This thesis explores experimentally and theoretically two different aspects of the properties and behaviour of metals: their ability to damp noise and their susceptibility to crack when solidifying. The first part concerns intrinsic material damping, and is motivated by increased demands from society for reductions in noise emissions. It is a material’s inherent ability to reduce its vibration level, and hence noise emission, and transform its kinetic energy into a temperature increase. To design new materials with increased intrinsic material damping, we need to be able to measure it. In this thesis, different methods for measurement of the intrinsic damping have been considered: one using Fourier analysis has been experimentally evaluated, and another using a specimen in uniaxial tension to measure the phase-lag between stress and strain has been improved. Finally, after discarding these methods, a new method has been developed. The new method measures the damping properties during compression using differential calorimetry. A specimen is subjected to a cyclic uniaxial stress to give a prescribed energy input. The difference in temperature between a specimen under stress and a non-stressed reference sample is measured. The experiments are performed in an insulated vacuum container to reduce convective losses. The rate of temperature change, together with the energy input, is used as a measure of the intrinsic material damping in the specimen. The results show a difference in intrinsic material damping, and the way in which it is influenced by the internal structure is discussed. The second part of the thesis examines hot cracks in solidifying shells. Most metals have a brittle region starting in the two-phase temperature range during solidification and for some alloys this region extends as far as hundreds of degrees below the solidus temperature. To calculate the risk of hot cracking, one needs, besides knowledge of the solidifying material’s ability to withstand stress, knowledge of the casting process to be able to calculate the thermal history of the solidification, and from this calculate the stress. In this work, experimental methods to measure and evaluate the energy transfer from the solidifying melt have been developed. The evaluated data has been used as a boundary condition to numerically calculate the solidification process and the evolving stress in the solidifying shell. A solidification model has been implemented using a fixed-domain methodology in a commercial finite element code, Comsol Multiphysics. A new solidification model using an arbitrary Lagrange Eulerian (ALE) formulation has also been implemented to solve the solidification problem for pure metals. This new model explicitly tracks the movement of the liquid/solid interface and is much more effective than the first model. / QC 20100929