Materials and Man's Needs: Materials Science and Engineering -- Volume II, The Needs, Priorities, and Opportunities for Materials Research (1975)

CHAPTER 5

PRIORITIES IN MATERIALS RESEARCH*

As part of the COSMAT study of the field of Materials Science and Engineering, a survey of various professionals in the field was conducted. The purpose of this survey was to gather information on areas of priority for basic and applied research. The breadth and scope of the responses was impressive. Materials are so diversely used in our society that no one person or indeed any small group of people could have information on the variety of materials and their uses which were present in the responses to the survey. The survey has succeeded admirably in obtaining a broad-based assessment of the current state-of-the-art for the wide range of materials, properties, processes and disciplines which make up Materials Science and Engineering.

This chapter is a detailed report on the responses to the Survey. The survey solicited some broad overall assessments but took into account the fact that few people have detailed knowledge of the whole spectrum of Materials Science activity. The Survey therefore asked for detailed responses only in a few areas selected by the respondee. The questionnaire was designed so that various cross correlations and sub-groupings of the responses could be selected for analysis.

The survey was divided into two main parts: One of these asked for an assessment of priorities for Basic Research; the other part, for Applied Research and Engineering. In this latter part, the priorities will depend on the area of intended application, which were grouped into nine major areas of impact. Each area of impact was in turn subdivided into various sub-areas of impact, and the respondees were asked to rate priorities in up to five of these. As will be seen from the responses below, priorities differ widely from one area of impact to another and even amongst the sub-areas.

In addition to providing a numerical rating of priorities, the respondees also provided comments on various areas of importance. These comments are also presented here to supplement the numerical ratings.

The questionnaire was accompanied by a cover letter, signed by M.Cohen and W.O.Baker, a copy of which is included in Appendix 5A. The instruction sheet for filling out the questionnaire, and the list of Areas and Sub-areas of Impact are also in Appendix 5A. The questionnaire (also included in Appendix 5A) began (page 1) by asking for a ranking on a 1 to 5 scale of the overall importance of Materials Science and Engineering to each area of impact. On page 2, the respondees were asked to select up to five sub-areas of impact, with which they were familiar, and to list materials problems which they judged of critical importance in each. These responses are summarized below.

The respondees were then asked to rate priorities for each of the subareas selected on page 2 according to Properties of Materials (page 3), Classes of Materials (page 4), Processes for Materials (page 5) and Disciplines and Sub-disciplines in the Field of Materials Science and Engineering (page 6). They were also asked to rate their familiarity with each Property, Material, Process and Discipline. A rating of level of priority for Basic Research for each Property, Material and Process was requested on the right hand side of pages 3, 4 and 5, along with a brief statement of the nature of the basic research. The last page of the questionnaire asked for personal information for statistical purposes.

Some 2800 copies of the questionnaire were mailed, using the names on the lists which are included in Appendix 5A. These lists were chosen in order to obtain a broad but in-depth coverage of Materials Science and Engineering. In all, 555 useful questionnaires were returned. Each respondee was asked to provide up to 451 answers or rankings, which would require an hour or more to do. Not all of these were completely filled in. The responses were computerized for analysis.

A rating scale was adopted to determine the average response to a question. The questionnaire asked for responses on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 indicated great importance and 5 indicated little importance. The responses of this type have been converted to a 0 to 100 scale, where 100 corresponds to all responses being “1” and 0 corresponds to all responses being “5”.

The rating number used to report these responses is given by:

where <1> is the number of “1” responses, <2> is the number of “2” responses and so on. Blank responses were not counted.

On the last page of the questionnaire personal information about the respondees was requested for statistical purposes, to provide information about the background of those who responded to the questionnaire. A summary of the responses to the personal information is shown in Table 5.1a. Most of the respondees have Ph.D.’s and are over forty years old. The respondees are fairly uniformly distributed between academia, government laboratories and industrial laboratories with a much smaller fraction being in non-profit organizations and “other”. Most of the people are engaged in research or in technical management but there is also a good representation of teachers and those engaged in development or engineering work as well as a significant number in general management. The respondees could check more than one category in this section, so the totals exceed the total number of respondees. About half of the managers have between 10 and 100 people reporting to them with about a quarter of them having less than 10 and a quarter having more than 100 people reporting to them. The discipline in which the respondees obtained their highest degree are shown in Table 5.1b, according to the responses which they wrote in. These have been divided into four main groups, the largest of which can be called Metallurgy but includes Physical Metallurgy, Earth Sciences, Ceramics and the newer discipline of Materials Science. The next largest group is Physics followed by Chemistry and the fourth category is Engineering which includes a variety of engineers.

The average age and educational level of the respondees are as expected in view of the lists which were used for mailing the questionnaire. The respondees typically have advanced scientific training and have reached a fairly mature stage of their careers. They are fairly evenly divided amongst the disciplines of Physics, Chemistry, Metallurgy and Engineering. This seems to be a fairly typical distribution for those involved in Materials Science and Engineering. We believe this cross section and this group of people to be fairly optimal for assessing the current priorities in Materials Science and Engineering.

The first page of the questionnaire asked for the “overall importance of Materials Science and Engineering” to each Area of Impact. The responses are summarized in Table 5.2a. The number of “1” (very high), “2” (high) responses etc. are indicated, as well as the corresponding rating on the 0–100 scale in the right-hand column.

The responses can be grouped as:

In Tables 5.3a through 5.3f, the responses of various sub-groups (selected using the personal data on the last page of the questionnaire) are presented. The number in parentheses above each category indicates the number of people in the group.

There are minor variations in these various Tables. These are indicated by “+” of “–” for a greater than 1σ deviation from the mean, and by “++” or “––” for a greater than 2σ deviation from the mean. Although few significant trends have been detected, some specific comments can be made. The responses from people with bachelors and masters degrees rate Communications lower than the larger group of Ph.D.’s and they also rate Production Equipment higher. This may reflect different interests of the two groups. In Table 5.3b, the Chemists are higher than average on Consumer Goods, Health Services, and low on Communications and Energy. The Physicists are high on Communications, low on Production and Transportation Equipment. Again these and other minor differences tend to reflect the interests of the group.

In Table 5.3c, the under-30 age group is small but the indicated differences from the other groups are statistically significant. The 30–39 age group rated Housing and Other Construction higher than average and gave a lower than average rating for Production Equipment. The 40–49 age group gave a low rating to Health Services, Housing and Other Construction and to Production Equipment. The over-50 age group gave a higher than average rating to Defense and Space, to Environmental Quality, to Production Equipment and to Transportation Equipment. Although there are significant deviations from the mean, no clearcut pattern emerges here.

The assessment broken down by type of institution in Table 5.3d shows that people in academic institutions gave higher ratings to a number of areas for the overall importance of Materials Science and Engineering than the rest of the community. The government and industrial laboratories are fairly consistent with each other and the non-profit group rates several areas higher than average and the people classified under “others” tend to give lower ratings than the average. But these latter two groups are small.

Table 5.3e shows the breakdown according to type of activity that the respondee is engaged in. Those engaged in teaching again gave significantly higher ratings than average and the ratings are very similar to the ratings given by the academic group in Table 5.3d (the two groups probably have most members in common). The people in development or engineering rate Communications, Consumer Goods, and Health Services low. The general management group are high on Environmental Quality, Housing and Production Equipment. The managers with between 10 and 100 people reporting to them gave ratings very close to the average ratings as shown in Table 5.3f.

The tendency of respondees to give a higher rating to those areas with which they are familiar or in which they are active than to other areas is further demonstrated in Table 5.4. In this table the responses from page 1 of the questionnaire are broken down according to the areas of impact with which the respondees are familiar. This was done in the following way. On page 2 of the questionnaire the respondees were asked to list areas and sub-areas in which they are knowledgeable or to which their experience relates. All of the respondees who indicated by a response on page 2 that they are familiar with, for example, Communications, Computers and Control were selected and the responses of this group to page 1 appear on the top line of Table 5.4. Those who indicated on page 2 a knowledge of or experience in Consumer Goods were grouped together and their responses appear on the second line. Of course, each respondee could indicate knowledge of, or experience in, up to five different sub-areas which might or might not be contained in the same area. His responses were counted in each of the groups in which he indicated knowledge and experience. Thus Table 5.4 gives a rating of how people who feel they are knowledgeable in a particular area, rate the importance of each of the areas of impact.

In each case, each group rated its own area approximately ten points higher than the average overall response (except for the three areas that already had very high scores). These ratings are found on the major diagonal of Table 5.4. The ratings of the other areas of impact by each group are not too different from the overall average. Each Area of Impact was given its highest rating by its own group, but the lower groups gave high ratings to areas other than their own. The right hand column in Table 5.4 is the average of the responses in each row and shows that each group of respondees gave fairly similar overall ratings. The bottom line in Table 5.4 is an average of each column in the table. These averages can be compared with Table 5.2a with which there is a high degree of consistency. The rankings given by each group to its own area, that is, the rating on the major diagonal of the Table, also give a rank ordering which is not dissimilar from the ranking shown in Table 5.2b. A few of the Areas of Impact change place but they can still be grouped into three categories shown there. We can conclude that although each group is

enthusiastic about the importance of Materials Science and Engineering to the area with which they are familiar, the relative assessment of each group is nevertheless in line with the overall assessment.

The tendency of people familiar with or active in a particular area to rate highly the importance of Materials Science and Engineering to their own area runs throughout the responses in this report. This could be regarded merely as chauvinism on the part of the respondees who feel that their own areas are more important than others. But taken at face value, the more familiar the respondees are with a particular area the higher they rate the importance of Materials Science and Engineering to that area. From this point of view the rankings are a very healthy sign for Materials Science and Engineering.

The same trend runs through the responses for Priorities for Basic Research and for Applied Research and Engineering reported below. Here again, the correlation between the “familiarity” of a respondee with a particular area and the priority he feels should be accorded it for research may be regarded as merely self-serving. On the other hand, it could be regarded as indicating a fairly optimal situation in which interest and effort are being concentrated in the very areas to which high priority should be afforded. Indeed, both are true to some degree, since researchers tends to seek out the problems which they think are important within the areas of their backgrounds and interests, and also seek to improve their knowledge and expertise in areas which they believe to be important.

The level of priority for basic research was assessed from responses on pages 3, 4 and 5 of the questionnaire (Appendix 5A). The level of priority for each of the Properties, Classes of Materials and Processes were requested. In addition, the familiarity of the respondee with each of these specialties was obtained. The responses in these two columns are summarized in Fig. 5.1, where the responses for the Priority for Basic Research are plotted vertically on a 1–100 scale and the familiarity rating is plotted horizontally on a 0–100 scale, although only the 10–80 part of this scale is shown on the horizontal axis. The responses for all three categories are shown. The Properties are shown as a “+”, the Materials as a “o” and Processes as an “x”. There is an obvious correlation between the familiarity of the respondees with a particular specialty and the Priority for Basic Research, which is shown by the general lower-left to upper-right trend of the data. As a result of this bias high priority should probably be accorded to categories which are on the upper envelope of the curve as well as to those which have a high absolute priority rating. Those on the lower envelope of the curve or with a low absolute rating should have less priority. On this basis the Properties that achieve highest priority are Mechanical and Acoustic Properties, Chemical Properties and Biological Properties; amongst the Materials, Ceramics, Glasses, Composites, Plastics and Prosthetic Materials rate highest; amongst the Processes Testing and Synthesis stand out. The Materials Asphalt, Wood and Concrete are at the bottom of the priority list for Basic Research.

The priorities for basic research accorded by each of the groups based on the personal data on the last page of the questionnaire were also collected and are presented in Tables 5.5a through 5.5f. The numbers in parentheses after each category are the number of respondees in each group. The ratings are shown for each class of materials, properties, and processes. The respondees were not asked to rate the priority for basic research in various disciplines.

The ratings in Table 5.5a are broken down according to highest degree of the respondee. The Ph.D. group was by far the largest and the ratings they gave to the various categories are, for that reason, fairly similar to the overall average. By and large the Ph.D. group tended to give higher ratings than the other two groups, especially to categories of more fundamental interest such as Atomic Structure, Microstructure (Electron Microscope Level), Electrical, Magnetic, Dielectric and Nuclear properties. Ph.D.’s also give higher ratings to Ceramics, Glasses, Composites, Thin Films and Prosthetic materials, as well as to Vapor Deposition, Radiation Treatment and Chemical Treatment. For the older and better established materials and processes the ratings tended to be more similar between the three groups. Table 5.5b gives the priority classified according to discipline of highest degree. Here the major groupings of Table 5.1b are presented along with ratings from the larger of the sub-groups. In these tables again one can see that the respondees rate the properties, materials and processes with which they are familiar more highly than others did. For example, the physicists and electrical engineers rate Electrical Properties much more highly than mechanical engineers. The physical chemists rate Prosthetic Materials much more highly than chemical engineers. The mining engineers rate Extraction as a very important process. Metallurgical and mechanical engineers are very high on Testing and Non-Destructive Testing but give Radiation Treatment a low rating.

Table 5.5c reports the priority for basic research according to the age of the respondee. There are differences amongst the various groups but the differences are not large so no coherent picture emerges from these data.

In Table 5.5d the priority for basic research according to the type of institution in which the respondee works is presented. Once again the members of the academic community tended, on average, to give higher ratings than the rest of the population. However many of the categories to which they gave high rating are the same areas to which the Ph.D.’s gave high ratings in Table 5.5a.

Table 5.5e presents the rating for priority for basic research classified by the type of activity. In this case the people involved in teaching consistently give higher ratings correlating well with academic group in Table 5.5d. Those doing development work give lower than average ratings to work on some of the more fundamental categories such as Optical, Electrical, Magnetic, Dielectric Properties and also to materials such as Semiconductors and Prosthetic Materials and to Radiation Treatment and Chemical Processing. These are the same categories to which the Ph.D. group gave higher than average ratings.

Table 5.5f shows the priority for basic research classified according to the level of management. Few significant differences emerge from these tables.

The level of priority for basic research in each of the specialties of Properties, Classes of Materials and Processes are presented in Tables 5.6a, b and c as rated by experts in each category. The “experts” were selected as follows. In the questionnaire each respondee was asked to rate his familiarity with each of the specialties. In constructing Tables 5.6 the respondee who rated himself 2, that is, indicated that he had a very high familiarity with the particular specialty, was selected as an “expert” in that specialty. Respondees could of course rate themselves as experts in more than one specialty, but the few who rated themselves as very familiar with more than five specialties in one category of Properties, Materials, Processes or Disciplines were excluded.

The specialty for each group is shown on the right hand side of the page in Tables 5.6 and the number of people who rated themselves as very familiar with that specialty is indicated in the left hand column. The respondees were asked to rate their familiarity with each of the specialties under properties, classes of materials, processes and disciplines. However they were not asked to rate the priority that should be accorded to basic research in the disciplines so that the tables include ratings given by the four sets of experts but for only the three categories of Properties (5.6a), Materials (5.6b) and Processes (5.6c). These tables are similar to Table 5.4 in structure.

Each group of experts gave a high priority to basic research in their specialty. These ratings tended to be significantly higher than the average rating. For example, one of the highest numbers in the table is for basic research on Prosthetic Materials given by the experts in that area. This rating of 94 is considerably above the group average rating of 54, although Fig. 5.1 identifies this as an important area for basic research. The highest number in the table is the 100 priority rating given by the 8 experts in Organic and Organo-metallic Compounds for basic research on Joining.

Much detailed information can be derived from these tables, for example the 66 experts on Optical Properties give a high rating for basic research on Optical and Electrical Properties, they rate Semiconductors, Glasses and Thin Films as important materials for basic research (Table 5.6b) and Radiation Treatment (presumably ion implantation) and Crystal Growth as important processes for basic research (Table 5.6c). Similarly the reader can extract information about the properties, materials and processes which are viewed as important by each group of experts.

The diagonal elements of these three tables, that is, the rating by each group of experts of their own specialty, were used as part of the input to Tables 5.7, where an attempt is made to assess overall priorities for Basic Research.