder, Roy Fellom Jr. wrote about the magneisum production processes of the times (much the same today). This article summarizes the progress made in magneisum technology through the decades, with emphasis on the use of magnesium. The year 1943 was a watershed year for magnesium production, with worldwide production peaking that year due to the war effort and then falling precipitously at the end of WWII by a factor of 50 times. It took decades for the market to recover to where it is today-some four times the worldwide production level during its peak in WWII-with credit due in large part to the remarkable properties of this light metal and to the outstanding work of magnesium technologists in creating alloys and processes that offer advantages and value in commercial applications. These trends in magnesium technology as well as the uses of magnesium have been documented in Light Metal Age. Upon cursory examination of the many decades of magnesium usage, we at first sense a case of "history repeating itself" but, digging deeper into the magnesium archives, we see how critical the progress made by magnesium technologists have been in expanding its use in a wide variety of markets.

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The Aerospace Structural Metals Database (ASMD) is the most widely used of the CINDAS products. Each month thousands of users access the ASMD which is recognized by the aerospace community as the global benchmark for critically evaluated materials property data. The web-based only product contains 232 chapters with over 250 alloys. The alloy families include: nickel and cobalt, stainless steel, aluminum, magnesium, titanium, high strength steel, niobium, molybdenum, tantalum and others. See the ASMD Alloy Sheet that lists the complete array of alloys. Take a look at two complete chapters to get a feel. Nickel based Haynes 282 and Ferrium S53 (ultra high strength martensitic steel) used in landing gears.

• View the ASMD Table of Contents.
• Try the ASMD demo.
• Don't recognize your alloy on our Alloy Sheet? Download the material cross-reference.
• Ferrium S53
• Nickel Alloy Haynes 282

CINDAS will launch a new product in December 2014 focused on the oil and gas, energy, power and chemical processing markets. The new database will be call the High Performance Alloys Database (HPAD) and will include alloys that meet the demanding requirements for higher temperatures, aggressive corrosive environments and higher pressures. Designers and engineers need to explore new alloys to meet the challenges they are faced with in the new and demanding environments. The HPAD will mainly include chapters on stainless steel, nickel and cobalt, titanium, high strength steel and aluminum. It will initially have about 90 alloys and grow to 120 alloys within a few years. A detailed chapter will be available for each of these alloys. The HPAD will be a web-based only product. Every detailed chapter for each alloy will typically include 40-80 pages of written text, tables and graphs of relevant mechanical and thermophysical properties of the material. Also included will be microstructures, joining information, thermal processing, corrosion data, fatigue and fracture toughness data. The capability to compare different materials in the database and plot independent variables such as yield strength versus temperature can be done for 10 or more materials on a single plot. The HPAD will be a valuable tool for all technical personnel doing material selection, optimization, design and finite element analysis, fabrication and root cause failure analysis.

• View the HPAD Alloy Sheet

The inherent inefficiency of electronic devices and their sensitivity to heat have placed thermal packaging on the critical path of nearly every product development effort in traditional, as well as emerging, electronic product categories. It is in this light that World Scientific, the leading publisher in thermal and electronics packaging, aims to publish top content to meet the need of researchers and practitioners alike, starting with the Encyclopedia of Thermal Packaging, and the Series in Advanced Integration and Packaging. The contributing authors to this series include Prof. Madhavan Swaminathan, recipient of the 2014 CPMT Outstanding Sustained Technical Contribution Award. (Taken from electronics and thermal packaging portal.)

CINDAS LLC is contributing data from the Microelectronics Packaging Materials Database (MPMD) to the Encyclopedia of Thermal Packaging. As one of the world's leading sources of microelectronics packaging materials data, the MPMD will be a great resource for the Encyclopedia of Thermal Packaging. The MPMD contains data and information on thermal, mechanical, electrical and physical properties of electronics packaging materials. It is available in a Web-based format. The database is continually updated and expanded. The MPMD contains over 1025 materials, 388 properties, and contains approximately 22,500 data curves. You can view additional information about the MPMD at the CINDAS LLC website.

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A computerized materials properties numerical data system has been developed and established at the Center for Information and Numerical Data Analysis and Synthesis (CINDAS) of Purdue University, which is a comprehensive, one-line, interactive, menu-driven, user-friendly, expert data system. This data system contains both critically evaluated reliable reference data and experimental data on the thermophysical, mechanical, electrical, optical, and other properties of various types of materials. It permits both the search of data and information for specified materials and properties and the search for materials that meet a set of requirements specified by the user (i.e., computer-aided materials selection). It permits also the on-line functional manipulation, statistical analysis, and mthemtical study of the retrieved data. The development, operation, functions, scope, contents, and other features of the data system are presented and discussed.

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