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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the selection of materials for the selective laser sintering (SLS) process, which is used for low-volume production in the engineering (e.g. light weight machines, architectural modelling, high performance application, manufacturing of fuel cell, etc.), medical and many others (e.g. art and hobbies, etc.) with a keen focus on meeting customer requirements. Design/methodology/approach – The work starts with understanding the optimal process parameters, an appropriate consolidation mechanism to control microstructure, and selection of appropriate materials satisfying the property requirement for specific application area that leads to optimization of materials. Findings – Fabricating the parts using optimal process parameters, appropriate consolidation mechanism and selecting the appropriate material considering the property requirement of applications can improve part characteristics, increase acceptability, sustainability, life cycle and reliability of the SLS-fabricated parts. Originality/value – The newly proposed material selection system based on properties requirement of applications has been proven, especially in cases where non-experts or student need to select SLS process materials according to the property requirement of applications. The selection of materials based on property requirement of application may be used by practitioners from not only the engineering field, medical field and many others like art and hobbies but also academics who wish to select materials of SLS process for different applications.

Extremely small amounts of La and Al doping on the A and B site of BaTiO 3 , respectively, resulting in a solid solution of the type Ba 1-3x La 2x Ti 1-3x Al 4x O 3 have been investigated. The compositions have been prepared by the Pechini process. The x-ray diffraction ͑XRD͒ reveals the presence of tetragonal ͑P4/mmm͒ phase. The XRD data has been analyzed using FULLPROF, a Rietveld refinement package. The compositions have been characterized by dielectric spectroscopy between room temperature and 200°C. The resulting compounds ͑0 ഛ x ഛ 0.008͒ exhibit a remarkable decrease in the Curie temperature as well as a significant enhancement of the dielectric constant.

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Polymer gel electrolyte (PGE) film is prepared by incorporating polyvinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene (PVDF-HFP) as polymer, ethylene carbonate (EC)-propylene carbonate (PC) as plasticizers and tetraethylammonium tetrafluoroborate (TEABF 4) as salt using solution cast technique. By varying weight percentages of EC-PC-TEABF 4 into a host polymer, different samples of PGE were prepared, and the concentration of EC-PC-TEABF 4 was optimized for maximum conductivity, and stability of the prepared film. The maximum ionic conductivity of the order of 4.9 × 10 −3 S cm −1 was determined for 80 wt% of [EC-PC (1:1 v/v)-TEABF 4 (1.0 M)]. From the conductivity as a function of temperature, activation energy E a was calculated and it is about 0.06 eV. Overall, the amorphous structure was confirmed by X-ray diffraction analysis. Dielectric and impedance spectroscopic analysis was also carried out to understand the electrical behaviour of electrolyte using modified Debye's function. An ionic character of prepared electrolyte was confirmed from DC polarization method. The ionic transference number of 0.91 was calculated from the data while the electrical potential stability window was found to be 3.8 V. The electrical performance of prepared PGE was examined by fabricating electrical double-layer capacitor (EDLC). In a supercapacitor, commercially procured activated carbon electrodes were employed. The specific capacitance of EDLC cell is found to be ∼60 mF cm −2 , and equivalent single-electrode capacitance is about 39 F g −1 .