tensors are used instead. In metals, anisotropic elasticity behavior is present in all single crystals with three independent coefficients for cubic crystals, for example. For face-centered cubic materials such as Nickel and Copper, the stiffness is highest along the <111> direction, normal to the close packed planes, and smallest parallel to <100>. Tungsten is so nearly isotropic at room temperature that it can be considered to have only two stiffness coefficients; aluminium is another metal that is nearly isotropic. For an isotropic material, where is the shear modulus, is the Young's modulus, and is the material's Poisson's ratio. Therefore, for cubic materials, we can think of anisotropy, , as the ratio between the empirically determined shear modulus for the cubic material and its (isotropic) equivalent: The latter expression is known as the Zener ratio, , where refers to elastic constants in Voigt (vector-matrix) notation. For an isotropic material, the ratio is one. Limitation of the Zener ratio to cubic materials is waived in the Tensorial anisotropy index AT that takes into consideration all the 27 components of the fully anisotropic stiffness tensor. It is composed of two major parts and , the former referring to components existing in cubic tensor and the latter in anisotropic tensor so that This first component includes the modified Zener ratio and additionally accounts for directional differences in the material, which exist in orthotropic material, for instance. The second component of this index covers the influence of stiffness coefficients that are nonzero only for non-cubic materials and remains zero otherwise. Fiber-reinforced or layered composite materials exhibit anisotropic mechanical properties, due to orientation of the reinforcement material. In many fiber-reinforced composites like carbon fiber or glass fiber based composites, the weave of the material (e.g. unidirectional or plain weave) can determine the extent of the anisotropy of the bulk material. The tunability of orientation of the fibers, allows for application-based designs of composite materials, depending on the direction of stresses applied onto the material. Amorphous materials such as glass and polymers are typically isotropic. Due to the highly randomized orientation of macromolecules in polymeric materials, polymers are in general described as isotropic. However, mechanically gradient polymers can be engineered to have directionally dependent properties through processing techniques or introduction of anisotropy-inducing elements. Researchers have built composite materials with aligned fibers and voids to generate anisotropic hydrogels, in order to mimic hierarchically ordered biological soft matter. 3D