There are more than 50,000 materials available to engineers for the design and manufacturing of products for various applications. These materials range from ordinary materials (e.g., copper, cast iron, brass), which have been available for several hundred years, to the more recently developed, advanced materials (e.g., composites, ceramics, and high-performance steels). Due to the wide choice of materials, today's engineers are posed with a big challenge for the right selection of a material and the right selection of a manufacturing process for an application.