Materials Kinetics Fundamentals

Materials Kinetics Fundamentals is designed to provide students with an accessible and interesting introduction to the main concepts and principles underlying kinetic processes in materials systems. A key point here is that this textbook focuses on materials kinetics. While there are a large number of books on chemical kinetics, there are far fewer that focus on materials kinetics, and virtually none that provide an accessible, introductory-level treatment of this subject. This textbook aims to equip students with that knowledge. Following this mandate, the first part of the textbook, Kinetic Principles, is devoted to a basic treatment of fundamental and universally important kinetic concepts like diffusion and reaction rate theory. Illustrated diagrams, examples, textboxes, and homework questions impart a unified, intuitive understanding of these basic kinetic concepts. Armed with these concepts, the second part of the textbook, Applications of Materials Kinetics, shows students how to apply the basic tool developed in part 1 to qualitatively and quantitatively model common kinetic processes relevant to materials science and engineering. Since materials scientists and engineers are chiefly concerned with the solid-state, the text focuses on gas-solid, liquid-solid, and solid-solid kinetic processes. A wide variety of exciting real-world examples are used to illustrate the application of kinetic principles to important and interesting materials systems including silicon processing and integrated circuit fabrication, gas transport through membranes, thin-film deposition, sintering, oxidation, carbon-14 dating, nucleation and growth, steel degassing, and kinetic aspects of energy conversion devices like fuel cells and batteries.