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Materials for engineering, 3rd Edition - (Malestrom)

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Structure of <strong>engineering</strong> materials 27<br />

solid state, and dependent upon atomic migration to proceed, they may well<br />

be suppressed if the material is cooled quickly.<br />

Quenched structures<br />

Alloys may deliberately have their microstructure controlled by cooling the<br />

material very rapidly (‘quenching’) to room temperature from a hightemperature,<br />

single-phase region of the phase diagram, such as the α field in<br />

Fig. 1.20. This may involve plunging the piece straight from a furnace into<br />

a bath of oil or water and, in general, two possibilities exist:<br />

1. A metastable supersaturated α solid solution may <strong>for</strong>m. If the temperature<br />

is then progressively raised again until solid state diffusion may proceed<br />

at a measurable rate, the supersaturation will be relieved by the <strong>for</strong>mation<br />

of a second phase. These are the processes underlying ‘age hardening’,<br />

which we will discuss more fully later.<br />

2. In some systems, the instability of the α phase is so high at low temperature,<br />

that it undergoes a diffusionless phase trans<strong>for</strong>mation to a different (again,<br />

metastable) structure we will call α′. This type of phase change is called<br />

a martensitic phase change and its most important occurrence is in steel,<br />

to which we will return and consider in some detail.<br />

Some alloys have been designed to trans<strong>for</strong>m to a martensitic phase when<br />

they are plastically de<strong>for</strong>med. If they are then heated, they may revert<br />

completely to their original crystal structure: this is accompanied by a reversal<br />

of the original plastic de<strong>for</strong>mation, a process known as the shape-memory<br />

effect. A number of shape-memory alloys (SMAs) exist: the earliest devices<br />

were of Ni–Ti (‘Nitinol’), but more recently Cu- and Fe-based SMAs have<br />

been developed in which an element ‘remembers’ the shape it had prior to<br />

de<strong>for</strong>mation. During this shape recovery, the element can produce a<br />

displacement as a function of temperature or, if constrained, a <strong>for</strong>ce and<br />

displacement. The SMAs have been employed in circuit breaker actuators as<br />

well as in certain prosthetic devices <strong>for</strong> the fixation of artificial teeth.<br />

1.3 Molecular structure of organic polymers and<br />

glasses<br />

The highly regular crystalline structures we have considered so far will not<br />

be <strong>for</strong>med if the interatomic binding requirements are satisfied simply by<br />

adding new units to the end of a chain. Instead, this can lead to the <strong>for</strong>mation<br />

of high molecular weight, long chain structures known as polymers.<br />

Although their properties differ widely, all polymers are made up of long<br />

molecules with a covalently bonded chain of atoms <strong>for</strong>ming a ‘backbone’. In<br />

organic polymers the covalent chain is of carbon atoms, but in other polymers

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