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Department of Engineering

Department authors get 'Texty'

Department authors get 'Texty'

A book co-authored by academics from the Department of Engineering has earned a Texty Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA).

The essential materials engineering text and resource for students developing skills and understanding of materials properties.

Materialstoday.com

Engineers make things. What do they need to know in order to choose and use materials successfully?

Materials: Engineering, Science, Processing and Design, authored by Professor Mike Ashby, Dr Hugh Shercliff and Professor David Cebon, takes students through the world of materials – the “menu” of metals, polymers, glasses, ceramics, composites and so forth – and the processes that can shape, join and finish them. It provides the ability to understand the origin of these properties and how they can be manipulated. It gives the methods for selecting from these menus the materials and processes that best meet the requirements of a design. Finally, it lends access to attribute data and ways of mapping these data to bring out relationships, similarities and differences. 

Of course, engineering students also need common sense: the ability to use experience and knowledge of the world at large to recognise inspired choices and reject those that are impractical. The book develops a design-led approach to teaching materials that follows this line of thinking. It covers both mechanical and functional (electrical, magnetic and optical) properties, presenting them as material-property charts, developing ways of optimally selecting materials based on these properties and illustrating their use in numerous case studies. Quality, full-colour illustrations accompany the text and aid instructors in teaching.

Materialstoday.com writes that the publication is "the essential materials engineering text and resource for students developing skills and understanding of materials properties and selection for engineering applications." The book was one of only 11 textbooks recognised by the 2014 Textbook Excellence (Texty) Awards, which are given to books in their second or later editions. The TAA is a national, nonprofit membership association dedicated to providing professional development resources, industry news and networking opportunities for authors of textbooks and other scholarly works.

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