What separates Materials Science and Engineering from Chemical Engineering and Chemistry?
There’s certainly a degree of overlap between Materials and Chemical engineering…and in fact between Materials and just about all other engineering disciplines. Materials is endemic to all other engineering fields…everything has to made of a material of some kind. Chemical engineers study things like heat and mass transfer, thermodynamics and kinetics as they apply to the production of materials…such as may be used in an oil refinery, or in a chemical plant used to produce polymers (plastics) like polyethylene or polypropylene in tonnage amounts. Materials engineers, on the other hand, study the relationships between the structure (from the atomic level upwards), properties (strength, hardness, modulus, electrical and/or thermal conductivity, density, dielectric and optical properties and so on) and processing (how materials are formed and processed to give them the properties needed for the applications in which they’ll be used). The relationship between structure, properties an
