Materials and Manufacturing Technology (MMT) is concerned with the generation and application of knowledge relating the composition, structure, and processing of materials to their properties and applications, as well as the manufacturing technologies needed for production. During the past two decades, MMT has become an important component of modern engineering education, partly because of the increased level of sophistication required of engineering materials in a rapidly changing technological society, and partly because the selection of materials has increasingly become an integral part of almost every modern engineering design. In fact, further improvements in design are now viewed more and more as primarily materials and manufacturing issues. Both the development of new materials and the understanding of present-day materials demand a thorough knowledge of basic engineering and scientific principles including, for example, crystal structure, mechanics, mechanical behavior, electronic, optical and magnetic properties, thermodynamics, phase equilibria, heat transfer, diffusion, and the physics and chemistry of solids and chemical reactions.
The field of MMT ranks high on the list of top careers for scientists and engineers. The services of these engineers and scientists are required in a variety of engineering operations dealing, for example, with design of semiconductors and optoelectronic devices, development of new technologies based on composites and high-temperature materials, biomedical products, performance (quality, reliability, safety, energy efficiency) in automobile and aircraft components, improvement in nondestructive testing techniques, corrosion behavior in refineries, radiation damage in nuclear power plants, fabrication of steels, and construction of highways and bridges.