A PERSPECTIVE ON MATERIALS CHARACTERIZATION FOR TECHNOLOGY ADVANCEMENT AND INDUSTRIAL-GROWTH - EMPHASIS ON NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION

Materials are the index of human progress. The evolution of mankind is linked to materials, for example, stone age, bronze age, iron age etc . The success of use of materials towards better quality of human life depends on the capabilities for characterization of these materials, which leads to ensuring reliable performance of the materials and deve lopment of new, and more efficient materials. The materials characteri zation encompasses determining chemical constituents, microstructural characterization down to a few Angstroms level and defect assessment f rom a few micrometers to few millimeters in a wide variety of material s. Recent progress made in the nondestructive characterization of mate rials and the future trends and direction are discussed in this paper.