From Material Discovery to Material Design and The Role of Computers

Note

This is one of my Doctoral assignment from Current Science and Technology in Japan Course which has never been published anywhere and I, as the author and copyright holder, license this assignment customized CC-BY-SA where anyone can share, copy, republish, and sell on condition to state my name as the author and notify that the original and open version available here.

Material Exploration and Discovery

Materials have been one of the based of technologies for millennia. Airplanes, accessories, apparels, buildings, cars, computers, televisions, weapons, almost every object we know is made up of materials. The field of material engineering, science, and those related became very famous and important to advance technology.

Before the 17th century is an age of exploration. There were many adventures/explorers back then who traveled the lands, and sailed the seas, finding new territories. They discovered stones, irons, bronzes, silvers, golds, diamonds, aluminiums, minerals, and many other resources to be used in people’s live. Starting on the 17th century is an age of discovery where many alchemist, philosophers, and scientist research and perform experiments which birth for examples the theory of atoms by John Dalton, polymers and molecules by Hermann Staudinger, electricity by Thomas Edison, engine by Edward Butler, and more material properties and process were found on this age. It is mostly due to the advance in engineering and other related disciplines that invented tools such as microscope, pyrometer, and x-ray. These led to many inventions such as electronic devices, vehicles and many other tools and machines that shaped this modern era. Today a new age is approaching. The field of materials science and engineering is shifting into a more systems based approach to materials innovation and toward materials design in which researchers can predict new materials they would like to have rather than having to discover them. [1]

Material Design

The coming age is the age of design. With the discovery of many raw materials, processes, and theories, researcher may now utilize these accumulated data to design new materials, depending on the demands…