Materials science also focuses on understanding the structure of materials, while chemistry focuses more on chemical reactions. There is a lot of overlap between the fields, however. For example, I know materials scientists who have worked on ice cream, hair, chocolate, dye, and more. I personally work on physical metallurgy which is pretty much exclusively materials science, but there are tons of other fields that overlap. Organic chemistry is the really hard chemistry that requires a lot of memorization.
Some may need it for research, but most of us just need the fundamentals—I never took a chemistry class after high school. The chemistry in materials science is mostly organic and deals with bonding, corrosion, and oxidation.
Chemistry usually involves compounds reacting via solutions. There is a liquid involved in every step. Materials science usually focuses on a bulk material or 2D material and tries to understand how the arrangement of atoms and bonding gives the material its property. There can be fluids involved like when dealing with corrosion or melting materials , but when we consider fluids, we usually consider the effect that a fluid has on our object of study.
So, when a materials scientist studies diffusion, dissolution, nucleation, grain growth, and precipitate growth, they are usually studying these things in the solid state. How does one solid precipitate inside another? How to atoms of one solid diffuse through another?
When chemistry focuses on diffusion, precipitate nucleation, and dissolution, they are usually looking at one or more liquids interacting, often with a solid that is dissolved.
A chemist might understand material properties such as biocompatibility, corrosion resistance, and possibly thermal or optical properties of a material. Materials science focuses on all properties of materials—including strength, hardness, fatigue, magnetism, conductivity, and more.
Materials science uses the materials tetrahedron—we are involved in a material from start to finish. Chemists can apply for jobs as. Materials scientists can apply for jobs advertised toward chemists, aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, process engineers, petroleum engineers, nuclear engineers, physicists, and more. The degree is very versatile, and materials scientists can make an argument for why they would be helpful to any industry for example, computational materials scientists can even go into finance, where they turn their knowledge of computational materials science into stock market algorithms.
To make any engineered device, structure or product, you need the right materials. Materials science teaches us what things are made of and why they behave as they do.
Materials engineering shows us how to apply knowledge to make better things and to make things better. Materials science and engineering drives innovation in both research and industry in everything from aerospace to medicine.
It is fundamental to all other science and engineering disciplines. As materials scientists and engineers, we integrate chemistry, physics, maths and biology with engineering to address global challenges relevant to technology, society and the environment, including:. As our students learn more about materials science and engineering, their enthusiasm for the subject grows.
Throughout their course, they produce pieces of work to demonstrate their understanding, and these can be presented in a number of ways. We can distinguish grains because the atoms like to arrange in a repeating structure. This is what I mean by length scales. Are you modeling atoms or bulk material? Grains or precipitates? The crystal structure—and thermodynamics and kinetics involved in heat treatment—can affect the grains.
The grains can affect precipitates, and together they make the sword strong, hard, and tough. A materials scientist makes a change on one length scale to achieve a change on a different length scale. Once we have something made of many disparate materials like a building , we conscript an architect or civil engineer. Geologists examine objects on a planetary scale, and astrophysicists theorize the nature of the universe.
You will see materials scientists working on all of these projects, but that is the nature of the field. Look at any university and you will see that materials science has the highest percent of join-department faculty. Materials science, while critical for modern technological advancement, is not well known. Many awards are attributed to physics or chemistry when they in fact deal with materials science.
For instance, since , 5 Nobel prizes in Physics or Chemistry were awarded for materials science topics. Along with medicine, materials science is one of the fields undergoing the most rapid development. Because the field is so new, materials science is the bottleneck of modern engineering. Think about what limits us from any technological breakthrough?
Why do internal combustion i. The other workaround to increase car efficiency—switching to electric—also relies on advancement in materials science, especially batteries. Even the physics involved as we shrink transistors far enough to feel quantum effects are the kinds of physics studied most by materials scientists. Look at nearly all useful engineering breakthroughs in the last two decades, and you will see that it was made possible by advances in biological understanding, computational power assisted by materials science , or materials science.
In general, there are 4 types of materials: metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites. Materials scientists apply the materials tetrahedron discussed above, but the actual subject is a material, and nearly all materials fall into one of these categories. They are very useful in materials science, but the final product is rarely in liquid or gas form. Actually, these 4 classifications still apply to fluids. For example, water and carbon dioxide are both ceramics, which can be easy to tell by examining their solid form.
Nearly all materials that are fluid at room temperature are bonded covalently, and thus can technically be described as a ceramic. Categorizing material applications into branches is more philosophy than science. For instance, my wife Ewelina likes to categorize all of materials science into just 2 branches: Structural Materials and Functional Materials.
Other people may choose categorizations that overlap more significantly. Below I will list a few of the most common branches, explain which materials fit into which branch, and where branches overlap. For example, copper may be an energy material when you are looking at its conductive properties, but it may be a structural material when you are looking at its mechanical properties.
Structural materials are materials which are designed to maximize mechanical properties. Mechanical properties include strength, flexibility, hardness, toughness, etc. Mechanical properties are a small subset of all possible properties, but since everything we build needs to support some load, mechanical properties get their own special category. All materials share some common properties—for example, strength or conductivity. Electronic, Magnetic, and Optical materials can sometimes be included as part of functional materials, but if an institution has a large research focus on one of these areas, it will probably get its own division.
Electronic materials deal with changing the way electrons flow through the material or materials that are important to other electronic materials , Magnetic materials have some uniquely useful magnetic properties, and optical materials deal with changing the way photons interact with the material. Computational materials science is a branch of materials science which deals with computer simulations. This contrasts with Experimental materials science, which is the stuff people do in a laboratory.
Computational materials science relies on simplifying the material system, applying rules for how the individual units behave, and processing the results. Computer simulations can work for any material and may model anything from small groups of atoms molecular dynamics to wave functions density functional theory to large macro-structures finite element method.
Biological materials are materials that integrate with biological systems. These can include:. For example, stents are made of a shape memory alloy which is definitely a functional material but must also be biocompatible. If you were trying to fine-tune the shape memory effect for the human body, I would consider you to be working on biological materials science because of the intended application.
Similarly, if you were working on a metallic foam because you wanted the implant to match the strength and density of bone—even though you are dealing with mechanical properties—many people would consider you to be working on a biological material.
In many cases, such a project would be a joint effort between the biological division and the structural division of the materials science department.
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