ABSTRACT
As early as humans started working with fire and heat, they have been using materials that can sustain high temperatures. Initially, the primitives used rocks, which they picked from their neighborhood. As they became more capable in controlling the heat that they produced and the related applications, increasingly efforts were made to control the properties of the produced materials and the performance of the structures that were made. The applications have grown from preparing food and heating their living areas to sophisticated processing methods at higher temperatures as well as applications that involve extreme thermal conditions. Today, the selection of high-temperature materials (Chapter 3) has been widened to such metal alloys as refractory metals, stainless steels, superalloys, and titanium alloys. Other materials that are being used include certain ceramic materials, carbon-carbon composites, metal matrix composites (MMC) and many others. Applications of high-temperature materials include aircraft jet engines (see example of an aircraft fighter jet engine in Figure 1.1), nuclear reactors, and industrial
CONTENTS
1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................1 1.2 Historical Perspective ............................................................................................................2 1.3 Need for High-Strength High-Temperature Materials ....................................................4 1.4 HT Materials ...........................................................................................................................5
