What are Industrial Materials?: Metallic Material Basics (Industrial Material and Surface Treatment Basics)

This article is designed to help users select materials with greater confidence by providing a brief introduction to the characteristics and selection methods of basic materials and surface treatments.

• What are Industrial materials?: Metallic material basics
• Frequently Used Metallic Materials
• What is Heat Treatment? / What is Surface Treatment?

What are industrial materials?

There are four main categories of industrial materials. This special feature focuses on the metallic materials.

Metallic material basics

Review of terminology used in material standards and for describing mechanical/physical properties

Material standards

Standards have been created for industrial materials to make it easier to identify their properties and compare different materials.
The JIS standards (Japanese Industrial Standards) for materials are generally represented as shown below. There are three parts in JIS standard.

Terminology describing mechanical/physical properties

Different materials have different mechanical and physical properties. Information such as product catalogs usually provides characteristic tables to let users know whether selected materials will satisfy their application needs or create problems.
Use the table below to review the meanings of terms used in characteristic tables.

Name	Unit of measurement (used in MISUMI catalogs)	Description
Tensile strength	N/mm2	The maximum tensile stress per tensile load on the material.
Stretch	%	(Material length when pulled and stretched to breaking point – Original length) ÷ Original length
Hardness	-	The magnitude of the metal surface's resistance to deformation generated by an external force. JIS standards specify Brinell (HB), Vickers (HV), Rockwell (HR) and Shore (HS) hardness
Conductivity (electrical conductivity)	% IACS	An index indicating the ease with which electricity flows in a material. Equal to the reciprocal of electrical resistivity. For industrial applications, the electrical resistivity of a conductor is sometimes expressed by an index that indicates the conductor wire's conductivity as a percentage relative to a value of 100% for annealed copper wire conforming to a standard known as the International Annealed Copper Standard (IACS).
Thermal conductivity	cal/(cm・s・℃)	The amount of heat transferred per second in a plate of unit thickness that has a temperature difference of 1°C between each end.
Linear expansion coefficient	10-6/℃	The rate at which the length of an object increases with each 1°C of temperature rise.

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