What is materials engineering?
In this video I am chatting to an award winning engineer to answer this exact question.
Hello!
Welcome.
I am Hayley Loren and if this is your very first time here, I am an engineer in the renewable
energy industry, and I am all about engineering.
I provide lots of tips help and advice on becoming an engineer and being an engineer,
interviews with really cool people and just general awesome cutting edge engineering stuff.
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Materials engineering isn’t something that we hear about that often, I mean you may have
heard of structural engineering and electrical engineering, but what is materials engineering?
I went to meet Anna Ploszajski who is an award winning engineer and science communicator
and she explains in detail what materials engineering is.
So lets jump to the conversation and I will see you here afterwards.
What is materials engineering?
So we look at all kinds of materials, so that might be metal, or paper or plastics or ceramics.
There are paper and plastics around us by the way.
I’m just looking around and you can’t see.
Wood, ice cream.
And we basically, a lot of the time we zoom into see what the atoms are doing inside and
the behaviour of atoms dictates the materials properties something might have.
So for example metal is very heavy and hard, and that’s because of what the atoms are
doing in there Is that they’re very dense and they resist fracture, or they resist breaking.
So we study what atoms are doing and how this influences a materials properties, and we
can use that knowledge to then design new materials, or to make cool new things out
of materials.
So at the moment I’m working on 3D printing, actually specifically 4D printing.
Whaat?
What is the 4th dimension?
It’s time.
Mind blown!
So these are smart materials, and smart materials have properties like their shape or sometimes
their colour and that property changes when the environment changes.
So in response to something.
So that could be heat, or light or increased precipitation in the atmosphere.
And 4D printing is where you can 3D print smart materials so that 4th dimension is that
you can 3d print a material so it can move with time.
So what sort of thing can you produce from that?
What would the product be?
Well some of the simplest examples are like a flat sheet, the other name for this is programmable
matter, so it’s basically you ebbed the function when you print the material that
when it gets more moist or when it hits light it folds up, or it pens out or it twists up
in some way, it basically moves.
Wow, so there’s so many different applications that are perceived to be suitable for this
kind of material.
One of which that I think is really cool is smart fabrics.
So fabrics that can get less insulating the warmer the body gets or more insulating the
colder it is outside.
So I did a couple of videos on smart fabrics and I kind of wish I had you involved with
them.
Hey welcome back.
So I hope you now think that materials engineering is pretty darn cool.
But remember that this is only one small sector of engineering, there are so many different
areas.
And if you if you rare keen to learn more about what engineering is and what engineers
do then you can then you can check out my what is engineering playlist.
Thank you so much for watching I hope you found this video useful.
If you did and you want to watch more then remember to subscribe and please do share
if you think that anyone will actually find this particularly useful.
If you want to know more about me then you can hop on over to my website and I’ll provide
a link underneath this video.
What I want to know from you is did you know about materials engineering before, let me
know in the comments, and actually what are your opinions about it.
I will see you next time.