![]() Examples are modern batteries with intricate arrangements of electrodes, membranes, barely understood thin passivation layers, electrolytes, contacts and packaging. These days, engineered materials and devices are complex and hierarchical. Crystallography has played a critical role in the materials revolution. The knowledge of where atoms are in a crystal is a prerequisite to understanding, and thereafter engineering, materials properties. The challenges that remain are enormous, but our ability to innovate in the materials domain is also unprecedented.Ī major contributing factor to this revolution in materials has been X-ray crystallography, which, probably not coincidentally, also began around 100 years ago when the materials revolution began. These need to be cheap and environmentally benign. For example, for electric powered transportation, we need higher energy density batteries and for grid storage, higher capacity batteries that are recyclable and made of earth-abundant materials. We continue to seek new materials to provide technological solutions to the most challenging problems facing humanity, from sustainable energy, to environmental remediation, to health. The materials landscape now would be totally unrecognizable to an early twentieth-century person, with so much of what is around us made out of man-made synthetic materials. But we were highly reliant on natural materials. Mankind had been learning metallurgy since the Bronze Age, and already by the turn of the twentieth century, we were quite sophisticated at making ferrous and non-ferrous metals. The one type of synthetic material that was rather highly developed was metals. Cement had been manufactured since Roman times, and ceramics go back much further, though largely made from naturally occurring clays. Shirts were made of cotton, trousers were wool, shoes and boots were leather and car tyres were natural rubber. A hundred years ago, most materials were natural in origin. A revolution has taken place in materials science in the past century.
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