Materials Engineering: The fastest growing engineering discipline today

As materials engineers and metallurgists, the work we do at One Eighty is all about the optimal use of engineering materials. The materials that are available to us today are highly diverse and materials technology is growing all the time. We are seeing new materials like blends of polymers with fillers making them temperature resistant and the high strength low alloy steels used in demanding oil and gas applications.

Materials are essentially designed for purpose. When a weld procedure is written, it is the design of the solid material that will join two pipes together, for example. For the high-tech materials such as HSLA steels or the Duplex stainless steels it is not simple. Weld positions can make a major difference in properties.

Materials engineering is the fastest growing field of engineering today. And has been since the first metals were discovered. The graph below shows the exponential growth of various materials available today.

Materials are not simply chosen from a catalogue. Materials are designed. Look for example at the heat treatment of steel and the different components in composites and various fillers in the wide range of polymer matrix materials available where the matrix is also designed by was of the chain lengths and degree of cross linking.

Look at the Schematic illustration of engineering materials development within history, showing the continuous trend to increase entropy. (Credit: Kaveh Edalati from the publication https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354694550_High-Entropy_Ceramics_Review_of_Principles_Production_and_Applications)

This year One Eighty has a team of Engineers that can help business and industry with any materials engineering problem – from welding to recycling to root cause failure analysis or design of a material for a new or established application.

Bring us your difficult problems. With over 21 years’ experience in metallurgy and materials engineering, One Eighty is the most ISO-scoped materials engineering and testing laboratory in Africa.