Materials science and engineering (MSE) is one of the oldest engineering disciplines. The origins of the MSE Department at the University of Maryland are relatively recent. The development of materials science education at Maryland followed the national progression of this discipline in the 1950s, which merged metallurgy with other fields such as ceramic science, polymer science and solid state physics. The early 1960’s saw a rapid expansion in funding for science, largely inspired by the 1957 launch of Sputnik, which led to the creation of both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA, the predecessor of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency or DARPA).
The Genesis of Materials Science and Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at the University of Maryland (UMD) grew out of the metallurgy curriculum within the department of Chemical Engineering, which began roughly in 1950-1951 with the arrival of Eugene P. Klier and William A. Pennington. Professor Pennington was an international expert in metallurgy, and became the President of the American Society for Metals (ASM) in 1961. He offered courses in metallurgy at the undergraduate level through the Chemical Engineering Department until 1962.
The graduate degree program in Materials Engineering at the UMD was created in 1962, as part of the initiative to create the new discipline to be called Materials Science and Engineering through funding by ARPA of Interdisciplinary Laboratories (IDL’s) in Materials Research. The Materials Science Research Centers as stated by ARPA were to “establish an interdisciplinary materials research program and shall furnish the necessary personnel and facilities for the conduct of research in the science of materials.” The University of Maryland was one of the twelve universities to receive ARPA Materials Research IDL grants during the years from 1960-1962.
The Rise of Interdisciplinary Laboratories
In 1962, as the first wave of IDLs was establishing itself, an administrative memo ARPA sent to them asserted: “You have to a great extent defined what is meant-at least in your university-by material sciences by listing in your proposals to us the names of individuals you believe to be the core of the program at your institution. ARPA funding (with assistance from the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) established a series of what it called Interdisciplinary Laboratories (IDLs) on university campuses. ARPA asked these universities to physically move their researchers with an interest in materials (in the early years, primarily physicists, chemists, metallurgists, and electrical engineers), and the tools they shared, into a common physical space.
The Center was initially funded at $912,000 and directed by an interdepartmental committee, headed by Professor Ralph D Myers, a Solid State theorist, and which included Physics Professors Rolfe Glover, Richard Ferrell, and Edward Stern, as well as Dr. Homer Schamp of the Molecular Physics Institute and Professor Ellis Lippincott of Chemistry. A major focus of the research carried out in this center was on superconductivity. In 1968, administration of the ARPA IDL was transferred to the Center for Materials Research, headed by Ellis Lippincott, Department of Chemistry; research proposals were reviewed and awarded to member of the Departments of Chemistry and of Physics, and especially to members of the materials group, thus providing very significant support for their budding research activity. The last Director of the Center was Robert L.
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Formal Creation of the Materials Engineering Program
At the University of Maryland, the Materials Engineering (MatEng) program was formally created in 1962 as part of the “General Engineering B.S. Degree Program”. It was administered by Chemical Engineering and the faculty members affiliated with the program were in the Department of Chemical Engineering as well as Mechanical Engineering. The General Engineering Degree was ABET accredited, but not the program in materials, which received its accreditation at a later date.
The Directorship rotated between the members of the Materials Engineering program; they included Professor Ronald Armstrong, who was hired by Mechanical Engineering (ME) at the beginning of the 1968 spring term, and served as the Director of the Engineering Materials Program from 1968-1969. It also included Professor Richard Arsenault, who was hired by Mechanical Engineering in 1967, and subsequently transferred to Chemical Engineering; he directed the program from 1969-1970. Professor M J “John” Marcinkowski was subsequently hired in Mechanical Engineering in the 1970’s. These three professors joined with ME Professor Robert Asimow, and Professors Leonard Skolnick and Pedro Bolsaitis in Chemical Engineering, to teach and conduct research in the Engineering Materials Graduate Program.
Three "central facilities" were established during this time: one on mechanical testing supervised by Richard Arsenault; one on electron microscopy supervised by John Marcinkowski with assistant, M.E. (Gene) Taylor; and one on x-ray diffraction supervised by Ronald Armstrong with assistance from A.C. Raghuram and C. Cm. Wu. From 1969 - 1973, the total research article citations for members of the UM Engineering Materials Group were among the top ten most cited.
Program Directorship and Faculty Expansion
Professor Ian Spain transferred from the Institute for Molecular Physics to the Materials Engineering Program in Chemical Engineering in 1971 as Director, a position he held until 1978. The Program Directorship continued to rotate frequently in later years, with Professor Richard Arsenault in 1979, Professor Ted Smith of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, an expert in polymers, in 1981, and Dean George Dieter as Acting Director twice: in 1980 and in 1982. In 1985 Professor Sreeramamurthy Ankem joined the Materials Engineering program, bringing further expertise in the mechanical properties of metal alloys. He received his Ph.D.
Formation of the Department of Materials and Nuclear Engineering
In September 1986 the Reliability Engineering Program was launched, consisting of three faculty members from Nuclear Engineering (Marvin Roush, Mohamed Modarres and Ali Mosleh). The Reliability Engineering Program grew from the Nuclear Engineering program and coincided with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s need for risk and reliability based licensing of nuclear reactors. In 1989, the Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department, chaired by Professor Marvin Roush and the Materials Engineering Program, directed by Professor Manfred Wuttig were reorganized to form the new Department of Materials and Nuclear Engineering (MNE), consisting of 13 Faculty, which also coincided with the formation of a separate Chemical Engineering Department.
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Frank Munno, who had joined the Nuclear Engineering Program in Chemical Engineering in 1957, was chosen as its first Chair, but stepped down soon thereafter, and Professor Wuttig became Interim Chair of MNE. Other Faculty included Joseph Silverman, Yih-Yun Hsu, Richard Arsenault, Mohammed Modarres, Sreeramurthy Ankem, Lourdes Salamanca-Riba, Gary Pertmer, Kazys Almenas, Ali Mosleh and Isabel Lloyd.
New Faculty and the Evolution of MSE
In 1992 five new faculty were added to the Department. Robert Briber, who had been a NIST research scientist working on polymer characterization using neutron and X-ray scattering joined the MNE Department as an Assistant Professor, beginning the program in soft materials, along with a strong program in neutron scattering. In 1995 two new faculty were hired in MNE. Professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who had been a researcher specializing in complex oxides, including piezoelectrics, as well as in electron microscopy at Bellcore Labs joined the MNE department. Professor Ramesh would go on to lead one of the interdisciplinary research groups in the University of Maryland’s NSF-Materials Research and Engineering Center (MRSEC) in 1996. Luz Martinez-Miranda was hired as an Assistant Professor; her research was in liquid crystals and in materials characterization using x-ray scattering and x-ray diffraction. In December of that year Materials Science and Engineering became a new B.S.
Continued Growth and Specialization
In 1999 Ichiro Takeuchi, whose research was in superconductivity and scanning microwave microscopy joined the Department as an Assistant Professor after a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received his PhD from the Physics Department at the UM, working with T. Venketessan. He would go on to develop the programs in combinatorial materials discovery, in elastocaloric materials and in machine learning in the Department. In spring of that same year, the first B.S. degrees in MSE were given. Between 1996 and 2003, the MSE played a leadership role in the following centers: the University of Maryland NSF-MRSEC (R.
Reorganization and Focus on Materials Science
During the fall of 2002, the college PCC, and campus PCC committees approved the reorganization of the department into the Materials Science and Engineering Department, with the Reliability program (including Professors Marvin Roush, Mohamed Modarres, Ali Mosleh, Joseph Bernstein, Carol Smidt and Michel Cukier, who had just joined MNE) and Nuclear program (which included Lothar Wolf, Mirela Gavrilas and Gary Pertmer) transferred to Mechanical Engineering; Wolf retired shortly thereafter, while Gavrilas took a position at the NRC. The Faculty Senate gave the final approval during December 2002 and the new Department started its operations during spring of 2003. As a result of the reorganization the B.S.
Leadership and New Initiatives
In mid-2003, Professor Christou was the named as the first Chair of the new MSE Department. Robert Briber became Chair of the recently reorganized MSE Department on July 1, 2003. At that time there were 13 faculty in the Department: Robert Briber, Mohamad Al-Sheikhly, Rama Ankem, Aris Christou, Isabel Lloyd, Luz Martinez-Miranda, Gottleib Oehrlein, Ray Phaneuf, Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Alex Roytburd, Gary Rubloff, Lourdes Salamanca-Riba, Ichiro Takeuchi and Manfred Wuttig. With a new name and mission focused the on field of materials science and engineering the department embarked on a goal of growing the educational and research programs.
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Professors Takeuchi, Rubloff and Williams (physics) were awarded a $750K grant from the Keck Foundation to establish the Keck Lab for Combinatorial Nanosynthesis and Multiscale Characterization. This facility included a new pulsed laser deposition system located in the recently opened Jeong H. In October 2004 the Deans of the Colleges of the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the Computer Mathematical and Physical Sciences and the College of Life Sciences announced the formation of the Maryland NanoCenter to oversee the facilities in the Kim Engineering building including the FabLab clean room and the Nanoscale Imaging, Spectroscopy and Properties Lab for electron microscopy (now the AIM Lab). MSE Professor Gary Rubloff was the founding director of the NanoCenter which was administered by the Institute of Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP).
During the same time period, two new transmission electron microscopes (TEM) were installed in the NISP Lab, a JEOL 2100F high resolution field emission TEM and a general purpose LaB6 JEOL 2100 TEM. In July 2006 the Maryland General Assembly approved $3.65 million in funding for the Maryland NanoCenter, drawn from the state’s “Sunny Day Fund” and former Maryland Governor Robert Erlich’s nanotechnology initiative. The undergraduate enrollment in the B.S. MSE program remained relatively low from 2003 through 2008 at about 35 students. In 2009 the Department saw a steady increase in the undergraduate enrollment due to an enhanced recruiting effort by the faculty with a series of open houses for high school seniors in the fall and spring semesters.
Expanding Faculty Expertise
In August 2005 Dr. John Cumings joined the MSE Department as an assistant professor with an expertise in electron microscopy and nanotechnology. Prior to arriving at UMD, Dr. Cumings was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physics at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. Dr. Joonil Seog joined the MSE Department in August 2006 as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Bioengineering Department. Dr. Seog’s expertise has expertise in the areas of biomaterials and nanoscale structural characterization of biomolecules. Dr. Seog was a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Medical School and received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and the Polymer Science and Technology program at MIT. In 2015 Dr.
In August 2007 Dr. Oded Rabin joined the MSE Department with a joint appointment in IREAP. Dr. Rabin’s expertise is in the synthesis and physical properties of nanowires and porous thin films and electrical, optical and thermal transport in low dimensional systems. Prior to arriving at UMD was a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Rabin received his Ph.D. By this time materials for energy harvesting and storage was becoming the new focus of the Department.
Focus on Energy and Nanomaterials
Professor Eric Wachsman joined the MSE Department in July 2009 as the William L. Crentz Centennial Chair in Energy Research and later (2017) the Director of the University of Maryland Energy Research Center (UMERC, now the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, MEII). Dr. Wachsman has a joint appointment in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department. Professor Wachsman’s expertise is in ceramics materials and electrochemistry with applications to fuel cells, batteries, sensor and other applications. Prior to his appointment as the Director of UMERC, Dr.
In August 2011 Dr. Liangbing Hu joined the MSE Department and as a member of the recently formed University of Maryland Energy Research Center. Dr. Hu’s expertise was in nanomaterials and cellulose based materials. Before starting his faculty appointment at UMD, Dr. Hu received his Ph.D. Dr. Marina Leite joined the Department in August 2013 with a joint appointment in IREAP. Dr. Leite’s expertise is in the areas of photovoltaics, energy storage and scanning probe microscopies. Prior to joining the MSE Department and IREAP at UMD, Dr. Dr. Yifei Mo also joined the Department in August of 2013, bringing with him expertise in Computational Materials Science. Dr. Mo had received his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madision and had previously been a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Gerbrand Ceder at MIT.
Research Growth and Continued Evolution
Starting with the reorganization of the Department to focus on the field of materials science and engineering coupled with hiring of new faculty, the Department research expenditures increased from $6.1M to $13.8M from 2003 and 2014. On July 1, 2015, Raymond Phaneuf was appointed as the Interim Chair of the Department. The period between this and the present saw no new faculty hires, and Alex Roytburd retired to Professor Emeritus status. It was a time of continued growth for the Department both in terms of research expenditures, reaching $14.6 Million by FY17/18, and number of publications, reaching 135 by that same year. The Department reached a rank…
Defining a Material
Discussing the history of materials science requires grappling with the question of what constitutes a material in the first place. What distinguishes materials from mere matter? The venerable historian of metallurgy Cyril Stanley Smith posed this question in 1968, in the course of a lecture honoring the founder of the History of Science Society, George Sarton. A focus on matter, he determined, had promoted an atomistic-that is, reductionist-attitude that had dominated science for centuries. Atomism had proved fruitful for understanding the composition of matter, but it had done little to help people put matter to work.
Matter, in Smith’s way of thinking, encompasses all the stuff of the world. The science dedicated to understanding it has long focused on making the most general scientific claims possible about its most elemental components. Materials, on the other hand, are those arrangements of matter whose properties make them conducive to human use. This meaning is rather obvious in languages other than English. German, for instance, refers to materials as Werkstoffe-substances that can do work. The properties of such substances can be discerned through careful observation, but they often resist easy explanation-not to mention prediction-in terms of the sorts of approaches developed for describing atoms and their constituents.
This approach to distinguishing matter from materials means that whether or not something is a material is contingent. Meteoric iron-which can be found on the surface of the earth and therefore did not require mining and smelting technologies to access-has always been matter, but it only became a material when human beings picked it up and began to fashion it into jewelry, tools, and weapons.
The Interdisciplinary Nature of Materials Science
At its beginning, materials science was an example of a new way of organizing scientific labor that emerged during the Cold War: the interdiscipline. Materials science reflected dwindling confidence that existing disciplinary silos contained the stores necessary to confront the political and technoscientific challenges of the day. Yet even as materials science exemplified this broader trend, it followed its own distinctive path. On the surface, the two have much in common. Both linked expertise from many established specialties. Both used that combined expertise to confront a shared set of problems-materials R&D problems in the case of materials science, the features and behavior of systems that rely on feedback mechanisms in the case of cybernetics. But beyond that, the similarities dissipate.
In the case of cybernetics, the focal point of the interdiscipline was intellectual; it centered on the conviction that systems of many types, at many scales, and studied by many fields shared structural features. The impetus for materials science, on the other hand, was institutional. Although a few individuals, such as Arthur von Hippel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been pushing increased support for interdisciplinary collaboration around materials since the 1940s, the organic efforts of these individuals were insufficient to launch a movement of any scale or stability. Materials science was constructed from the top down, through an institutional rearrangement of existing disciplinary practices. But top-down, commanded interdisciplines like materials science were actually more common in the history of postwar science, and more indicative of its guiding ethos.
Notably, cybernetics fizzled out, whereas materials science, which was institutionally entrenched, not only survived but was used as a model for later interdisciplines such as nanotechnology. The rise of materials science roughly coincided with a parallel rise in systematic thinking about how both scientific knowledge and technology progress, and how they can be encouraged to interact more effectively. Vannevar Bush’s manifesto Science-The Endless Frontier, penned in 1945, exerted considerable influence on postwar research policy. By the 1960s, the common wisdom in science policy circles was that research could be decomposed into three capacious categories: fundamental research, applied research, and development.
The Linear Model of Innovation
Many successful examples of materials science appeared at the time to uphold the linear model, at least superficially. Much of the Manhattan Project involved developing deeper understanding of the basic metallurgy of uranium and plutonium. The development of the transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947 rested on improved understanding of the electrical behavior of semiconductors, which spurred the realization that semiconducting devices could replicate the amplifying and rectifying functions of vacuum tubes. As the structures of macromolecules like proteins and DNA were uncovered, so too were clues about how to exploit those structures. The mid-century science of matter could boast a strong track record of transforming matter into materials.
Physical space was itself perceived as a tool to spark fruitful interdisciplinary connection. Offices in Penn’s Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM), one of ARPA’s first IDLs, were arrayed so that individuals with different disciplinary expertise, but similar topical interests, would be placed in close proximity. Instruments and tools were located in the center of the facility, and were to be shared among disciplinary groups, hedging against their being dominated by, or optimized for, one or another of them. What counted as successful interdisciplinary interaction within the LRSM, however, was vague. The laboratory produced few co-authored papers from people in different disciplines, although informal consultation was more common.
Aluminum-Lithium Alloys
Aluminum-lithium alloys have been the subject of extensive research and development. Aluminum-Lithium Alloys, Proceedings of the First International Aluminum-Lithium Conference, Stone Mountain, GA, May 19-21, 1980, T. H. Sanders, Jr. and E. A. Aluminum-Lithium Alloys, Proceedings of the Second International Aluminum-Lithium Conference, Monterey, CA, April 12-14, 1983, T. H. Sanders, Jr. and E. A. E.A. Starke, Jr. and F.S. Lin:Metall. Trans. A, 1982, vol. 13A, p.
Mechanical Metallurgy
Mechanical Metallurgy, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1976, p. George E. Dieter.
Plastic Deformation
Plastic Deformation of Sinsle Crystals 117 the fact that the size of a stable dislocation pile-up is smaller at T2 because of increased thermal fluctuations.
Fatigue of Metals
Failure of metals like uranium which have highly anisotropic thermal-expansion coefficients mnder repeated heating and cooling is also called thermal fatigue.
Creep in Metals
Recent Advances in Knowledge Concerning the Process of Creep in Metals, "Progress in Metal Physics," vol.
Statistical Methods
Statistical Methods for Research Workers," 12th ed., Hafner Publishing Company, New York, 1954.
Plastic Forming of Metals
Plastic Forming of Metals produced in deep drawing. The bulge test has been shown^to correlate with press performance under conditions where the Olsen cupping test and Rockwell hardness gave poor correlation with performance.
Rolling
The geometry of rolling is uniquely defined by the ratios hf/R, hf/ho, orR/ho and q. Show that hy/R is independent of the scale of the operation and that equivalent stress states are produced for equal values of hf/R. The residual stresses produced in rolling are proportional to {hf/LY, where L is the length of the arc of contact. ^From the geometry of rolling show that {hf/LY = {hf/R)[{\m -q)/q], where q = [{h, -/i/)Ao]100.
Extrusion
For extrusion through a flat die the strain rate is given approximately by e = (Qv/D) In R, where v is the ram velocity, D is the billet diameter, and R is the extrusion ratio. ^For the conditions given in Prob. 20-3 compare the strain rates and the time the metal is in the die for a 2 in. /sec and 10 in. /sec ram speed.