Aims & Scope of Materials & Design

Modern engineered materials play a central role in enabling technological designs that underpin, advance and revolutionise engineering practice. Materials & Design seeks to publish reports of materials research that present applicable advances in the insight into structure and function, and provide useable and reproducible recipes for the synthesis, preparation, characterisation, modelling and exploitation of new metallic alloys, ceramics, polymers, coatings, composites and bio-materials systems.

Today's products and their constituent components and structures have to meet increasingly stringent requirements during operation. The economic and human costs of failure during service impose a great deal of responsibility on organisations and individuals who select and integrate materials in a final engineering design. A critical feature of successful product development is the judicious selection of the best materials based on informed awareness of the capabilities and opportunities afforded by all candidates, coupled with a design that takes full advantage of their properties. A further aim of Materials & Design is to promote a greater knowledge and understanding of the attributes and capabilities of all types of modern engineering materials in the context of engineering design.

Materials & Design publishes a range of high quality peer reviewed research articles including full papers, short communications and technical reports, and occasional special issues, that investigate the properties of materials that influence or control any practical design. All types of engineering materials are considered, and all scales of processing, analysis and design from nano- and micro-scale devices and systems to large structural components. The content is broad and widely relevant to materials researchers, engineers and designers in academia and in industry.

The emphasis is placed on developing both practice and theory relevant to the field of materials engineering and science, with appropriate links established to processing, characterisation and simulation. To reflect the multidisciplinary nature of design, submissions to Materials & Design should offer information useful to professionals working in fields related to the immediate subject of the article.

Materials & Design brings together the overriding interest in the inherent architecture of solid matter with the practical need to know and use its properties to perform certain roles in service, either structural or functional. In reflection of this title, the journal is focused on the studies of natural and engineered materials, with particular emphasis on the elucidation of their structure and properties at all scales, from nuclear and electronic to amorphous and crystalline levels of organisation, to nano-scale and micro-structuring aspects, and ultimately to the manner in which this manifests itself in the suitability and performance of materials in various natural and man-made systems and applications.

In order to help the authors, reviewers and editors identified those directions of research that match the existing and future thematic threads in Materials & Design, to compile a list of priority areas that are of particular interest to the readers of the journal. These are:

  • Micro- and nano-scale multi-physics phenomena, and the analysis structure, morphology, and the role of interfaces in relation to design at all scales, e.g. electrochemical energy storage, phase transformation and associated processes
  • Operando and in situ studies of processes and structural evolution
  • Processing of alloys and compounds for microstructure and property control, e.g. friction stir and severe plastic deformation
  • Lightweight materials, e.g. alloys containing magnesium and lithium, as well as composites of all types of matrix (polymer, metal and ceramic) and reinforcement, including continuous and discontinuous fibres, low aspect ratio inclusions and nano-structured reinforcements
  • Multifunctional materials, e.g. alloys, polymers and ceramics displaying shape memory effects, as well as bio-composites, composites of green or sustainable origin, and biomimetic materials
  • Intelligent materials design to optimise performance, including hierarchical microstructural optimisation, self-healing, energy absorption, for durability, against damage and environmental extremes

Authors submitting their work to the journal are encouraged to identify how their studies correspond to the priority areas above, by indicating this match in the Cover Letter and the text of their manuscript, referring to the Editorial Note on the aims and scope of the journal:Editorial Note – On the aims Aims & Scope of Materials & Design

Assessment Criteria

In assessing the submissions to Materials & Design, the editors are guided by a few key principles. These are:

  • The editors of Materials & Design favour submissions that bring together experimental observations with modelling in a logically connected way that reflects the journal title. The combination of modelling with experiment helps elucidate the ways in which theoretical (analytical or numerical) descriptions of material behaviour can be turned into predictive tools to help design and applications.This does not mean that submissions to Materials & Design that contain reports of purely theoretical or experimental nature will be automatically rejected: editors reserve the right to accept submissions of either kind that report particularly novel and original approaches and results likely to make outstanding contributions to the field.
  • For reasons outlined above, submissions split into multiple parts, e.g. Part I and Part II, are unlikely to be successful. Editors believe that a well-connected coherent piece of research should in fact incorporate multiple approaches and findings, and can and should be reported as one compact piece, in the form of an article. Ample provision is made by the publisher to attach supplementary material that accompanies the main text of the paper.
  • To have a good chance of success, submissions to Materials & Design must identify and display clearly and prominently the aspects of novelty of findings, originality of approach, unusual treatment or experimental setup, unexpected discovery, etc. This means that the application of methods and techniques previously reported in this journal or in other published periodical(s) to similar or somewhat different materials systems or situations does not qualify for consideration. The authors should note that in this sense the frequently advanced argument of the sort "we recently published a similar paper in your journal" is distinctly counter-productive in terms of improving the likelihood of seeing their work in print.
  • Papers must be written in clear scientific English that is well-structured and understandable to reviewers and editors without additional copy-editing. The presence of grammatical errors in the text may lead to submission being rejected at any stage in the consideration process, on the grounds of poor language impeding the understanding by the readers.

Editorial board

Editor-in-Chief

  • Alexander M. Korsunsky
    Dept. of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PJ, UK

Editors

  • A. G. Gibson
    Newcastle University, England, UK
  • E. Le Bourhis
    Université de Poitiers, Futuroscope, France
  • G. Nguyen
    University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
  • M. Sebastiani
    Università di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
  • X. Song
    Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

Assistant Managing Editors

  • M. Z. Mughal
    Università di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
  • W. Zhai
    Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, Singapore

Journal Manager

  • Elavenhil Mohan
    Global Journals Production, Elsevier, Chennai, India

International Editorial Board

  • H.M. Akil
    Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia
  • E. Axinte
    "Gh. Asachi" Technical University of Iasy, Iasy, Romania
  • F. Berto
    Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy
  • D.L. Chen
    Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Y. Chen
    University of Manchester, Manchester, England, UK
  • J.P. Davim
    Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
  • F. Findik
    Sakarya University, Sakarya, Turkey
  • S. Hampshire
    University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
  • L. Hennet
    CNRS-CEMHTI, 45071 ORLEANS CEDEX 2, France
  • C. Hepburn
    Ulster University, Newton Abbey, UK
  • W.M. Huang
    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore City, Singapore
  • A. Kotousov
    University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
  • M. Lehocky
    Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Zlin, Czech Republic
  • Y.-C. Lin
    Central South University, Changsha, China
  • B.B. Rath
    U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, District of Columbia, USA
  • X.J. Ren
    Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), Liverpool, England, UK
  • Y. Ribakov
    Ariel University, Israel
  • G.S. Upadhyaya
    Materials Consultant, Varanansi, India
  • M. W. Fu
    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
  • X. Wu
    Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

Express Editor

  • Alexander Lunt
    European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)