Signal Processing for Advanced Materials [From the Guest Editors]

Mary L. Comer, Jeff P. Simmons, Steve Niezgoda, Charles A. Bouman, Benjamin Berkels

Abstract: The development of new materials has been a hallmark of technological advancement since at least the Bronze Age, when copper and tin were alloyed to create tools that had properties favorable to those made from stone. For thousands of years, until the development of microscope imaging, new materials continued to be developed “blindly,” without any understanding of the effects of the structure at the micro- or nanoscale on the observable properties of a material. With the advent of sensing modalities, such as electron microscopy and X-ray tomography, huge amounts of microstructural data of many different classes of materials have become available.