The aim of the celebrated High Pressure School (HPS) is to provide a platform where both young and experienced researchers can meet and exchange their experiences in high-pressure research techniques.

The world production of primary and recycled aluminum continues to increase and, over the past twenty years, has risen from ~15 Mt/y in 1985 to ~32 Mt/y in 2005. The main consumers are transportation, beverage and other packaging, and building construction. The global primary aluminum production has been growing by about 2-3% per year. However, growth rates over the last decade have been much higher. In particular, during the past five years, China has played a critical role in aluminum production and has gone through a dramatic period of growth.

This substance is very much a material for the new millennium, since its new manifestation as a high-temperature superconductor can be dated precisely from the seminal 2001 Nature paper (1st March, p63), Superconductivity at 39K in Magnesium Diboride, by J.Nagamatsu, N.Nakagawa, T.Muranaka, Y.Zenitani and J.Akimitsu of the Physics Department of Aoyama-Gakuin University, Tokyo. Until then, it had been seen and used only as a rather nondescript ceramic/abrasive.

Materials science and engineering is a multidisciplinary area of research which encompasses the physics, chemistry and engineering of every class of material. In recent years, the field has attracted increasing attention, following the discovery of new types of material and their subsequent application in new technologies.

This work presents its readers with the most recent advances in the fields of machining and advanced manufacturing technology. It will be of especial valuable to production and research engineers, research students and academics.

Advances in the welfare of humans tends to be directly related to advances in the science and technology of advanced materials. Hybrid materials make up just one such class of materials, and they are unique in the sense that they exhibit properties that cannot be achieved by using conventional materials design and - at the same time - cannot be predicted by using conventional extrapolations: such as a simple weighted average of the constituents’ properties.

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.

Integrated manufacturing of lightweight components is of increasing importance for production engineering in today’s industrial climate. Due to the market’s need for high geometrical flexibility, combined with small batch sizes and short production cycles, the requirements of customers are becoming increasingly stringent.

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.