Pick: electrical or chemical

RacinReaver
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:39:13 +0000

why would metallurgy not be a subdiscipline of chemE? There’s chemical bonding behavior, processing, chemical crystal structure, dopants and even fluid dynamics when trying to understand the behavior of of non-newtonian and highly viscous molten metals in industrial applications. Plenty of chemEs work on high performance materials in the area of metallurgy.



I think it’s that materials tends to focus more on the solid applications of materials than ChemEs. Like, I got very little fluid dynamics in my materials education (it was about 1/4 of the semester on my class on heat/mass transport through diffusion), but the amount of solid mechanics is significantly higher. Also, talking to few people I knew in ChemE, we get significantly more crystallography, crystalline defects, and have a slightly different focus in thermodynamics (we focus on phase transformations and equilibrium states).

I can’t find the requirements now, but in order to become a licensed Materials Engineer (which, thankfully doesn’t matter), you have to pass an exam covering in depth knowledge of metallurgy, corrosion, ceramics (types and processing), polymers, and even a bit on semiconductors and electrical materials.

I think materials gets a reputation as being a subset of ChemE because the field is significantly smaller, but I really don’t feel their relationship is like MechE to AeroE.