All Materials and Metallurgical Engineering

Materials and Metallurgical Engineering groups engineering disciplines that study a material's internal structure and its resulting properties, then apply that understanding to select, process and design materials for specific applications. Materials engineering studies the relationship between a material's atomic bonding, crystal structure and microstructure and the mechanical, electrical, thermal and optical behavior that structure produces, drawing on chemistry, physics and mechanical engineering. Metallurgical engineering, the historical root from which materials science as a broader field grew, applies the same structure property approach specifically to the extraction of metals from ore and the alloying, casting, forging and heat treatment processes that set a metal's finished grain structure and strength. Nanotechnology extends this same structure determines property principle down to the nanometer scale, where materials often behave differently than they do in bulk. All three fields share one governing method: characterizing a material's internal structure to predict, and then engineer, its properties.