The aim of this book is to provide the reader with the latest advanced research results on, and an improved understanding of, various aspects of the processing and characterization of materials.

The Industrial Revolution showed that the development and improvement of new materials and functions could bring about social change, and benefit human society. However, one can be forgiven for feeling that more recent materials research, particularly in the domain of metals, has focused only upon individual elemental characteristics and narrow specialty fields, and that the original vision of materials research has thus been lost.

This collection comprises invited and contributed papers which were presented at the Advanced Structural Materials Symposium held in Cancún, México during the Annual Conference of the Mexican Academy of Materials Science.

This eighth volume in the series covering the latest results in the field includes nearly 700 abstracts of papers which appeared between the publication of Annual Retrospective VII (Volumes 233-234) and the end of November 2005 (allowing for vagaries of journal availability).

Severe Plastic Deformation (SPD) has proved to be an attractive tool for obtaining ultrafine-grained and nanocrystalline materials in bulk form; free of defects such as pores and impurities.

This collection of papers provides the most up-to-date information available for researchers and engineers who are interested in any aspect of the field of solidification processes. Herein, theoretical analyses are presented, as well as studies of the technological problems which are associated with solidification in various gravitational environments. The topics covered range from fundamental aspects and modelling, to practical engineering applications.

The steel industry continues to remain a highly dynamic sector that must repeatedly face new challenges. During recent years, key factors have been the consolidation of new technologies, the marketing of new steel grades and the development of new products. Innovation, cost-reduction and environmental conservation are challenges that all of the players in the steel world - i.e. industry, research and academia - have to confront every day. Microalloying is one of the principal actors in this struggle.

To the materials science community, Texture is an important property which describes the relative orientations of the various material elements which constitute the microstructure. These elements are usually the crystalline grains; each with a different orientation of its crystal lattice. However, morphological textures, such as the arrangement of fibers in a composite material, also have to be considered. In rare cases, the texture is random; with all possible orientations being equally represented in the material. But, usually, processing of the material has caused the texture to become non-random; with a consequent anisotropy of the material properties. Thus, not only metallurgists and materials scientists take an interest in textures, but also physicists, mathematicians, geologists, mechanical engineers and others.

This book presents a wealth of valuable up-to-date information for active researchers and engineers, and will certainly form a solid basis for any future research, in the field of abrasive technology, which is aimed at creating new and practical machine tools, systems and processes, or at identifying new characteristics.

The field of Residual Stresses is surprisingly large, and also highly interdisciplinary in nature, both with regard to its applications and to its scientific and technological fundamentals.