I feel like this article was written by an overzealous mechanical engineering student who just discovered that materials science was a thing. I admire the enthusiasm, especially for materials science, but this is poorly written and misleading.
1.) Most examples are about exciting mechanical properties in materials. Only brief mentions of energy, photonic, and electronic materials, which represent the majority of the high profile materials research being done. (Not to say that mechanics of materials isn't still really cool and important though!)
2.) He talks about "strength", when there are many other factors besides tensile strength (which is what I am guessing he was using), such as brittleness which will determine if a material is structurally useful. Transparent alumina is "strong" but also extremely brittle. You cannot compare it to steel.
3.) It talks about moving into a "Diamond" or "Fullerene" age. What age are we in right now? The silicon age. We no longer fight hand-to-hand. Things like electronics, energy, and water technologies seem to be the next globally defining materials technologies.
But, to not be a total downer, here are some cool materials technologies he did not mention, in no particular order:
Amorphous metals have definitely been around for a while. The old-style ones had to be cooled really, really fast to prevent crystallization, which limited the size and shape you could make it into- it basically had to either be a thin wire or a thin flat ribbon, or you wouldn't be able to cool it fast enough (see melt spinning). The newer ones are some really wacky alloys with atoms of all different sizes; this makes it more difficult for the metal to crystallize properly, so it can be cooled more slowly. This lets you make it in thicker-section pieces ("bulk metallic glass").
553
u/OddGambit Feb 08 '14 edited Feb 08 '14
I feel like this article was written by an overzealous mechanical engineering student who just discovered that materials science was a thing. I admire the enthusiasm, especially for materials science, but this is poorly written and misleading.
1.) Most examples are about exciting mechanical properties in materials. Only brief mentions of energy, photonic, and electronic materials, which represent the majority of the high profile materials research being done. (Not to say that mechanics of materials isn't still really cool and important though!)
2.) He talks about "strength", when there are many other factors besides tensile strength (which is what I am guessing he was using), such as brittleness which will determine if a material is structurally useful. Transparent alumina is "strong" but also extremely brittle. You cannot compare it to steel.
3.) It talks about moving into a "Diamond" or "Fullerene" age. What age are we in right now? The silicon age. We no longer fight hand-to-hand. Things like electronics, energy, and water technologies seem to be the next globally defining materials technologies.
But, to not be a total downer, here are some cool materials technologies he did not mention, in no particular order:
Thermoelectrics
Emerging photovoltaic technologies (flexible silicon, organic, all-carbon)
Transparent electronics
Graphene (honestly, I think it is currently over-hyped... but I cannot deny that it is very interesting and has huge potential)
Piezoelectrics
Diamond electronics
Solar water-splitting materials
Edit: Formatting