BRL-CAD uses simple material properties, presently limited to density, for calculating weights, moments of inertia and other geometric analyses. There is presently no centralized repository for specifying material properties, so users have to recreate and manually share inputs.

This website would provide a comprehensive means for specifying, storing, importing, export, and reusing material properties. If you're interested in this web development idea, there is prior proof-of-concept web work of relevance that can be built upon or you could start from scratch. The latter approach from scratch would be somewhat discouraged unless your implementation idea was vastly different and better.

References

• rtweight
  • binary that calculates weight of a BRL-CAD geometry model
• .density
  • default input file used by rtweight, see BRL-CAD man page for rtweight for the format

We have a preliminary material database dataset with all of the fields we're interested in (name, density, young's modulus, equivalence factors, etc).

Requirements

• Ability to run shell scripts
• Ability to navigate a UNIX/Linux command-prompt
• Familiarity with web development technologies