Physical Metallurgy
MIT OpenCourseWare's Physical Metallurgy connects the atomic and microstructural makeup of metals to their mechanical and physical properties. The course covers crystal structure, phase diagrams, diffusion, and defects, then builds toward alloy design and microstructural engineering, showing how processing routes and thermodynamics combine to produce materials with specific properties. Lecture notes, problem sets, and exams from the MIT course are provided as free downloadable materials, following the structure used in the original graduate-level offering in Materials Science and Engineering. The course assumes some background in solid-state physics or materials fundamentals and moves through topics like precipitation hardening, martensitic transformations, and strengthening mechanisms in metals. As with other MIT OCW offerings, there is no instructor interaction or certificate, just the course materials themselves, useful for self-study or as a companion to a formal metallurgy curriculum.