Chemistry

Material Science and Chemical Metallurgy

Materials science and engineering, involves the discovery and design of new materials.  Many of the most pressing scientific problems humans currently face are due to the limitations of the materials that are available and, as a result, major breakthroughs in materials science are likely to affect the future of technology significantly. Materials scientists lay stress on understanding how the history of a material influences its structure, and thus its properties and performance. Material science plays an important role in metallurgy too. Powder metallurgy is a term covering a wide range of ways in which materials or components are made from metal powders. They can avoid, or greatly reduce, the need to use metal removal processes and can reduce the costs. Pyro metallurgy includes thermal treatment of minerals and metallurgical ores and concentrates to bring about physical and chemical transformations in the materials to enable recovery of valuable metals. A complete knowledge of metallurgy can help us to extract the metal in a more feasible way and can used to a wider range Extractive metallurgy is the practice of removing valuable metals from an ore and refining the extracted raw metals into a purer form. In order to convert a metal oxide or sulphide to a purer metal, the ore must be reduced physically, chemically, or electrolytically. Mining may not be necessary if the ore body and physical environment are conducive to leaching. Leaching dissolves minerals in an ore body and results in an enriched solution. The solution is collected and processed to extract valuable metals. Common engineering metals include aluminium, chromium, copper, iron, magnesium, nickel, titanium and zinc. These are most often used as alloys. Much effort has been placed on understanding the iron-carbon alloy system, which includes steels and cast irons.