Engineering Materials

    Material science is a field which investigate the relationship between the structure of materials at atomic or molecular scale and their macroscopic properties. These Engineering Materials can be separated into different groups. The traditional groups are ceramics, metals and polymers. Ceramics are inorganic, non-metallic, often crystalline oxide, nitride or carbide materials. In compression they are brittle, hard and strong but weak in shearing and tension.They withstand chemical erosion that occurs in other materials subjected to acidic or caustic environments. Ceramics generally can withstand very high temperatures, such as temperatures that range from 1,000 °C to 1,600 °C. Porcelain which is used in plenty of household objects are ceramics. Glass is a ceramic but because of its amorphous character it is often not understood as one. There are also ceramic knife blades made by the ceramic material of Zirconium dioxide. The second group of engineering materials are metals. Metals use metallic bonding to connect their atoms together. They are high electrical conductors as electricity can easily move through them. Their thermal conductivity help heat up a material over a flame. The most common metals are iron and aluminium which are the most abundant metals in the earths crust. The third and final traditional group of materials are polymers.Polymers are the raw materials used to make what we commonly call plastics.Polymer properties are broadly divided into several classes based on the scale at which the property is defined as well as upon its physical basis. The most basic property of a polymer is the identity of its constituent monomers. A second set of properties, known as microstructure, essentially describe the arrangement of these monomers within the polymer at the scale of a single chain. These basic structural properties play a major role in determining bulk physical properties of the polymer, which describe how the polymer behaves as a continuous macroscopic material. Chemical properties, at the nano-scale, describe how the chains interact through various physical forces. At the macro-scale, they describe how the bulk polymer interacts with other chemicals and solvents. Matter consists of materials. Depending on if it is a metal, a ceramic or a polymer it will have different properties. If it is ceramics for a simple clay pot, metals for making the main metal structure of a building or polymers for a sheet of plastic, materials are used everyday by everyone.