ASM Handbook, Volume 9 Metallography and Microstructures

Volume 9 is an indispensable reference for anyone who specifies, performs, monitors, evaluates, or uses metallurgical analyses for production quality control, research, or educational training. This edition provides important updates and new information reflecting the substantial changes in automation, equipment, consumable products and preparation methodology, as well as new metals, alloys and manufacturing technologies that have emerged since 1985. Expanded coverage of color metallography is provided, including more than 70 pages in full color.

Preface

This new edition of Metallography and Microstructures, Volume 9 of the ASM Handbook series, is quite different from the 1985 edition in several ways. One difference is that the citations of micrographs are integrated within the textual discussions on the metallography and microstructures of materials. This is distinctly different from the previous edition, in which the end of each article contained an atlas of many micrographs without citation in text. The atlas method in the previous edition was effective at that time, as micrograph collections are useful in making visual comparisons for different materials conditions and/or specimen preparation techniques. However, with the development of electronic publication, a new approach is possible, where a large collection of micrographs can be stored and searched electronically. This is the underlying concept of the newly released Micrograph Center as part of the ASM International Materials Information Online. This electronic archive provides a collection of the previously published micrograph atlases in the 8th and the 9th Editions Metals Handbook. As such, one objective of the new Volume 9 is to complement more closely the electronic archive of the Micrograph Center by moving away from an atlas format and by focusing more on representative micrographs that are visual tools in assisting experienced and new practitioners in the preparation and interpretation of micrographs.
The new Volume 9 also places more emphasis on the underlying physical metallurgy of alloys, as an important part in the interpretation and understanding of microstructural development. In this regard, formation of phase constituents is described in more detail in terms of the general concepts in physical metallurgy and key compositional categories of important alloy systems. Some coverage on phase diagrams is included, although binary phase diagrams are not collected to the same extent as in the 8th Edition Metals Handbook, Volume 8, Metallography, Structures, and Phases Diagrams (1973). This is because binary phase diagrams are covered extensively in other publications such as ASM Handbook, Volume 3, Alloy Phase Diagrams, and the Desk Handbook: Phase Diagrams for Binary Alloys, ASM International, 2000. In this volume, the key emphasis is on the concepts for using phase diagrams as a tool in metallographic interpretation and on the presentation of important binary-phase regions or the quasi-binary and pseudo-binary diagrams of key compositional components.