Material properties

A material's property (or material property) is an intensive property of some material, i.e. a physical property that does not depend on the amount of the material. These quantitative properties may be used as a metric by which the benefits of one materia versus another can be compared, thereby aiding in materials selection. A material's property (or material property) is an intensive property of some material, i.e. a physical property that does not depend on the amount of the material. These quantitative properties may be used as a metric by which the benefits of one materia versus another can be compared, thereby aiding in materials selection. A property may be a constant or may be a function of one or more independent variables, such as temperature. Materials properties often vary to some degree according to the direction in the material in which they are measured, a condition referred to as anisotropy. Materials properties that relate to different physical phenomena often behave linearly (or approximately so) in a given operating range. Modeling them as linear can significantly simplify the differential constitutive equations that the property describes. Some materials are used in relevant equations to predict the attributes of a system a priori. The properties are measured by standardized test methods. Many such methods have been documented by their respective user communities and published through the Internet; see ASTM International.