Dude, where am I? Who are you?

My name is Shawn Matt. You’re on my metallography website called Metallography Today. Here, I post cool pictures of metal I take with a microscope. I discuss cool metallography stuff and go off on all sorts of tangents.

All of the images in my gallery are taken by me. I’ve taken many nice ones over time.

Metallography Today is a project that attempts to speak to the common man. Through my career and education, I’ve discovered a whole new microscopic world. AND IT’s LIKE NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT!

Sure materials science nerds like me who dedicate their life to the craft know about it. For most, the microscopic world is abstract. Those materials nerds are cool and all, but I want to talk to everyone about it. I wanna talk to YOU. You’re cooler than those materials nerds.

Dude, you have two first names.

No, I have three. And that’s not a question. It’s Michael.

What is metallography?

Metal - photography, usually performed with a microscope. Some not-so-micro-structures are large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

Metallography is often used in developing new processing techniques, or verifying quality of metals. Modern nomenclature is trending toward using materialography to be more inclusive to all material classifications, rather than just metal. Plastics, ceramics, semiconductors exist and are just as important as metals. They want representation too! Still, metallography just rolls off the tongue better, so I use metallography and materialography interchangeably.

Microscopy is the general term for using a microscope to look at small stuff. Optical microscopy is what most people will be familiar with, its what you picture when you hear the word microscope. Optical ‘scopes use lenses to magnify and focus light to generate a crisp zoomed in image. This is pretty intuitive and easy to understand. There are much fancier microscopes that use electron beams and magnetic lenses to generate images. Electron microscopes are capable of generating much higher resolution images than optical microscopy.

Metallography is a subclass of microscopy in the way that a square is a subclass of a rectangle. But it’s more than that. There’s an artistic element to it. We’ll get into that in some blogs.

Metallography is an ART and a SCIENCE.

What is materials science and engineering?

What is a material to you? To me - everything is a material, and materials are everything! Steel and aluminum are materials, obviously. So is wood, and glass, and polyester. And chocolate. Wait, what? Yep, chocolate is a material. Look it up. Chocolatiers are materials engineers. They use metallographic techniques to inspect the fat and sugar crystallization to make sure your Hershey’s bar has just the right taste and texture. Chocollography?

Most people have never heard of material science, and if you jump right into metals, it can be hard to explain. But everyone has heard of baking! There’s tons of overlap. Materials science is like baking but with metals. Bakers have wet and dry ingredients, bake times, coatings, and mixing protocol. Materials scientist do the same thing but with metal ingredients. There’s often heat involved and detailed baking schedules. We might choose to paint our materials to protect from the environment, similar to icing a cake.

Through the lens of material science, the microscopic world is revealed to you. Tiny things make big things. If you want to estimate the structural integrity of a house, you look at the quality of the bricks. Materials science tells us about the bricks. And so much more.

It’s science, its engineering, it’s art, it’s everything.

What is characterization?

To keep with our baking analogy, characterization is like taste testing. You’re describing the outcome of your recipe. It’s crunchy, it’s sweet, it’s a little burnt on the bottom.

You take that feedback and adjust your recipes. In materials we call that establishing process-structure-properties-performance relationships. You started with an input (your recipe) and ended up with a certain output.

Materials scientists perform all sorts of “taste tests”. Visual inspection is usually very important, and that’s where metallography comes in.

Why should I care?

Because I love materials and think they’re SO cool and I SWEAR, if I could lock you in a room and tell you about it, just for a few LITTLE WHILE, you’d love materials too!

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.