Materials & Engineering: Propelling Innovation
- PDF / 943,237 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 87 Downloads / 216 Views
MATERIALS & ENGINEERING: Propelling Innovation V.S. Arunachalam and Gopal R. Rao Materials and engineering are soulmates. Materials transform designs and equations into artifacts. Engineering, in turn, enables this transformation. Advancements in one have propelled advances in the other, creating new and wellintegrated technologies. The relationship between materials and applications remained empirical throughout most of history, with clever artisans shaping materials that were obtained in native form in land and riverbeds. This experience was well recognized in ancient texts, such as in the Indian King Somadeva III writings in Manasollasa and by the Tamil Saint Ilango in the Tamil epic Silapadhiharam. There are similar examples from ancient Greece and Italy. Such references, however, are few and far between. In the ancient world, materials and design were yet to become commonplace, except in the form of fired clay pots and pans and other implements. Technological revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries made new pathways possible in this intertwining of materials and engineering. The Industrial Revolution was propelled by the development of coal mining and the Bessemer process for iron and steel making. For the first time, iron and steel could be produced on a scale of thousands of tons. This availability of steel and other alloys in large quantities boosted engineering applications, giving rise to steam power, machine tools, and industries with output on a massive scale. Past the Industrial Revolution and into the 20th century, demands for new materials with newer applications increased steeply, such as for automotive and aerospace applications. This necessitated better understanding of the behavior of these materials and a move away from empiricism. Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics that established the relationships among temperature, energy, and entropy of physical bodies provided the initial tools to develop new materials. In a sense, this formal knowledge created a bridge between the two entities of materials and engineering, where engineering described the demand and designs, and materials provided the artifacts with tailored properties. The connection between materials and engineering is not static. With experience, many empirical relationships that were compatible with formal knowledge were developed. Formal knowledge, in turn, became more sophisticated, thanks to accurate measurements and predictions of properties, development of relevant theoretical underpinnings, and the availability of computing power for simulations and modeling. Today, the association between materials and engineering extends to the quantum domain, and even further to the molecular and atomic scale. For instance, band theory on a fundamental level explains the distinction between metals, semiconductors, and insulators.
This knowledge paved the way for the synthesis of numerous semiconductor compositions used in real devices. In the development cycle, innovations with new materials and relevant engineering do not emerge at th
Data Loading...
