Materials Science

So today's post is going to take a slightly different route. Instead of discussing another element or example of chemical engineering, I'm going to discuss a related field that many chemical engineers often find work in - materials science and materials engineering. This topic is particularly interesting to me because I am considering pursuing a graduate study in materials engineering. Basically, materials science and materials engineering is based on the ideas of how things are made and what they're made of. A car engine and a spoon may both be made with metals but the types of metals used have quite a few differences. Even the same metals can have different properties when used for different application. A cold metal behaves differently from a hot one and a thick piece metal is different from a thin one. 

Materials science goes back thousands of years even if the field was not technically called materials science. Historically, materials science would probably be more traditionally known as blacksmithing or metallurgy and the science behind these fields was not entirely understood for most their history. Even without knowing the little details about making alloys, blacksmiths and metallurgists for millennia have known that if you heat iron to extreme temperatures in the presence of coke (carbon, not the soda) that you can get steel. Carbon-steel has been one of (if not the) most important discoveries in history and it is still extremely important in almost all fields today. If you look around yourself, you can probably find several things made of or made with carbon steel. This could be the screws in the chair you’re sitting in, your nail clippers, or the body of your lamp. It’s everywhere and that’s because carbon-steel does two things very well. It is very strong, but is also fairly malleable – that is, it won’t crack and shatter. It’s slightly flexible and thus is great for building things out of. Those massive cables that run over the Golden Gate Bridge are an excellent example of these two traits. Carbon steel cables can be bent and wound together in a braid to make an even stronger and larger cable similar to how you might braid together smaller ropes to make a bigger one. Unlike, rope though, steel cables are extremely strong and yet they can still bend slightly. High winds can cause the bridge to distort small amounts, changes in heat can cause compression and expansion. Carbon-steel cables can absorb this kind of movement without breaking and that’s why it’s so important. If we were to build those cables with something less malleable like hard ceramics, the cables would still be very strong, but they wouldn’t be able to bend and absorb shock. They would just shatter. 

Modern materials science research is heavily focused on the idea of nano and lower-dimensional materials as well super lightweight materials. You may have heard of Graphene, “the miracle material that can do everything but leave the lab”. Now Graphene is just one example of a nano-material. Graphene is basically an extremely thin sheet of carbon, so thin in-fact that it’s only one atom thick. It’s basically a sheet of atoms. Now what scientists have found with this is that this sheet of carbon atoms behaves very differently from other forms of carbon. It is quite strong, it can be used to conduct electricity, and it’s extremely lightweight. It’s so thin, we can almost call one dimensional. Graphene isn’t the only really cool material that modern scientists are working on though. There’s also carbon nanotubes, which, like graphene are one atom thick but they are tubes of carbon rather than sheets. These tubes have been proposed for thousands of different uses but their development is still quite young and thus many of their uses are not fully mapped out at this point. They could eventually be used for drug delivery, nanobots, microscopic surgeries and a myriad of other things. Even with all these scientists focusing on really small materials, other scientists are focusing on slightly bigger things that weigh very little. One great example of this is Aereogel. It’s a super lightweight material – that is a block the size of a car would weigh less than a pound and yet it is still quite strong. Again, this is a very young development but research programs like NASA are investigating the material for potential use in space applications. Lightweight materials are very important in space travel as most of the fuel used in space travel is used in getting out of earth’s atmosphere and thus saving any weight at all reduces the amount of fuel needed.

So these are just some basic examples of materials science and engineering. It’s the science of making and understanding the things that make up everything and there’s a good chance almost every item you use in your day to day life has probably at one point been worked on by a materials scientists or engineer. It’s an extremely important field and one where many chemical engineers often find themselves. I, myself am certainly considering such a field.