Manufacturing is a series of interactions between materials, machines,
energy and people in the process of making goods and articles. There are manufacturing
processes available for the four main groups of materials: metals, ceramics,
plastics and composites. Only those processes for metals and polymers will be
covered here.
Metals: Alloys composed of two or more elements,
at least one of which is metallic, are the predominant type of metals used in
manufacturing. Metal are either iron based ferrous metals or nonferrous metals,
a group that contains all other metals and their alloys.
Plastics: Plastics are formed from repeating
structural units called mers whose atoms share electrons to form large molecules.
There are three categories of plastics: thermoplastics, which can be subjected
to multiple heating and cooling cycles without a large change in their molecular
structure; thermosets, which chemically transform (cure) into stiff structures
when they cool from a heated plastic condition and elastomers, which exhibit
significant elastic behavior.
Ceramics: Ceramics contain metallic or semimetallic and nonmetallic elements.
For processing purposes ceramics can be divided into crystalline ceramics, which
are formed from powders and then sintered, and glass ceramics that can be melted
and cast and then formed in processes such as glass blowing.
Composites: Composites are materials that usually consist of two phases,
both homogeneous masses of material, that are bonded together to achieve properties
superior to those of its constituents. Usually the structure of a composite
consists of particles or fibers of one phase mixed into a second phase, which
is called the matrix.
Please submit any questions or comments concerning this website to njsalamon@psu.edu.