Applications

Functional applications, and everything used for each one.

• Abrasive

  Materials used to cut, grind, shape or polish by wearing another material away.

• Additive manufacturing

  Building an object by adding material rather than removing it — and a set of trade-offs almost exactly inverse to moulding.

• Adhesion and bonding

  Joining without a fastener — and increasingly the only way to join two materials that cannot be welded to each other.

• Alloying

  Adding one element to another to obtain properties neither has alone.

• Battery electrodes

  Storing and releasing electrical energy by moving ions between two electrodes.

• Catalysis

  Accelerating a reaction with a substance that is not consumed by it.

• Corrosion protection

  Keeping a structural metal from returning to the oxide it was smelted from.

• Electrical conduction

  Carrying electric current with minimal loss.

• Fertiliser

  Supplying the elements crops remove from soil, chiefly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

• Flame retardancy

  Additives that interrupt combustion rather than resist heat — the reason furniture and electronics do not carry fire as readily as their materials would.

• Glass and ceramics

  Materials made by melting or firing minerals — and one of the largest consumers of industrial minerals by tonnage.

• Jewellery and adornment

  The oldest use any material has been put to that was not survival — and the one where the selection criteria are appearance, durability and scarcity, in that order and rarely admitted.

• Lighting

  Converting electricity into visible light, historically by heating something until it glowed.

• Magnetic cores

  Carrying a magnetic field that reverses, tens of thousands of times a second, at the lowest possible cost in wasted heat — the opposite requirement to a permanent magnet.

• Medical imaging

  Seeing inside the body without opening it — a set of techniques each depending on particular materials.

• Nuclear fuel

  Releasing energy by fission, and the materials that must survive doing it.

• Packaging

  Keeping something intact, clean and saleable between the factory and the buyer — where roughly half of all plastic made ends up.

• Permanent magnets

  Materials that retain magnetisation without power — the component that makes electric motors and generators compact.

• Photovoltaics

  Turning light directly into electricity in a semiconductor junction — the application that made silicon a bulk commodity rather than an electronics material.

• Pigment

  Insoluble particles that give a material colour by absorbing part of the spectrum.

• Protective equipment

  Materials chosen for what they stop — a projectile, a flame, a cut, an impact — where failure is measured in injuries.

• Refractory lining

  Materials that line furnaces, kilns and reactors — the reason it is possible to contain a process hotter than most metals survive.

• Sealing and gasketing

  Keeping fluids on the correct side of a joint — an unglamorous application that decides whether engines, buildings and spacecraft work.

• Structural engineering

  Carrying load without falling down — the application that consumes more material by mass than every other use put together.

• Tableware and vessels

  Things to eat, drink and cook from — the application that decides more household material choices than any other, and one that turns almost entirely on what happens when the object is heated, dropped or washed.

• Telecommunications

  Carrying a signal further than a shout — and a two-hundred-year argument between copper and glass that glass has now won.

• Textiles

  Fibre made into fabric — clothing, rope, carpet, sailcloth and reinforcement, and the second-largest destination for synthetic polymers.

• Thermal insulation

  Almost always trapped air or gas held still by something. The solid part is scaffolding for the void that does the work.

• Timekeeping

  Counting a fixed atomic transition to measure time — the application that defines the second, and quietly underwrites navigation and telecommunications.