So, what is Matter Realisations? Well, at one level, Matter Realisations is a play on words. We want to materialise things (or processes). Hopefully this play on words makes us easier to remember.
Matter Realisations is a Materials Science and Engineering company. Our business is consulting. We firmly believe in using the best material for the job. It should be noted that "best" usually needs to be defined for every application, and likely will change with time.
Below you will find one way to describe how materials properties influence design and performance. You will also find links to the periodic table, definitions, etc. A common request/requirement is with/about experience. Do we have any, what kind, etc.
In a lot of places, materials science and engineering, materials science, and materials engineering all mean the same thing, that being the same thing as what used to be called metallurgy or metallurgical engineering twenty years ago. It's "How do we find the cheapest piece of steel which can be used?". (Occasionally "steel" is replaced with concrete, aluminum, wood, etc.)
We really have advanced our knowledge of materials a lot in many ways. Fibre optic glass that is kilometers long, absorbs less light than our living room window. Razor blades are not simple steel sharp edges, they have multiple coatings, possibly including diamond-like carbon, teflon, and platinum. Our golf clubs are not wooden shafts with a wood or metal head. We have replacements for various kinds of body parts, made of cobalt-chromium alloys, powder metallurgical titanium alloys, ultra high molecular weight polyethylene, shape memory alloys, etc. And then you can look at the semiconductor and nanotechnology industries, where at the limit they are placing individual atoms exactly where they want them as they build up a "structure".
Materials Science and Engineering is to engineering (or society in general), very similar to what "bread flour" is to all uses of flour in cooking and baking.
For most people involved with cooking on a "casual" basis, you either end up buying "all purpose" flour or you buy bleached bread flour. Bread flour is stronger, due to its higher protein content (gluten).
If you are making white bread, bleached white bread flour works fine. It produces a loaf of bread with good structure, usually well risen with a nice crust. It doesn't take too long to bake, and doesn't require strange ingredients. Relatively cheap. Pretty much the same as irons and steels in structural applications.
If you know anything about cooking, or eating, you must know there are many different kinds of flour: bleached bread flour, "all purpose" flour, whole wheat flour, oat flour, rye flour, rice flour, pea flour, corn meal, corn starch, etc.
All purpose flour is sort of like all season tires, they are both a compromise to all conditions likely to be seen. All purpose flour hardly ever is bad to use; but then again, it is hardly ever great.
A lot of people who use bread flour, are making bread. Sort of like making bridges or automobiles. The plain old bread flour works, it makes a loaf of bread with the right structure and strength. Slap enough butter on it, pile on meats, lettuce, peanut butter or what have you, and another piece of bread and you have a good sandwich. You probably can't taste the bread, but it does keep your hands and clothes clean when you are eating the sandwich. Which after all is the purpose of enclosing the "meal" in bread. The meal is all the other engineering which goes into a project.
The adventurous cook, might even mix in a little whole wheat flour, or some whole grains, or dried fruit into the flour, to make a slightly little different bread. This is very much like the engineer deciding to use a slightly different alloy than what is normally used. Things usually work out, because we are just making small changes to basically, bleached bread flour.
But the average cook, or even the adventuous cook, is going to get lost if you want them to produce something much different than bread. If you bake a cake with bread flour, it is either going to be a hockey puck or a piece of rubber. Phyllo dough? Even the adventuous cook is just going to make a bunch of stuff which needs to be thrown in the garbage, and then go buy a package of phyllo dough at the store (in the freezer section). But, there are breads that will quickly exhaust the abilities of the even the adventurous cook. The ancient recipes for pumpernickel are probably the worst in this regard. Who has ever heard of baking (actually steaming) bread for 19 hours?
However, if you do start to consume these other kinds of "bread", you need to know about them from the very beginning. Peanut butter and jam probably works fine on the generic white bread, it doesn't work worth a darn on that ancient pumpernickel. But you can make some wonderful sandwiches with pumpernickel; even the modern varieties which don't take 3/4 of a day to make.
Get the materials scientists and engineers "in the loop" early! They could easily have a better solution, but the properties are much different than the "generic" solution. And the final design will depend critically on knowing just what you are building with!
Engineers (and scientists, technicians, etc.) make "things" out of "something". Materials Science and Engineering (MS&E) is the study of the "something" that these "things" are made out of. How to make the something from raw materials, how to process the something for service, how this something interacts with its environment, why this something failed in service.
Engineering design usually starts with an assumption as to what materials to use in construction. In structural applications, this assumption provides good estimates for the stiffness and density, and usually provides estimates for a range of strength, toughness, and other properties of interest. Bringing materials science and engineering into the design process early, complicates the early design since these assumptions about stiffness, density, etc. cannot be made. However, making changes to the construction materials at this point is less expensive than making these changes later on.
For a long time, most things were designed with little/insufficient regard as to what material should be used. In the Stone Age, we built things with stone. Sometimes we thought about what kind of stone, but often this thought was overshadowed by the kind of stone that was locally available. Stone is an ordinary kind of material, a little brittle and pretty much useless in tension.
Time advances, and we see the Copper Age. Copper can be found as the native metal, and unlike stone it is ductile and malleable, and it has useful strength in tension (or torsion/shear). Pretty much all tools are made of copper, and other things tend to be built out of what is available locally and can be "worked" with copper tools.
The Bronze Age is an advance on copper, whereby we are starting to learn about alloying. In most applications of the day, bronze is much better than copper. Everything else is built according to what is available locally and can be worked with bronze tools. There is probably the odd application which is best built of copper, a material which is well known. Stone too still has its place.
We are in the Iron Age in some way, and everything tends to be made of iron, or its close alloys. The most common, close alloys of iron in use are the steels, and cast irons. In the early part of the Iron Age, things were similar to the Bronze, Copper and Stone Ages; the higher technology things were made of the dominant material of the age, whereas other things tended to be made from what was locally available. Since the Iron Age began, we have also learned to produce aluminum and we have found a way to produce castable stone (cement and concrete).
We do have a hidden daemon in our dependence on iron. Like water, it is an anomalous material. Very few substances undergo a increase in volume upon cooling when going through some kind of phase change. Water does. If water didn't expand upon freezing, we might not be here. Certainly a lot of aquatic species in cold climates wouldn't be here.
Iron has a different kind of anomaly, an anomaly based on its magnetic properties. Civilisation has been bitten by this anomaly in the past, and people have suffered. Weakly "austenitic" stainless steels will transform into a magnetic structure when stressed, and become strongly magnetic doing so. The crystal structure that iron's magnetic property anomalously stabilizes suffers from ductile to brittle transitions. What works fine in the tropics, may not work well in temperate climates. Can't happen? Re-nitrogenised steels were considered for automobiles. These steels aren't very good for Canada (or Siberia).
We might not think about it very often, but the most common component of our ecosystem is an anomalous material: water. Very few materials have a less dense solid phase than the liquid phase. Millions of marine species are very thankful that ice floats. This comes along with things like a high heat capacity and high latent heats of fusion (melting) and evaporation (boiling). Anything that is largely made of water can regulate its temperature by making use of the high thermal mass, and if necessary lose heat by evaporating water.
The usefulness of iron in the Iron Age is due in part to it being an anomalous material. Normally elements tend to arrange themselves to have more nearest neighbour atoms, and higher forms of crystalline symmetry as the temperature gets closer to absolute zero (-273 Celsius). Iron doesn't do this, it transforms from a very symmetric solid at high temperatures (austenite, face centered cubic) to a less symmetric solid (ferrite, body centered cubic) at low temperatures. The reason for iron behaving in this strange way, is its tremendously strong magnetic properties. In steels, this solid state transformation is augmented by some useful differences in solubility for both large and small kinds of common atoms (elements) like carbon.
This inverted symmetry transformation, along with the useful differences in the solubility of some common elements, has made iron especially useful, in that many mechanical properties of iron alloys can be usefully changed just by changing the temperature through one or more cycles. Even more useful changes can be effected by some mechanical deformation and these temperature changes.
Two variations on a famous saying/maxim are relevent in a situation where a material is extremely commonplace.
If all you have is a hammer,
every problem is a nail,
(sometimes given as "When all you have is a hammer,")
- Baruch's Law
or
If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you will see every problem as a nail.
- Abraham Maslow
This is especially true when that material is anomalous. With one or two materials in a dominant position, most people trained in the use of a material, only learn about the dominant material. If you are going to build a widget, it gets built out of the dominant material. Only if that doesn't work (well), is consideration given to other materials. If it appears that the original (anomalous) material isn't good enough for the application, a materials person or a designer may strive to find a better material based on rules of thumb derived for the anomalous material. For a small increase in performance, the rules of thumb may still lead one to a better material. At some point, applying the rules of thumb developed for the dominant (anomalous) material clearly doesn't lead to a better material for the application.
The principle of Matter Realisations started in metallurgy, but didn't specialise in one of the three main subdisciplines: extractive, physical, mechanical. He has worked on many different projects. Special study areas included: extracting Au, Ag, PGE from magnetite sands, computer simulation, technical ceramics in gas turbines and fusion reactors, and the economics of the production of large, welded steel, pressure vessels. From there, he added radiation effects, statistical mechanics, advanced mathematics, 5+ years experience at a research nuclear reactor, 1 year at a biotechnology company working on a photochemical reactor and a an isotope production process using quaternary amine bilayers.
Having an understanding of how the something is meant to work, or interact with its environment, can't but help to increase the chance of finding the best material for the job. Within the context of concurrent engineering and teamwork, the widely experienced materials engineer may be able to suggest alternative solutions that can accomplish the task in a similar or superior way.
Follow this MS&E link for more. Or, perhaps you would like to see one engineer's opinion as to what engineering is, and how it fits in to society.