Role of MSE in Engineering in Technology

MSE plays a central role in almost every engineering field. If you are studying to become a mechanical engineer you'll be mostly interested in the mechanical properties of the materials that you use in your designs. It will be important that you know how to choose the best materials and interface with materials engineers to understand why different materials perform the way they do. If you're working to become a chemical engineer, you may work to design and control chemical processes to produce solid, raw materials --- polymers, in particular. It's important to know that a material is not simply the product of the chemical reactants result of a chemical reaction - there's structure in the end product that is a result of your processing choices. If you're going to be an environmental engineer you may need to consider new materials solutions that can reduce human impact the on the environment: materials for photovoltaics, wind turbines, batteries, or water purification equipment. If you're an electrical engineer you may work with the highly optimized conductors, insulators, and semiconductors that comprise all electronic equipment. The list goes on. In short - any engineer that works with physical objects should understand the role that MSE has played in enabling the technology, and they should be cognizant of the potential that materials innovation has in pushing technologies further.

To drive this idea home, let's consider a piece of technology that's gone through rapid development over the past few decades and is very close to most college students' hearts: the mobile. The first commercial mobile phone was the Motorola Dynatac 8000x, released in 1983. This product weighed 1.5 lbs (0.75 kg), had a battery life of 30 minutes, and cost about $4000! It couldn't fit in your pocket. It served really one purpose: to allow the consumer to make mobile phone calls.

Over the next few decades the mobile phone developed into something much different. Current models like the iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy S22 (not shown in Figure 1.6.1) now fit easily in your pocket, cost and weigh an order of magnitude less than the Dynatec 8000x, and have a battery that can last a full day. Importantly, it's become much more than a phone, and has now displaced dozens of technologies that required separate devices in the past. It's been one of the most highly disruptive and displacive technologies ever created and - of course - many of the capabilities of this device have been enabled by advances in materials.

The evolution of the mobile phone. From <usell.com>, apparently.

Figure 1.6.1 The evolution of the mobile phone. From , apparently.

Exercise 1.6.1: MSE and Displacive Technology
Not Currently Assigned

  1. The current embodiment of the cell phone has displaced many old technologies. Come up with a list of technologies or devices that are obsolete (or near obsolete) now that so many functions are possible with contemporary mobile devices.

    If you have time and are interested, try to figure out what materials advances (there almost always is one) that enabled the displacement of some of the technologies on your list

    Spend about 5 minutes on this exercise. An example solution for the compass is provided.

What Materials Scientists and Engineers Do?

So - what do practicing materials scientists and engineers do? They explore the connections within the paradigm (processing-structure, structure-properties, properties-performance) to design, discover, characterize, and implement new materials. They do this using theory, experimentation, computer simulations, and data science. Many large technology companies (Apple, Samsung, Tesla, SpaceX, Boeing, Johnson and Johnson, Abbott, Dow-Corning, 3M, etc.) have Material Science divisions that are central to their operations. (Indeed, Dow-Corning calls itself "The Materials Science Company".)

What separates materials scientists and engineers from their engineering counterparts is that they focus on the material itself, not exactly the fabricated product. So, while a civil engineer may come up with a design for a bridge that uses concrete and steel, the materials scientists design, produce, and test the concrete and steel. A biomedical engineer may conceive of a new implantable device to host insulin-producing pancreatic cells for people with diabetes, the materials engineer figures out what material will serve to host the cells while being biocompatible, vascularizable, and protect the islet cells from destructive immune response. The list goes on - in short, if there's a material in the technology, there's a materials engineer behind it.

For this reason, MSE is a tremendously interdisciplinary field. You can do MSE in robotics, medicine, aerospace, product design, renewable energy, sports - whatever!