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●Materials and its Properties – Slides

●Everyday Materials Song

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Why are materials used for certain purposes? Materials have to match their purpose.

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Why are materials used for certain purposes? Materials have to match their purpose.

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Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. A useful way to start thinking about matter is to think about the different materials, or substances, that it can be made into.

These materials make up the objects around us, and each of these materials has different properties or characteristics that can be observed or tested. Scientists, technologists and engineers investigate these materials - they experiment with them, compare their properties and relate the results to possible uses.

Types of materials

There are many different types of materials. Some examples of everyday materials are plastics, metals, fabric and glass.

Find out more about plastic products in the article Plastics and recycling.

Find out more about metals and what happens when they mix in the article Metals, alloys and metal compounds.

Ceramic materials are used to make traditional pottery, right through to advanced ceramics used in engineering and medicine. These inventions require scientists to understand the properties of minerals. You can learn more in the article What are minerals?

Wool is another traditional material that has undergone innovation. Investigate the properties of wool and how they link to its uses in the student activity Exploring wool fibre properties.

Some other fascinating, less well known materials include nanofibres, biological materials and composites.

Examples of properties

When we refer to the properties of a material, we are talking about features we can sense, measure or test. For example, if we have a sample of metal in front of us, we can identify that this material is grey, hard and shiny. Testing shows that this material is able to conduct heat and electricity and that it will react with an acid. These are some of the metal's properties.

It is important to decide if you are investigating the properties of a material or of an object. For example, are you identifying the properties of a spoon (an object), or are you looking at properties of the material it is made of, for example, stainless steel? Properties like shape and mass may be different for different objects, even when they are made of the same material. Density is a useful property for making comparisons between different materials.

Use this activity to learn more about density.

Other properties of materials can include their viscosity and conductivity.

A commonly talked about property is the state or phase of matter. There are currently five different states of matter that have been identified: solids, liquids, gases, plasma and Bose-Einstein condensate. The last two of these are much less well known.

It is important to note that the state of matter refers to the positioning and movement of the particles that make up a material and not the material itself.

You can learn more about states of matter in the article States of matter.

Physical versus chemical

Sometimes it can be useful to distinguish between different types of properties. Physical properties refer to properties that can be observed or measured without changing the composition of the material. Examples include colour, hardness and smell and freezing, melting and boiling points.

Chemical properties are discovered by observing chemical reactions. They include combustion point, reactivity with acids and toxicity.

Changing material properties

Processes such as mixing, heating and cooling can change materials and their properties. This can be useful as the new properties may be better suited for particular purposes. For example, mixing certain metals can create a material that is both strong and lightweight.

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Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. A useful way to start thinking about matter is to think about the different materials, or substances, that it can be made into.

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Want to know more about metallic glasses? Here are a few web articles: The case for bulk metallic glass, A brief overview of bulk metallic glasses, and Bulk Metallic Glasses and Their Composites: A Brief History of Diverging Fields.

Is metallic glass poised to come of age? Offers a great discussion about the future of metallic glass, take a look and see what you think.

In addition to their ultra-high strengths, metallic glasses are ~10 times springier than most metals. They have an incredible capacity to store and release elastic energy. Check out this fun bouncy ball experiment that talks more about metallic glass's very high coefficient of restitution (Note: "Liquidmetal" is a commercial name for a class of bulk metallic glasses).

At room temperature, metallic glasses may be superheroes in strength, but at higher temperatures (close to what we call the glass transition temperature), they soften a lot and have the potential to be shaped easily into complicated shapes just like plastic. You can learn more about thermoplastic forming of metallic glasses here: Thermoplastic blow molding of metals, Bulk Metallic Glasses: Constructing the Future, and Processing of BMGs.

Unlike metals that shrink while solidifying from molten liquid, metallic glasses don't. This allows for them to be cast directly into precise shapes in a single molding step. This combined with excellent surface finish right out of the mold helps cut overall fabrication costs. Here's how one company called LiquidmetalR Technologies Inc. uses injection molding to produce commercial metallic glass products with complex geometries.

Most metallic materials are polycrystalline, meaning they are made of many crystallites or grains. In each of these grains are atoms that are arranged in an orderly manner but the areas where the grains meet are called ' grain boundaries ' that have atoms with stretched or broken bonds. Grain boundaries are weak spots that can get preferentially attacked by chemicals. A metallic glass, thanks to its amorphous structure, has neither grains nor grain boundaries and so is more resistant to chemical attack or corrosion. Absence of grain boundaries is also what leads to atomistically smooth, mirror-like surfaces thereby reducing wear considerably.

It was mentioned in the movie that we are unable to build large structures out of metallic glasses yet because they do not exhibit adequate toughness. So what exactly is 'toughness'? In Materials Science, one definition of toughness is the amount of energy per unit volume that a material can absorb before rupturing. It is a measure of the combination of material's strength and ductility. Strength is determined by the force it takes to get a material to yield or deform plastically. And ductility is the ability of the material to plastically deform i.e., undergo a permanent change of shape (elongate, bend, dent etc.) and NOT break catastrophically under load. For example, if you hit a bar of metal with a hammer it bends or gets dented, i.e., it absorbs energy and deforms plastically before it ruptures or fails eventually. This bar of metal has decent (but not super high) strength and is very tough due to all the plastic deformation it can undergo before breaking. But if you hit a ceramic bowl or your window glass with a hammer, it breaks or shatters immediately with no plastic deformation whatsoever. These materials have very high strengths but no ductility and therefore have very low toughness values. Many engineering polymers have very low strength and toughness values. Metallic glasses fall somewhere in between. They have ultra-high strengths and are capable of small amount of plastic deformation (attributed to their inherent metallic bonding). So, they are much tougher than your window glass but not nearly as tough as metals. This means that it takes a lot of force for them to yield or plastically deform, but once they yield they have limited ductility. Rather, they break or fracture without warning. So, they are not tough enough for load bearing applications yet. Toughness can be depicted graphically using what we call a stress-strain curve. It is defined as the area under the curve which basically is a measure of the total energy absorbed by the material until failure. The larger the area, the tougher the material.

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What is metallic glass? - Ashwini Bharathula

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Steel and plastic are essential to much of our infrastructure and technology. Steel is strong and hard, but difficult to shape intricately. Plastic can take on just about any form, but it's weak and soft. Wouldn't it be nice if there were one material as strong as the strongest steel and as shapeable as plastic?

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Lessons like this usually end up leading to more learning. While writing it, I found myself barrelling head first down several rabbit holes that took me to even more information and interesting content. Don't say I didn't warn you if you end up wondering where a few hours have gone. Enjoy!

1. Aerogels are another example of how NASA technology is working its way into our everyday lives. It's hard to imagine that scientists began developing them in the 1930s.
2. Invisibility cloaks - This invention could be used in a variety of mischievous applications. This is a brief article that leads you to a 40+ minute podcast.
3. Super-hydrophobic surfaces can protect and extend life and usability of materials by repelling water while keeping them dry. This link explains the Math that accompanies the Science.
4. Hyperdiamonds are a design material with medical applications. Start your reading here http://www.hyperdiamond-projec...
5. Metallic Glass - technical, but still digestible information here
6. Metallic Foam - one stop information shop at www.metalfoam.net
7. The classic "transparent aluminum" scene from Star Trek IV The Voyage Home where McCoy and Scotty share the future. Take note of the strategically placed Apple Computer.
Here is a video about how transparent aluminum or Aluminum Oxynitride(ALON) is made.
8. Light transmitting concrete seems to have become very possible and is beginning to make its way into design and construction. With advances in manufacturing the costs will continue to decrease.
9. Self-repairing concrete uses dormant little creatures (a.k.a bacteria) that come to life and produce limestone when they get wet. Sounds like a movie plot!
10. Although it wasn't mentioned, D3O is a fascinating futuristic material that is being used to make life better and safer today. The future is here.

Can't get enough? Check this out from the good folks at Harvard's Wyss Institute.
And for all of your other University-type studies or simply for sheer nerdery, check this out: Nature.com.

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"Scotty, we need transparent aluminum now!" "But Jim, we don't have the power or technology to do it!" That was 1986. It's 2018, and we do now. This futuristic material in Star Trek IV came from a faraway future and 30 years later, that faraway future is our present reality.

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Organizing Properties: Crash Course Kids #35.1

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Metals & Ceramics: Crash Course Engineering #19

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Physical Properties of Materials | Science Video For Kids | Kids Academy

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SafeYouTube lets you share videos on YouTube easily, without distracting third-party content or advertisements.

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