Physical Foundations of Materials Science

Abstract

This book is a translation of a German textbook on Materials Science. It originates from a set of handouts at the RWTH Aachen university for students of materials engineering and of metal physics and was developed over the years to a compact manuscript. From the core of a physical metallurgy text it was extended to a broader coverage of materials in the frame of established scientific concepts. The text aims at providing the physical fundamentals to understand materials behavior and at preparing the reader for more advanced litarature on the subject. On the other hand the book is designed not to follow the common scheme of traditional introductory Materials Science texts which primarily introduce into the phenomenology of materials on an elementary level. Rather this book tries to bridge the scope from atomistic mechanisms to engineering properties of materials not staying away from mathematics where necessary. The manuscript does not pretend to give a comprehensive coverage of materials science, and as a textbook it has to find a compromise between comprehensive and in depth treatment of the subject. Such compromise is a matter of personal preference and taste. This is particularly true for the chapter on " physical properties" which is designed for materials engineering students who usually are less familiar with the basics of solid state physics. The text builds on the classical German text of Masing "Einfuhrung in die Metallkunde" (introduction to physical metallurgy) which represents the approach of the Gottingen school of physical metallurgy in the line of Tammann, Masing, Haasen, and Lucke. It is typical for this approach to develop a deeper understanding of the subject and to reduce complex phenomena to their essential physical mechanisms for refined analysis and prediction. Since understanding is essentially based on visualization the text provides an abundance of figures to guide the reader through the seemingly confusing but fascinating world of material