Section 9 of 21

Materials Science/Structure of Matter

Bonding, corrosion, diffusion, material properties, and phase diagrams

What the section holds

Atomic bonding, corrosion, diffusion, thermal and mechanical processing, a long properties of materials block, the relationship between hardness and tensile strength, ASTM grain size, composite materials, hardenability, and binary phase diagrams.

Why it matters for your exam

Materials appears on every discipline specification in some form, whether as materials science, material properties and processing, or simply materials. It moved position between handbook editions, which makes it a section people reliably fumble for.

How to navigate it

This section sits between dynamics and mechanics of materials in the current edition. In older editions it sat before statics. If you learned the book on an older copy, this is the one relocation most likely to cost you time.

Search terms that land here

phase diagram | corrosion | hardenability | grain size | composite

Subsections, in handbook order

These are the headings the handbook itself uses. The page number beside each is where it begins.

  • Atomic Bondingp116
  • Corrosionp116
  • Diffusionp116
  • Thermal and Mechanical Processingp116
  • Properties of Materialsp117
  • ASTM Grain Sizep122
  • Relationship Between Hardness and Tensile Strengthp122
  • Composite Materialsp123
  • Hardenabilityp123
  • Binary Phase Diagramsp127

Disciplines that use this section

Practise finding it

18 drill items in the corpus have this section as their answer.

Start a round

Page numbers here are read from handbook version 10.5 (seventh printing, April 2025), which runs to 502 pages. NCEES revises the handbook and page numbers move with it, which is why the drill asks which section a topic lives in rather than which page. Check the version of your own copy, downloaded free from NCEES.