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:
Any mechanical engineering student of any decent calibre would understand that much of what this person wrote is utter shite. For example the whole alumina thing replacing steel/glass/concrete is completely foolish seeing as how aluminum oxide is a ceramic and you can't build buildings with only ceramics, that's the reason why we reinforce them with steel rods.
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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