Materials Forum

The U.S. industrial complex and its associated infrastructure are essential to the nation's quality of life, its industrial productivity, international competitiveness, and security. Each component of the infrastructure-such as highways, airports, water supply, waste treatment, energy supply, and power generation-represents a complex system requiring significant investment. Within that infrastructure both the private and government sectors have equipment and facilities that are subject to degradation by corrosion, which significantly reduces the lifetime, reliability, and functionality of structures and equipment, while also threatening human safety. The direct costs of corrosion to the U.S. economy represent 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and the total costs to society can be twice that or greater. Opportunities for savings through improved corrosion control exist in every economic sector. The workshop, Corrosion Education for the 21st Century, brought together corrosion specialists, leaders in materials and engineering education, government officials, and other interested parties. The workshop was also attended by members of NRC's Committee on Assessing Corrosion Education, who are carrying out a study on this topic. The workshop panelists and speakers were asked to give their personal perspectives on whether corrosion abatement is adequately addressed in our nation's engineering curricula and, if not, what issues need to be addressed to develop a comprehensive corrosion curriculum in undergraduate engineering. This proceedings consists of extended abstracts from the workshop's speakers that reflect their personal views as presented to the meeting. Proceedings of the Materials Forum 2007: Corrosion Education for the 21st Century summarizes this form.

Research in smart materials and structures seeks to apply multifunctional capabilities of new and existing materials to develop structures and systems that are capable of self-sensing and monitoring, self-diagnosis and prognosis with intelligence, self-healing and repair, and adaptive response to prevent loss of human life and catastrophe, to minimize maintenance and life-cycle costs, and to prolong service life. This book provides the critical knowledge and technological bases required for meeting one of the ultimate engineering challenges: the design and construction of smart structures and systems.

This book focuses on the emerging class of new materials characterized by ultra-fine microstrucures. The NATO ASI which produced this book was the first international scientific meeting devoted to a discussion of the mechanical properties and deformation behavior of materials having grain sizes down to a few nanometers. Topics covered include superplasticity, tribology, and the supermodulus effect. Review chapters cover a variety of other themes including synthesis, characterization, thermodynamic stability, and general physical properties. Much of the work is concerned with the issue of how far conventional techniques and concepts can be extended toward atomic scale probing. Another key issue concerns the structure of nanocrystalline materials, in particular, what is the structure and composition of the internal boundaries. These ultra-fine microstructures have proved to challenge even the finest probes that the materials science community has today.

The book covers self-healing concepts for all important material classes and their applications: polymers, ceramics, non-metallic and metallic coatings, alloys, nanocomposites, concretes and cements, as well as ionomers. Beginning with the inspiration from biological self-healing, its mimickry and conceptual transfer into approaches for the self-repair of artificially created materials, this book explains the strategies and mechanisms for the readers' basic understanding, then covers the different material classes and suitable self-healing concepts, giving examples for their application in practical situations. As the first book in this swiftly growing research field, it is of great interest to readers from many scientific and engineering disciplines, such as physics and chemistry, civil, architectural, mechanical, electronics and aerospace engineering.