Materials Science Division, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore
○KALYANI VIJAYAN Mahesh Kumar

POLYINFO enables property-specific selection of polymers used in aerospace. POLYINFO has two components viz., a database POLYSEARCH and a selection module POLYSELECT. Aerospace polymers have stringent requirements on their properties. Good thermal resistance, excellent mechanical properties, light weight are few examples of such requirements. As is well known, properties are closely related to crystal structural characteristics. Indeed, several hard and soft sources providing information on the crystallographic properties of polymers in general, are available. However, databases which combine crystallographic data with mechanical properties and other user-relevant information like decomposition temperature, service temperature, suppliers etc are perhaps not many. The authors have developed the database POLYSEARCH which includes data on crystallographic, mechanical and miscellaneous properties, exclusively for aerospace polymers (Access from www.nal.res.in). To select polymers with specific properties from POLYSEARCH, in its stand-alone mode, the user has to survey the entire database. To simplify this procedure, a selection module POLYSELECT which enables property-specific selection/identification has been developed. For example, all polymers belonging to the monoclinic crystal system can be identified by a simple click on the `monoclinic' grouping button. Similar, selection modules based on other properties have been included in POLYSELECT. POLYINFO hyperlinks POLYSEARCH and POLYSELECT.