Materials are technology enablers. If you want to build new types of cars, planes and renewable-energy devices, then you need new materials that have better properties than the ones we use today. It’s our task as materials scientists to develop these materials.
Part of our job is to consider the whole lifecycle of materials; how they age during use and can form defects that could lead to failure. Think of an airplane for example – you do not want to have any material defects. Materials scientists aim to develop materials that are failure proof.
In order to do so, we need to work with the microstructure of the materials. We need to characterize and develop the material’s internal properties. This is why we use microscopes that can magnify materials up to one million times.