Crystallographic in the context of "Interstitial site"

Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries.

The intellectual origins of materials science stem from the Age of Enlightenment, when researchers began to use analytical thinking from chemistry, physics, and engineering to understand ancient, phenomenological observations in metallurgy and mineralogy. Materials science still incorporates elements of physics, chemistry, and engineering. As such, the field was long considered by academic institutions as a sub-field of these related fields. Beginning in the 1940s, materials science began to be more widely recognized as a specific and distinct field of science and engineering, and major technical universities around the world created dedicated schools for its study.

Raymond George Gosling (15 July 1926 – 18 May 2015) was a British scientist. While a PhD student at King's College, London he worked under the supervision of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. The crystallographic experiments of Franklin and Gosling, together with others by Wilkins, produced data that helped James Watson and Francis Crick to infer the structure of DNA.

A mesocrystal is a material structure composed of numerous small crystals of similar size and shape, which are arranged in a regular periodic pattern. It is a form of oriented aggregation, where the small crystals have parallel crystallographic alignment but are spatially separated.

When the sizes of individual components are at the nanoscale, mesocrystals represent a new class of nanostructured solids made from crystiallographically oriented nanoparticles. The sole criterion for determining whether a material is mesocrystal is the unique crystallographically hierarchical structure, not its formation mechanism.

In materials science and related fields, crystallographic texture is the distribution of crystallographic orientations of a polycrystalline sample. A sample in which these orientations are fully random or is amorphous and thus no crystallographic planes, is said to have no texture. If the crystallographic orientations are not random, but have some preferred orientation, then the sample may have a weak, moderate or strong texture. The degree is dependent on the percentage of crystals having the preferred orientation.

Texture is seen in almost all engineered materials, and can have a great influence on materials properties. The texture forms in materials during thermo-mechanical processes, for example during production processes e.g. rolling. Consequently, the rolling process is often followed by a heat treatment to reduce the amount of unwanted texture. Controlling the production process in combination with the characterization of texture and the material's microstructure help to determine the materials properties, i.e. the processing-microstructure-texture-property relationship. Also, geologic rocks show texture due to their thermo-mechanic history of formation processes.