MSc Advanced Engineering Materials

For entry in the academic year beginning September 2027, the tuition fees are as follows:

• MSc (full-time)
  UK students (per annum): £15,400
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £38,600

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

Always contact the admissions team if you are unsure which fee applies to your qualification award and method of attendance.

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

We offer a number of postgraduate taught scholarships and awards to outstanding UK and international students each year.

The University of Manchester is committed to widening participation in master's study, and allocates £300,000 in funding each year. Our Manchester Master's Bursaries are aimed at widening access to master's courses by removing barriers to postgraduate education for students from underrepresented groups.

We also welcome the best and brightest international students each year and reward excellence with a number of merit-based scholarships. See our range of master’s scholarships for international students .

And, if you have completed an undergraduate degree at The University of Manchester, or are currently in your final year of an undergraduate degree with us, you may be eligible for a discount of 10% on tuition fees if you choose to study on a taught postgraduate course here. Find out if you're eligible and how to apply .

For more information on master's tuition fees and studying costs, visit the University of Manchester funding for master's courses website to help you plan your finances.

Many applications of advanced materials are highly tailored to give enhanced structural or functional properties. These properties are controlled by both the intrinsic material properties and the microstructure of the material. An understanding of the relationship between the properties of a material and its microstructure is important in the selection of materials for a given application or the design of a material to achieve a specific function. The processing routes are used to create these microstructures that provide the desired properties. The objective of this course is to give an overview of the essential concepts underpinning materials science and engineering.

This unit describes a range of materials manufacturing methods and explains how they influence the resulting microstructures, using examples from metals and ceramics. For each material type, the importance of defects in controlling properties is discussed through relevant examples. These defects are then linked to processing routes and to the resulting failure mechanisms.

The unit aims to:

1. Allow students to understand the key principles that underly the interaction between materials processing and materials microstructure, with an emphasis on metals and ceramics.
2. Inform students how the microstructure influences the key mechanical and functional properties of engineering alloys and ceramics.
3. Allow students to understand the role of defects in controlling the properties of materials and have an appreciation of the range and type of defects introduced by manufacturing processes.
4. Introduce a range of failure mechanisms and how they relate to the materials microstructure.
5. Give students experience on how to choose the best material and processing route for a given application, whilst balancing competing requirements.

A greater depth of the learning outcomes will be covered in the following sections:

• Knowledge and understanding
• Intellectual skills
• Practical skills
• Transferable skills and personal qualities

Teaching weeks 4–12 cover the scheduled lecture, tutorial and coursework activities shown below. A pre-examination question-and-answer session will be held in teaching week 17; final dates, times and rooms will be confirmed through individual timetables.

Every week there will be 2 or 3 (50 minute) face-to-face lectures/Q&A/tutorial sessions delivered. Every week there will also be asynchronous (online) content to cover as well. The Lecturer will inform you how the face to face and asynchronous content will work together each week, you will be expected to engage with the online content to make the most of the face-to-face sessions.

• Identify constituent phases in binary and ternary materials systems and their compositions using a phase diagram, and calculate, through use of the lever rule, the approximate phase fractions.
• Identify eutectic, peritectic and continuous solubility phase diagrams and describe how they can be exploited for different applications.
• Generate a description of the solidification sequence for metals that results in the formation of dendrites and grains, including a discussion of compositional segregation. 
• Recall the major processes, and the common resulting properties and microstructure, of shaping processes of metals and ceramics including: rolling, forging, wire drawing, powder route via green state. Identify and justify when you would use the different methods.
• Describe how the following act to strengthen an alloy: precipitate hardening, solid solution strengthening, grain size refinement, creation of single crystal/crystallographic texture inc. phase transformation toughening. Demonstrate the ability to interpret which strengthening mechanisms are present in different materials systems.
• Define what crystallographic texture is and explain how it influences mechanical performance. Make basic predictions of texture evolution from major processing routes i.e. rolling, wire drawing, forging.
• Understand how microstructure can be controlled through processing inc. recovery, crystallization and grain growth and the evolution of texture, include example key microstructures.
• Describe how manufacturing processes can lead to materials defects and understand the underlying processes relevant to their formation and control.

• Identify major failure mechanisms for brittle and ductile materials inc. microvoid coalescence, transgranular cleavage, intergranular failure and fatigue from the appearance of fracture surfaces and demonstrate understanding of how these features were formed
• Evaluate and choose the best material for a specific application using Ashby diagrams and further construct an appropriate processing route for performance optimization balanced via the production route.

• Discriminate between different thermomechanical processing routes and select the appropriate route to achieve certain end results through the use of TTT diagrams, and the use of quenching, ageing etc. 
• Define the stress concentration, k, and stress intensity factor, K, related to fracture mechanics.  Predict K and justify its appropriate application
• Manipulate data using statistics to understand the mechanical properties of brittle materials using Weibull modulus

• Solve numerical problems.
• Understand the 3-dimensional nature of materials microstructure.
• Write concise and relevant reports in an appropriate format following the guidelines given.

Feedback given written and verbally.