ABSTRACT
The importance of materials in society cannot be overstated. In many respects, a society’s potential for success and advancement is fundamentally related to the sophistication of its materials. Ancient civilizations can be distinguished according to the materials they employed. Occasionally, those materials even served as the de–ning characteristic of that era; accordingly, the “Bronze Age” identi–es hundreds of years of history and the thousands of people that lived during that time. To bring this impact closer to home, consider that the industrial revolution was intimately associated with improvements in steel production and that many of the phenomenal engineering and computing feats accomplished over the past few decades were possible only through advances in metal alloys, ceramics, semiconductors, and materials processing. The impact of nanotechnology, and its promise of addressing many of the pressing issues of today has been hampered largely by the dif–culty in achieving reproducible and inexpensive production but will appear increasingly in everyday applications as these technical challenges are overcome. New ideas, new
7.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 201 7.1.1 Metal Oxide Models in Calculations ................................................202
