December 23, 1996
1996 Annual Fontana Corrosion Center Newsletter
To: Friends and Alumni of the Fontana Corrosion Center
From: Gerald S. Frankel, Director, Fontana Corrosion Center
Greetings to you all. 1996 has been a simply amazing year for me personally, and also for the Fontana Corrosion Center. So much has happened since the last (and first annual) FCC newsletter, that the time is long past due for me to fill you in. We have several new projects just starting, many new people in the group, and plans for much more.
MURI
The FCC was very fortunate to have received several grants over the past year. Most notably, we were the lead institution in a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awarded in July by DoD through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The contract is for $5,000,000 over 5 years. Unfortunately it's not all for us! A terrifically talented team has been assembled, including Hugh Isaacs from Brookhaven National Lab, Clive Clayton from SUNY Stony Brook, Martin Kendig from Rockwell Science Center, Rich Granata from Lehigh, Martin Stratmann from Univ. Erlangen in Germany, Rick McCreery from Chemistry at OSU, and Susan Smialowska. The purpose of the program is to study in detail the mechanism of corrosion inhibition of Al alloys by chromate. The Air Force is very interested in reducing corrosion problems and replacing chromates at the same time. It is extremely exciting because the Air Force and DARPA are now putting a lot of resources into this problem. The MURI program and our other Air Force projects put us at the center of the whole effort. The hope is that we will generate the fundamental knowledge on how chromates work that will provide the understanding needed to develop a better corrosion-protection system. Please get in touch if you are interested in more details.
People
I want to begin by congratulating Susan Smialowska for being named a Fellow of NACE. This long-overdue recognition is richly deserved. Please join us in New Orleans at Corrosion 97 to honor Susan (more details on that below too). She has been very busy this past year, having taken separate trips to Poland, China, and Australia. Bob Rapp has been equally busy, both in his travels and with an extremely active research program.
Last year I introduced my first graduate students, Sanjeev Khosla, Donghui Lu, and Jian Zhang. They are all still here, and now busy preparing for their qualifying exams. Since February, Akshey Sehgal has been working in the FCC as a post-doc. Akshey did his PhD work at Penn State with Howard Pickering and then a short post-doc stint there with Digby Macdonald. (Yes, we took the opportunity to rub in the humiliation inflicted by the Buckeyes on the Nittany Lions!) The new students that have joined the FCC include Junye Zhu, Myna Bisineer, T. Ramgopal, and Mohammed Al-Anezi. Mohammed is an employee of Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and will be working with an old FCC friend, Arun Agarwal, at CC Technologies to study H2S effects on pressure vessel steel. You may be interested to know that CCT has built a new building that includes a facility to handle H2S. The other students will be working on a range of projects including the influence of chromates and other inhibitors on pit growth kinetics, AFM studies on intermetallics in Al alloys, photoelectrochemistry of chromated Al, developing a paint that acts as a corrosion sensor, and NDE of corrosion damage propagation. We still have our collaboration with IBM on the corrosion of a conducting polymer/metal composite used in electronic interconnect applications. Serge Hauert is visiting us for 4 months from Lausanne, Switzerland to study the corrosion of magnetic materials. Zaizhu Xia, who has been working with Prof. Smialowska for many years, is now involved in a project on the corrosion and SCC of Al alloy friction-stir welds, which is a new and fascinating welding technology. I have just brought on someone who will finally get my life here in order. Cindy Flores has been in EE for 17 years and is now the FCC administrative assistant. I moved into the 5th floor office this year, and it is starting to bustle again as the group is growing in size. Patrick Schmutz will be joining us in January as a post-doc. Patrick is also from Lausanne, and will be funded by the Swiss NSF. Finally, I am hard at work trying to find yet another post-doc for the MURI project.
Some really exciting news is that the MSE faculty has agreed to initiate a search for another faculty member in corrosion. The long tradition of high-quality corrosion research in the FCC and the success we have had in the last year has convinced the department that corrosion is a good area in which to invest. This process has just started, but stay tuned. Be assured that the FCC will continue to grow into a range of new research topics.
You must have already received a mailing from the department about the new chairman of MSE, Bob Snyder. Bob is a ceramist who comes to us from Alfred University. He is a terrific guy, and we are all charged up about a number of new and exciting developments in the department. You'll be hearing more on this in the future.
Odds and Ends
Join us during Corrosion 97 in New Orleans at the FCC Alumni Reunion Dinner. As I mentioned, we will take this opportunity to honor Susan Smialowska for her election to NACE Fellow. Rumor has it that my wife, June, may even sneak off to New Orleans to join us. FCC alumnus Bob Bartlett, who lives in the Big Easy, has put a lot of time and thought into making dinner arrangements for us. We will eat at Andrea's in Metarie on Wednesday 3/12. Be sure to look for the sign up sheet at the conference message center.
Some of you may be interested to know that I will be teaching a short course in corrosion with Barbara Shaw and Howard Pickering at Penn State University on August 4-8, 1997 at State College, PA. It will be a lab-based course covering the electrochemical basis of corrosion, the phenomenology of corrosion, and experimental techniques to study corrosion. If there is someone in your company who is just starting in the field or only needs a refresher, this may be just the thing. For more information, contact me.
Make sure to check out the FCC home page at http://www.eng.ohio-state.edu/res/fcc. It's not a really flashy site, but I have included some interesting information. For instance, there is a list of all FCC alumni (at least all that I know of - I'm still interested in corrections and additions) with email links. There is a detailed description of the research projects in the FCC. There is also the world's only corroder's portrait gallery, which contains many shots of famous corroders from around the world.
Remember to specify the FCC when making your annual contribution to OSU - you may as well send your money to a program that you are interested in!
I want to end by wishing you and your family a healthy and prosperous New Year. I hope to hear from each of you, and will disseminate tidings to your fellow alumni.