Materials characterization and the evolution of materials
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uction As any reader of MRS Bulletin is aware, the space spanned by the materials characterization topic is vast.1–3 Researchers likely first think of familiar tools in today’s advanced laboratories and at large user facilities. Certainly, those tools are vital for discovery science as pursued in university, government, and corporate laboratories. However, to make the connection to engineering, which spans applied research, development, design, and manufacturing of devices, followed by their utilization, maintenance, and ultimate disposal, we must broaden our view of the role played by materials characterization methods. We must also disabuse ourselves of the fiction that the route from the science to the product follows a neat sequential innovation chain. In practice, much of the fundamental understanding garnered from materials characterization lies fallow in the reservoir of published literature and property databases until some often unanticipated development project finds a bit of it quite useful. At the other extreme, the scientific understanding of material properties and behavior based on advanced measurements in the laboratory might lag many years behind the commercialization of a product built through empirical trial and error (see the sidebar on Aluminum alloy grain refinement).
In addition, the characterization of materials does not belong to any one or a few aspects of the innovation process. That is, characterization does not merely help launch the next engineering advance of a material from the laboratory, where it stays behind awaiting the next specimen to analyze. Rather, it overlays the entire development process. Characterization is not only an early precursor or an after-the-fact elucidator; rather, it permeates the entire materials engineering and development enterprise from end to end. A particularly cogent pictorial attempt to categorize the materials science and engineering (MS&E) field is reflected in the so-called materials science tetrahedron.10 An amended version is shown in Figure 1 that highlights characterization’s central role. A polyhedron with more vertices would be needed to capture the complete journey of an advanced material to the marketplace. Nontechnical economic factors, such as cost and customer demand, control the final steps toward the marketplace. Those same practical considerations constrain the use of characterization tools to the minimum needed to guarantee quality and consistency without regard to underlying discovery science. Electron microscopy and x-ray analysis are perhaps the two most frequently used modern tools. They each have
J.O. Cross, Argonne National Laboratory, USA; [email protected] R.L. Opila, Departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, USA; [email protected] I.W. Boyd, Brunel University London, UK; [email protected] E.N. Kaufmann, Argonne National Laboratory, USA; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.2015.271
© 2015 Materials Research Society
MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 40 • DECE
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