Mechanical properties such as the strength and stiffness of a material must be known to design an optimized structural component from that material. Measured mechanical properties are well established for standard metal alloys, but the same can not be said for composites due to their limited standardization and the broad range of material and process variables in composites. This lack of published material properties makes designing structural composite parts challenging. Analysis tools can help guide a design, but they rely on material property inputs that must be accurate in order to achieve reliable results. The best way to obtain accurate numbers for these input variables is through physical testing on representative composite test samples. Without accurate inputs, analysis results will have limited utility. Large safety margins must be added to a design to account for unrefined quantification of material properties, which adds weight, ultimately defeating one of the main reasons composite materials are selected in the first place. Thus, there really is no way to completely eliminate physical testing from the design process of an optimized structural component.