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The intended learning outcomes from this presentation are to be able
to identify the different classes of materials, describe the distinctive
chemical features of different materials and to recognise advanced
materials and how these differ from the classical material classes.

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What is materials science and engineering? In answering this question
it is sometimes easier to separate them into materials science and
materials engineering. Thus, materials science will be the science that
studies the relationship between structure and properties of materials
and materials engineering will be the design or engineering of new
materials or materials with a pre-determined set of properties on the
basis of the structure property correlations. Why do we need to know
about materials? Well, as an engineer, whether you are a civil engineer,
electrical engineer, mechanical engineer or whatever engineer, at some
stage in your career you will have to select materials for a specific
application. This selection will be based upon a material’s properties of
structure, performance, processing, cost, etc.

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So if we were to consider a simple device such as a screwdriver and
we consider the question how much knowledge of materials do you
need in order to build such a simple device? So let’s take a look:
Firstly, the blade is made out of metal because it needs to be strong in
order to withstand a twisting motion. The head of the screwdriver has
to be tough and hard, especially true for a Phillip’s type screwdriver, in
order to not wear away too quickly. Alternatively, some people abuse
their screwdrivers for example using them to lever open tins of paint, so
the shaft of the screwdriver needs to be resistant to bending, and some
people use it as a chisel, so once again it has to have sufficient
strength. Why is the handle made out of plastic or wood in some
examples? Possibly, if it was made out of metal it would have been
easier to produce but what about electrical conductivity? So if it was
made out of metal, first it would be much heavier. We would also need
to consider using it to fix your electrical socket and forgetting to turn off
the mains power. The other thing is that the metal - if it was made out
of metal – is also a good conductor of heat; so if you leave it in the sun
it will become very hot and in cold climates it becomes very cold. So
we can see that in order to design even a very simple device you need
to have considerable knowledge of materials.

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Now, we may think that a screwdriver is a very cheap, almost
disposable item. If it breaks we simply use or buy another but what
about very complex and expensive items? Well, in some cases the
breaking or failure could have very much more dramatic and
catastrophic. You will probably all know about the Titanic, the biggest
passenger liner of its time but do you know why it sank? Because the
engineer selected the wrong material. The Titanic was built using
inappropriate steel which contained an excessive amount of phosphor
and sulphur such that at low temperature it became brittle.

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Another well know catastrophe was the Space Shuttle Challenger,
which exploded a few minutes after launch again, because of material
problem.
In this instance it was a fuel leakage in the rocket booster which was
caused by an o-ring seal which lost elasticity at low temperature – the
day of the disaster was cold with estimates putting the lowest
temperature of the o-rings at below freezing – outside the safe
operating temperatures.

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A third example identifying the importance of material selection is the
Eschede train disaster in Germany which resulted in one hundred and
one deaths. Here the cause of the crash was attributed to a single
fatigue crack in one wheel.

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So you can see that it is important to understand materials, how they
are used and what limits their use and this has been true throughout
history. The important ages of human civilisation or human
development are so known after the important materials of the age. In
the beginning people knew only simple materials such as stone, bone,
wood and skin and this age was called The Stone Age. Subsequently,
people learned about metals and how to form and use them so the next
stage was called The Bronze Age. More refined techniques and
knowledge of how to process iron lead to the Iron Age and now we
have the Concrete Age, the Polymer Age, the Silicon Age etcetera, so
in 5 thousand years it will be interesting to imagine what the
archaeologists will call the current Age.

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Let us consider some more examples. Here we have a selection of
prehistoric hunting tools. Imagine how hard it was at that time to hunt
an animal – a full-time occupation that was essential to survival. How
does hunting today compare? Today it is simply a hobby but if one is
interested somebody needs to have made this rifle. They need to have
considered and selected the correct type of steel to make the barrel,
the correct ceramics and how to process them to fabricate the optics
for the telescopic sight and so on.

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What about agriculture? These are agricultural tools - this is a
harvester’s sickle from about 3000 BC. Imagine what hard work it was
and how labour intensive it was to harvest the crops. Compare this with
harvesting today. A much lower proportion of the population are
involved with the process of harvesting today but to make this combine
harvester we need to know about the different types of steel and
metals, the ceramics for the glass cabin and the rubber and other
plastics for the tyres, seats, wiring insulation, etc.

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How have materials changed our lives in just the last 50 years? The
aeroplane, 50 years ago and how it looks today. The modern plane is,
of course, much faster and more powerful than the earlier model and
this is because of the new alloys and composite materials we now have
available as materials engineers. What about the electronics age and
computers? Well this is an information storage device now in
comparison to one from 50 years ago. The earlier model could store a
few kilobytes and this can store a few gigabytes. The same can be said
of the modern computer which would have occupied a large room in
the sixties yet have less computing power than most people today
carry under their arm. The electronics revolution is all due to the
materials scientists and engineers who developed the fabrication and
processing of silicon. With these few examples you should now have
an appreciation of how important materials are to everyday life and why
an understanding of their properties, processing and application has
shaped the world we live in.

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So what do we need to know about materials? We need to know the
material’s structure; the arrangement of the material’s internal
elements. We can define these depending on the size of the internal
elements and so we define atomic structure as the arrangement of the
atoms and the molecules within the material. We can also define the
microscopic structure which will be aggregates of a few or several
hundred atoms or molecules which can be directly observed using an
optical microscope. Finally, we define macroscopic structure which is
comprised of features that can be seen with the naked eye.

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So when we talk about a material property what are we actually talking
about? The property of a material is simply the response of that
material to an externally applied stimulus and it is the type of this
stimulus that dictates the type of property. So for example here we
have external forces in the form of loads being applied from which we
can derive a number of the material’s mechanical properties. Another
type of stimulus would be electrical such that we can determine the
material’s electrical properties, for example conductivity. Thermal
properties on the other hand would be concerned with a materials
response to an external temperature.

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Likewise magnetic properties being the response to an externally
applied magnetic field and optical the interaction with light or
electromagnetic radiation.

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Processing is another important aspect of materials engineering and
processing is defined as a series of operations to transform the raw
materials into a finished product or component. As you can see here on
this diagram the processing will influence both the structure and
properties of the material and this slide serves to illustrate this point.

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Here we have an image of the same material, aluminium oxide which is
a ceramic, but each sample has been processed in a different manner.
On the left hand side is an example of a single crystal, in the centre a
semi-crystal and on the right a poly-crystalline sample. All three
samples are the same material however the processing has produced
three distinctly different structures which, in this instance, have differing
optical properties – transparent, semi-opaque and opaque.

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Generally we classify materials into four distinct material types -
metals, ceramics, polymers and composites. Hence, metals will be
composed of one or more metallic elements such as iron, aluminium,
copper, titanium, gold, etc. As part of their composition they may also
have some non-metallic elements such as carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen,
and these non-metallic elements will be in relatively small amounts.
The atoms in the metals and their alloys, which are metallic materials
composed of two or more elements, are arranged in a small number of
very specific patterns and the final section of this week’s lectures will
examine these arrangements. Metals and their alloys have a range of
particular properties; some can be stiff and strong whilst others can be
flexible or ductile. Some will have high thermal and electrical
conductivity but all are opaque, reflective, and, in comparison to the
other material types, of high density.

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Polymers - many of these types of material are organic compounds
that are chemically based on carbon, hydrogen or other non-metallic
elements such as oxygen, nitrogen or silicon. There are also a class of
inorganic polymers silicon rubber. Polymers are composed of very
large molecules which have a chain-like nature. Polymers are generally
soft, very flexible with low strengths and low densities. In general they
are thermally and electrically insulating and can be optically translucent
or transparent.

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Ceramics – this class of material are compounds between metallic and
non-metallic elements and are most frequently found as oxides, nitrides
and carbides. Some of the more important examples would be
aluminium oxide, silicon dioxide, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, clay
minerals, cement, and the glasses. They are generally seen as brittle
or glass-like but have a high strength and are typically non-conductive.
So ceramics are used where insulation or optical transparency is a
material requirement.

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The final material type, Composites, is a special class of material that
consist of two or more individual materials of metals, ceramics or
polymers. The ultimate objective in the design of a composite material
is to achieve a combination of properties that are not displayed by any
single material whilst incorporating the best characteristics of each of
the component materials. For example here we see a yacht made of
fibreglass, a composite material of very small glass (ceramic) fibres
embedded in an epoxy (polymer) matrix. The resultant composite is
both stiff and strong from the glass fibres but also lightweight and
flexible from the polymer matrix. There are also a number of natural
composites, such as bone and wood which have similar combinations
of properties.

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Let’s now briefly consider some properties of the different classes of
materials. Here we see material densities and we can see that the
metals have the highest density, followed by the ceramics with the
polymers and composites having the lowest densities.

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However, compare this with the stiffness and then the strength of the
different materials.

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To finish the section of this week’s lecture I am going to briefly
introduce another class of materials which are collectively described as
Advanced Materials. This term ‘advanced materials’ is a little subjective
in that what we consider to be advanced today may not be so
advanced into the future. The typical characteristics of advanced
materials are that they are usually recently developed, are high
performing in some aspect or another when compared to the traditional
materials and are generally very expensive.

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Semi-conductors are one example of an advanced material and it’s
these materials, fabricated from elements and compounds such as
silicon, gallium arsenide and germanium that have revolutionised the
computer and electronic industries. Another class of advanced
materials are Biomaterials which are employed externally in contact
with or inside the human body in the form of medical devices or
implants to replacement diseased or damaged tissue. A requirement of
these materials is their need to be biocompatible but all classes of
materials, metals, ceramics, polymers and composites are used.

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Finally we have Nanomaterials, materials with sizes typically below 100
nm in diameter or by comparison ten to twenty times smaller than the
diameter of a strand of hair. At this size the materials show some novel
properties and here is an example of silver nanoparticles. Here we
have bulk silver which is non-transparent however, with a suspension
of silver nanoparticles, with a diameter of below 70 nm, is transparent
solution with a yellowish colour and it has neutral optical properties
because of this absorption of the silver nano-particles at about 400 nm.

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In summary materials are mainly classified by their elemental
composition and structure. Their performance is directed by this
structure as is their processing or fabrication.

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If you have any questions or desire further clarification please post a
question or comment on the Engineering Materials Discussion Forum.

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