Material Classes

Solid materials have been conventionally grouped into basic classifications: metals, ceramics, and polymers. This scheme is based primarily on chemical makeup and atomic structure, and most materials fall into one distinct grouping or another, although there are some intermediates. In addition, there are three other groups of important engineering materials--composites, semi-conductors and biomaterials. Composites consist of two or more different materials, where as semiconductors are utilized because of their unusual electrical characteristics; biomaterials are implanted into the human body. We will only cover composities for this scope of the course.