Book excerpt: Digital materials are integral to the modern design methods for industrial components and structures, allowing mechanical properties to be predicted from a description of the microstructure and behavior laws of the constituent parts. This book examines a wide range of material properties, from transport phenomena to the mechanics of materials and microstructure changes in physical metallurgy. The fundamental mechanisms of deformation, annealing and damage to materials involve complex atomic processes; these have been explored and studied by numerical simulations, such as molecular dynamics. In contrast to this minutely detailed approach, Digital Materials explores how these mechanisms can instead be integrated into an approach that considers the continuum of the physics and mechanics of materials at the mesoscopic scale. The book thus focuses on the mechanics of continuous media and the continuum thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The models displayed take the myriad properties of different materials into account, in particular their polycrystalline and/or composite natures; this becomes an intermediate step toward establishing effective laws for engineers in the processes of structure calculation and manufacturing.