Despite the several comprehensive series available in Material Sciences and their related fields, it is a hard task to find grouped properties of metals and alloys, ceramics, polymers, minerals, woods, and building materials in a single volume source book. Actually, the scope of this practical handbook is to provide to scientists, engineers, professors, technicians, and students working in numerous scientific and technical fields ranging from nuclear to civil engineering, easy and rapid access to the accurate physico-chemical properties of all classes of materials. Classes used to describe the materials are: (i) metals and their alloys, (ii) semiconductors, (iii) superconductors, (iv) magnetic materials, ( v) miscellaneous electrical materials ( e. g. , dielectrics, thermocouple and industrial electrode materials), (vi) ceramics, refractories, and glasses, (vii) polymers and elastomers, (viii) minerals, ores, meteorites, and rocks, (ix) timbers and woods, and finally (x) building materials. Particular emphasis is placed on the properties of the most common industrial materials in each class. Physical and chemical properties usually listed for each material are (i) mechanical (e. g. , density, elastic moduli, Poisson''s ratio, yield and tensile strength, hardness, fracture toughness), (ii) thermal (e. g. , melting point, thermal conductivity, specific heat capacity, coefficient oflinear thermal expansion, spectral emissivities), (iii) electrical (e. g. , resistivity, dielectric permittivity, loss tangent factor), (iv) magnetic (e. g. , magnetic permeability, remanence, Hall constant), (v) optical (e. g. , refractive indices, reflective index), (vi) electrochemical (e. g.
