Introduction to Materials Science and Engineering

Book excerpt: Our civilization owes its most significant milestones to our use of materials. Metals gave us better agriculture and eventually the industrial revolution, silicon gave us the digital revolution, and we’re just beginning to see what carbon nanotubes will give us. Taking a fresh, interdisciplinary look at the field, Introduction to Materials Science and Engineering emphasizes the importance of materials to engineering applications and builds the basis needed to select, modify, or create materials to meet specific criteria. The most outstanding feature of this text is the author’s unique and engaging application-oriented approach. Beginning each chapter with a real-life example, an experiment, or several interesting facts, Yip-Wah Chung wields an expertly crafted treatment with which he entertains and motivates as much as he informs and educates. He links the discipline to the life sciences and includes modern developments such as nanomaterials, polymers, and thin films while working systematically from atomic bonding and analytical methods to crystalline, electronic, mechanical, and magnetic properties as well as ceramics, corrosion, and phase diagrams. Woven among the interesting examples, stories, and Chinese folk tales is a rigorous yet approachable mathematical and theoretical treatise. This makes Introduction to Materials Science and Engineering an effective tool for anyone needing a strong background in materials science for a broad variety of applications.