ข้อมูลทรัพยากร

เนื้อหาย่อ : Since I have been teaching in the general area of materials, I have always been able to say with complete certainty that it is very important for an engineer to be knowledgeable in "materials science." To the obvious question, "What should I know about materials science?"' I have never had a very definite answer. To some peo- ple, the term "'materials science" means the systematizing and formulating of the laws gov- erning the behavior and properties of all states of matter (i.e., gases, liquids, solids, plasmas, and any other defined state that one wishes to imagine); others prefer to limit the term to merely the solid state. Most texts in this area are devoted primarily to solid materials. The primary aim of this text is to promote an un- derstanding of the relationship between the mo- lecular structure of a material and the manner in which the material reacts to its environment (i.e., its physical properties). The emphasis is strongly on organic polymers simply because this is my major field of interest and because it is my conviction that this particular group of materials is of special interest to other chemical engineers. I have retained the more general title of ''Structure and Properties of Materials" because I very much want to characterize the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. There is a great deal of technique and theory that has been developed to understand the behavior of gases, salt crystals, dielectric crystals, and metals that is also applicable to much more complicated materials such as ceramics, plas- tics, and composite structures. The general ap- proach is thus to develop the basic concepts with as simple a structure as possible and then try to indicate how these techniques might be used to promote a better understanding of a complex organic polymer. Although the appeal is primarily toward chemical engineers, I think