How Breakthroughs in Materials Science Shaping the Future of World?

Materials science refers to a part of engineering that consists of discovering and designing new materials and assessing their properties and structure. Since making any engineered device, structure or product require the right materials, materials science helps in determining what things are made of and why they behave as they do. The materials people utilize these days continue to have a vast impact on their daily lives, playing significant roles in energy use, transportation, human health, and industrial productivity. 

Previously, materials characterization and development has been done primarily by academic research institutions. Now, with relentless advances in microscopy, researchers can characterize the structure of materials down to the nanoscale and beyond. This will enable them to determine in unprecedented detail how the atoms that structure various materials function and interact with each other, even in various environmental conditions.

Materials science is a syncretic discipline hybridizing metallurgy, ceramics, solid-state physics, and chemistry. It is the first instance of a new academic discipline that emerges by fusion rather than fission. Materials science breakthroughs are likely to have a substantial impact on the future of technology. The lithium-ion battery, which powers everything from smartphones to autonomous cars nowadays, is one of the breakthroughs in materials science. The demands of these batteries have increased for several years majorly due to a significant drop in price.

Materials science is also an imperative part of forensic engineering and failure analysis, inspecting materials, products, structures or components which fail or do not function as anticipated that cause harm to property. 

In the past, many eventual materials science departments were metallurgy or ceramics engineering departments, emphasizing on metals and ceramics. By the time, the field has expanded to take account of every class of materials, such as ceramics, polymers, semiconductors, magnetic materials, biomaterials, and nanomaterials. They are generally classified into three distinct groups, ceramics, metals, and polymers. 

In recent years, the major change in materials science is the active usage of computer simulations to explore new materials, envisage properties, and understand phenomena. The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was recognizable. Invented by Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory was deservedly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986. This is not only a new microscopy technique, but it provides a way to probe the local properties of a sample directly with nanometer resolution. Hastily followed by the atomic force microscope (AFM), this new access to the nanoscale world arguably brought about the current ubiquity of nanotechnology.

The discovery of Carbyne by a team of scientists at Rice University claimed to strongest material ever. Unlike graphene, an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal structure, carbyne is considered to be a one-dimensional material with the thickness of one atom. It is twice as strong as graphene, with three times the tensile stiffness of diamond. 

Moreover, modern materials science has been evolved from metallurgy, a domain of materials science and engineering and involves both the science and the technology of metals. The growth of materials science is largely driven by the development of technologies such as semiconductors, biomaterials, and more.