Structure, property, processing, performance — and the relationships between them.
13 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
K. Eric Drexler · 1986
Argues that molecular manufacturing — building objects atom by atom using molecular assemblers — is a natural extension of the self-assembly already…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Engineering Property Data on Selected Ceramics, Volume III: Single Oxides
J. F. Lynch (ed.), Metals and Ceramics Information Center · 1981
Compiles measured mechanical, thermal and electrical property data for structural oxide ceramics such as alumina, establishing a common reference…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel
Henry Bessemer · 1856
Announces that blowing air through molten pig iron burns out its carbon and impurities directly, without added fuel, converting iron to steel in…
+9 more at this level
12 of 14 works
K. Eric Drexler
Argues that molecular manufacturing — building objects atom by atom using molecular assemblers — is a natural extension of the self-assembly already seen in biology, and treats runaway self-replication as an engineering safety problem to be designed against rather than an inevitability; the assemblers it proposes remain contested as physically implausible at the scale described.
J. F. Lynch (ed.), Metals and Ceramics Information Center
Compiles measured mechanical, thermal and electrical property data for structural oxide ceramics such as alumina, establishing a common reference dataset for design against a material class with no single dominant handbook.
Gerhardus H. Koch et al.
Quantifies the direct cost of metallic corrosion to the US economy at over $276 billion a year and argues that most of it is avoidable with corrosion-control technology already available but simply not applied.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of Defense
Standardises how polymer-matrix composite properties are measured, statistically qualified and reported, so that data generated by different laboratories and programmes can be trusted and compared.
Henry Bessemer
Announces that blowing air through molten pig iron burns out its carbon and impurities directly, without added fuel, converting iron to steel in minutes rather than days and making steel cheap enough to build with at structural scale.
Henry Marion Howe
Systematises the relationship between carbon content, heat treatment and the resulting microstructure of steel, turning steelmaking from craft practice governed by a smith's judgement into a subject with predictable, checkable rules.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alexander Findlay
Works through practical two- and three-component chemical systems using Gibbs's phase rule, translating an abstract thermodynamic law into the actual construction and reading of a phase diagram.
about 7.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026W. H. Bragg & W. L. Bragg
Derives the condition under which X-rays reflected from successive planes of a crystal lattice interfere constructively, turning X-ray diffraction into a quantitative tool for determining atomic structure rather than a curiosity of scattering.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hermann Staudinger
Proposes that materials such as rubber and cellulose are long chains of covalently bonded repeating units rather than colloidal aggregates of small molecules, against the prevailing view of the time, founding polymer chemistry.
link checked 17 Sept 2026G. I. Taylor
Introduces the dislocation as a line defect whose motion through a crystal lattice accounts for plastic deformation occurring at stresses far below the theoretical strength of a perfect crystal.
link checked 17 Sept 2026G. R. Irwin
Extends Griffith's energy criterion into the stress-intensity factor K, giving engineers a single number computable from a crack's geometry and loading that predicts whether it will propagate, turning fracture mechanics into a design tool rather than a theory of brittle glass.
John A. Thornton
Proposes the structure-zone model, arguing that a sputtered coating's microstructure is set predictably by the substrate temperature and gas pressure during deposition rather than by the target material alone.
This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.