One of our Level 2 students having spoken with a newcomer had asked what he had seen that day on the Materials Lab. The students reply had been "I saw (a) desert(s)!". Looking at the attitude of many of the 1st year students, it would come as no surprise to me if all of them where to say that they saw a desert, particularly since they are not in a stage to appreciate this vast area called Materials Science and Engineering.
I am not sure how many of our Level students have seen the movie "Batman begins" or even "Titanic" (especially so since the latter came out around 10 years ago when I was in year 10 or 11). In Batman begins, Lucius Fox tells a Bruce Wayne looking for a light cloth for "space diving": "It's called memory cloth. Notice anything? Regularly flexible... ...but put a current through it... (the cloth expands)". Looks fun? Well in case you didn't know about it Materials Scientists invented them way back during the World War II. It's called Smart Materials. They can be made to deform in a variety of ways. Not just by applying an electric field as Lucius Fox does, but also by heating, applying a magnetic field etc. Well, not everyone needs a piece of cloth that can expand by putting a current through it, but then can we replace the conventional parachutes with such a material where we can allow the parachuter to control the direction of his flight during the jump? Just think of the dangerous situations that would be avoidable with such a maneuverable parachute.
If Smart Materials seems something that is so far off in history as to not tick off your mind how about and alternative: Carbon Nanotube reinforced composites. It was Dr Thrishantha Nanayakkara (formerly of the Mechanical Engineering Department and now a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University) who first brought forward the idea of studying the properties of such composites under the application of an electric field for applications in artificial muscle fibers (robotics) the real applications of such a composite would definitely go beyond robotics. Sounds interesting but nearly impossible to carry out inSri Lanka? Well not quite! Carbon nanotube reinforced polymer composites maybe prepared using conventional fabrication techniques already accessible in Sri Lanka and in our University.
So much for Batman, Smart Materials with some nanotechnology thrown into the mix. What can we say about Titanic then? Well, something I have been saying to some of the practical groups is how the constituents of the steel used for building the hull of the Titanic was the main cause for the "unsinkable" ship to be sunk. But really, it doesn't show the amount of forensic engineering that's involved in proving why is it is so.
The first step in doing a forensic investigation for a steel sample from such wreckage is to make sure that the sample we are taking is not damaged by in obtaining the sample. Then we'd have to eliminate the effects of corrosion which would of course not have been there during those tragic moments. Then starts the real detective work. Starting with visual observation, followed by micro structural examination using and optical microscope and even an electron microscope ("the desert" hold the key to some of greatest metallurgical mysteries), we then begin to understand how the grains may have affected the behaviour or whether there is anything suspicious lurking in the background. This will of course have to be supported by a chemical analysis (which can be done also by using those wonderful electron microscopes) can tell us if anything's amiss. Great, now we know what to expect! But it's all Qualitative. To get a quantitative idea we have to do some of those mechanical tests such as tensile and impact test trying to understand how the material will behave at those near freezing temperatures. Phew! That's quite a lot of work, but it's exactly like being one of those investigators on the famed TV series CSI, except that we do it for structures without worrying about body bags.
Well, it's all really nice and fine you might say and ask what we at the Department of Materials Engineering have been doing for the past couple of years. Well let me put it this way. Last year, an undergrad (who by the way is the Temporary staff of the Department now) worked on obtaining a relationship between ultrasonic attenuation (energy loss in sound waves traveling through a solid) and the hardness of a material by using Quantum Mechanics. It's a radically new way of measuring hardness compared to the Rockwell and Vickers method that Level 1 students are taught in our Labs. Some of us worked on the field of Advanced Ceramics to fabricate a Material with low energy dissipation and high relative permittivity for high frequency capacitor applications by studying composites of the nature MgO/BaxSr1-xTiO3 and right now some of our undergraduates are carrying out a research on how to fabricate a class of Smart Materials called piezoelectrics using Pb free materials. All of this has been and is going on inside those labs of ours!
Still interested? Well then I strongly encourage you to take up Materials Science and Engineering. Its Nerdy, it's exciting and with an undergraduate education in this field you're open to almost any field of engineering.
What you can achieve is only limited by your passion and imagination.
MaterialsEngineers Community
"Imaginaiton Engineered"
http://www.materialsengineers.co.cc/
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