Quality, performance, reliability, cost etc. of any product are all affected by the material being used to manufacture it. Hence, it becomes imperative to select an appropriate material for a successful product. Material selection involves a complex interaction between component function, material type, process, shape and cost. The designer must have a broad understanding of various properties of materials and their processing characteristics. No two materials have the same properties, and the choice is usually decided by the best possible combination of material properties and economic factors providing an optimal solution. In this paper, the best suited materials for two products, i. e. engine flywheel and metallic gear, are selected applying an almost unexplored multi-criteria decision making tool in the form of the TODIM (TOmada de Decisao Interativa Multicriterio, which means in Portuguese “interactive and multi-criteria decision making”) method. The derived results corroborate those obtained by past researchers. A sensitivity analysis showing the effect of varying values of attenuation factor of the losses on the rankings of the candidate materials proves the robustness and applicability of the TODIM method in solving material selection problems. Finite element analysis is carried out to study the behavior of the candidate materials under specific loading conditions.

The present study is focused on investigating the effect of the micro-mechanical properties of the natural fiber- (pineapple leaf fiber) reinforced polymeric composites by the addition of pineapple leaf micro-particulates. For the investigation, a two-step approach has been used. In the first step, finite element method-based analysis has been used to characterize the tensile and shear properties of the pineapple leaf fiber-reinforced polymeric composites (FRP) and pineapple paticulate-reinforced polymeric composites (PRC), and the adopted finite element method-based analysis has been validated through the experimental approach. In the second step, the validated finite element method-based analysis has been used to characterize the micro-mechanical properties of the hybrid fiber-reinforced polymeric composites (HFRP) fabricated using the pineapple leaf micro-particle embedded epoxy as a matrix material and the pineapple leaf fiber has been used as reinforcing material. It has been observed through the analysis that the micro-mechanical properties of HFRP were superior to that of FRP. There has been a 10.16% increment in Young’s modulus in the longitudinal direction and a 26.36% increment in Young’s modulus in the transverse direction for HFRP over FRP. Further, a 9.91% increment for in-plane shear modulus and 26.17% increment in outer-plane shear modulus have been observed for HFRP in comparison to FRP. These results suggest that pineapple leaf particulates are good reinforcing materials to enhance the transverse direction and outer plane micro-mechanical properties of the fiber-reinforced composite.