To: Friends and Alumni of the Fontana Corrosion Center
From: Gerald S. Frankel and Rudy Buchheit
Warmest holiday greetings from
the Fontana Corrosion Center!
Another year has rushed by us, but not before visiting much change upon the FCC and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. By any standard, this has been an exceptional year for MSE. As you may know from various correspondence, MSE won a Selective Investment Award from OSU this past year. This award was the result of a University-wide competition given to departments judged to be on-the-rise, and is intended to result in the hiring of several distinguished faculty. The objective of selective investment is to propel departments to the highest echelons in the national rankings, thereby fostering OSU’s objective of becoming one of the premier public universities. It is obvious to us that the historic and recent successes of the FCC played a major role in convincing the selection committee that MSE is a department worth investing in. The selective investment award will be used to help fund the Honda Chair (JimWilliams), the Orton Chair for Ceramic Engineering (search underway), and three new positions in the area of computational materials science (search committees forming). The odds are stacked against those funds being used to bring another corroder onto the faculty, but it is not impossible.
In addition to the selective investment award, there are several large research initiatives being pursued by MSE, and the FCC is active in all of them. Hamish Fraser is leading an effort to win an NSF Science and Technology Center in the area of accelerated materials development through computation. Corrosion is a part of the STC since one focus is on materials such as Al alloys that must be designed with corrosion susceptibility in mind. This proposal is in the final stages of the review process and the odds for success are good. If you think your company would like to be connected to this activity, please get in touch. Another proposal for an NSF Engineering Research Center is being developed. The plan of the ERC is to bridge the gap between discovery and technology readiness of component technologies, by focusing on affordability, reliability, and producibility. The FCC is active in reliability issues. The University recently funded a seed grant program to develop interdisciplinary activities in the area of biomaterials. Corrosion of prosthetic devices is one of the focuses of this initiative. These activities have created a very positive and energizing research environment.
In the midst of this upswing in MSE, the FCC continues its growth. The annual research funding for the 3 faculty most closely aligned with the FCC (Jerry Frankel, Rudy Buchheit, and Ken Sandhage) is about $1.2M/year. The funding for all research projects at OSU in corrosion that the FCC is either leading or collaborating in now totals about $1.8M/year! This number places us as one of the largest academic corrosion labs in the whole US. Investment in lab renovation and equipment over the last 3 years is approaching $1 million. Our objective in this renovation is to be able to conduct corrosion research that spans the range from fundamental to applied and from the smallest to largest length scales. We are methodically renovating our lab space with MacQuigg 646 being our biggest conquest this year. We recently purchased a second STM/AFM, and are in the midst of an up-grade of stress corrosion and exposure test facilities. We continue to upgrade our core tools including electrochemical test equipment and computing capacity. We are also embarking on a major thrust to synthesize and characterize the electrochemical characteristics of intermetallic compounds of various types to support several localized corrosion activities. As a result, we have invested in several furnaces and thin film deposition units that are just now coming on line.
While investment in facilities and infrastructure is essential for a productive research program, the key ingredient for success is people. We have had the good fortune of being able to attract some excellent students and researchers this year. We welcomed new graduate research assistants Rob Fecke (stochastics of pit initiation), Deepanker Mathur (SCC of Al-Li-Cu alloy AF/C458), and Qingiang Meng (crevice corrosion of Al alloys), and undergraduate researchers Joan Kertz (IG corrosion in friction stir welded AF/C458) , Ryan Leard (Al-based intermetallic compound synthesis and characterization), and Jennifer Wisecup (Cu control during conversion coating of Al-Cu-Mg alloys). Two post-doctoral researchers will be joining the group from France right after the new year, and both are named Valerie! Valerie Laget, will join the group from the Universite´ Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg . Valerie is a materials scientist whose background is in characterization and synthesis of lamellar inorganic compounds. She will be joining the group to lead activities in synthesis of hydrotalcites for our chromate-free conversion coating development projects. She will also conduct research on thermal and UV-induced degradation of chromate coatings. Valerie Guillaumin will join the group this winter from the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse . Valerie conducted research in the area of localized corrosion of Al alloys. Our suspicion is that she won't have a hard time fitting in around here! Finally, Xiaodong Liu will be joining us as a visiting scientist. He is currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Corrosion and Protection of Metals, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China.
Mohammed Al-Anezi finished his M.S. thesis this summer with his M.S. and has returned to Saudi Arabia where he has project responsibility for Aramco. The results of his thesis on HIC of pressure vessel steel in H2S-containing DGA solutions will likely save Aramco millions of dollars in construction costs for new gas plants. Cate Buchheit recently departed the FCC to work in the chronically understaffed Department office downstairs. As always, it's hard to keep good people around!
That leaves the rest of us plugging away here on the 5th and 6th floors. Cindy Flores continues to keep the group organized minding the budgets, purchases, travel, consumable stock s and otherwise being the FCC den mother. The three FCC post-docs will likely be leaving next year. Akshey Sehgal has been developing the foil penetration technique to measure open circuit pit growth rates, and has been getting fascinating data. Eiji Akiyama has been splitting his time between using the artificial crevice technique to study chromate effects in Al localized corrosion, and in using optical absorption techniques to study chromate release from coatings. The work of Patrick Schmutz on novel approaches of using AFM to study Al alloy pitting has received high acclaim. Two papers were published last summer, and several more are on the way.
Our senior graduate students Donghui Lu and Jian Zhang have successful negotiated all the requirements for their Ph.D.'s save one (the Defense), and are in the home stretch. Lu has been conducting studies of pit growth in thin films and Jian is working on the now-famous corrosion-sensing paint. An OSU press release on Jian’s work led to articles in a number of publications, including Business Week and Aviation Weekly. Myna Bisneer is putting the final touches on her Master's project on the corrosion of metals coated with thin polymer layers. She expects to finish in the next few months. Other grad students who have been hard at work include Ramgopal Thodla (exfoliation and IGC of 7XXX Al alloys), Wenping Zhang (hydrotalcite coating process development) , M.S. Babu (chromate-free coatings with active corrosion protection), and Weilong Zhang (effect of chromate on anodic and cathodic kinetics). Derik Devecchio, who has been on staff, was planning on pursuing research in Japan. He has elected to stay and get a Ph.D. by using our novel SPM techniques to study corrosion. Seemed like an obvious choice to us!
We would like to take the opportunity to dispel the rumor that Bob Rapp is retired. Bob is advising students, interacting with post-docs, writing (and winning) proposals, and traveling as much as ever, all while trying to revolutionize the electroreduction of aluminum. See Bob run! It was also announced that Bob will be the recipient of several significant awards including the ASM Gold Medal, the TMS Robert Franklin Mehl Award, and the Henry Linford Award for Distinguished Teaching from ECS.
For that matter, Susan Smialowska, doesn't seem to be taking retirement all that seriously either. Susan continues to interact with the students, actively pursues research, and has traveled extensively in Africa and Europe this year. While in Europe Susan was awarded the prestigious Cavallaro Medal by the European Federation of Corrosion for distinguished activity and publication in the field of corrosion . Congratulations Susan!
We also want to brag a little about our own successes. This year Rudy Buchheit led a successful proposal to SERDP on chromate inhibition of Al alloy corrosion. The program, totaling $2M over 4 years, will involve researchers from the Air Force and Army Research Labs, as well as OSU. Jerry Frankel was elected chairman of the Gordon Research Conference on Aqueous Corrosion for the year 2000. It will be held at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH on July 23-28, 2000. Place it on your calendar now. Jerry is also co-teaching a short course on corrosion each summer at Penn State. The third annual course will be held July 26-30, 1999. Get in touch for more information.
Odds and Ends
As you can tell, this has been another booming year for the FCC. We expect the growth to continue through next year, but saturation is quickly approaching. It remains our utmost priority to maintain the highest standard in quality. Stay in touch with us and other FCC friends by visiting the FCC home page at:
http://www.mse.eng.ohio-state.edu/~frankel/fcc/index.html.
You may find that site interesting. We have assembled about 80 portraits of active corrosion researchers, continuing Roger Staehle’s tradition.
Thanks to great advance organization by Gustavo Cragnolino, the FCC Alumni Reunion Dinner will be held during the CORROSION/99 meeting in San Antonio. Please plan to join us at El Mirador restaurant on Tuesday evening, April 27, 1999. Like our wonderful San Diego dinner last year (pictures of that evening are available on the FCC web page), we are again set to enjoy the food, flavor, and fun of the Southwest. El Mirador is a wonderful place that will suit our group perfectly (make sure to try the Margaritas). There will be a sign-up sheet posted on the message board in the Convention Center.
If you have a few spare minutes during the meeting make sure to check out the OSU posters in the student poster competition in the Exhibition Hall. Stop by and say "hello" and see the research presentations by M.S. Babu, Joan Kertz, Jennifer Wisecup, and Wenping Zhang.
We would like to close by wishing you and your family a happy holiday season and a healthy and prosperous New Year.
Jerry Frankel Rudy Buchheit