Courses Detail Information

VK350 – Structure of Materials

Instructor: Shouhang Bo

Instructors (Faculty):

Credits: 4 credits

Pre-requisites: Vk 250

Description:

This course teaches basic principles of materials science and engineering, including bonding, structure, defects and how are they described and how are they determined experimentally.

Course Topics:

The properties of materials are intimately linked with the structures of materials. This course touches on the basic principles of materials science engineering, laying out foundation for the understanding and characterization of materials structures. We take a bottom-up approach of lecturing, starting with interatomic bonds in materials. This is followed by a detailed description of crystal structure (or crystallography), which deals with the essential topics of unit cells, crystal systems and symmetry in crystallography. Also, diffraction techniques, in particular X-ray diffraction, for the probing of crystal structures will be discussed. We finally move from ideal to real-life scenarios, discussing the nature of defects that are always present in materials at finite temperatures above 0 K.