Spring 2012
ASM President Visits IMS
The current president of ASM International, Professor Chris Berndt, visited the School of Engineering, the Chemical Materials, and Biomolecular Engineering Department, and IMS on April 16. Professor Berndt delivered an inspiring and thought-provoking presentation on career choices and best practices for graduating students. Several junior and senior chapter members attended the presentation, which is available online.
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ASM Hartford Area Materials Camp
About 55 high school juniors attended the fifth annual ASM Hartford Area Materials Camp on April 16 at the Institute of Material Sciences, University of Connecticut. After a brief introduction the students split up into eight groups and then embarked on a tour of materials science and engineering learning stations. The eight stations covered many important aspects of materials science and engineering, for example materials processing (casting of Al-Zn alloys in the IMS foundry, orbital welding of steel tubing), characterization (materials identification), and property determination (mechanical behavior).
The camp could not have taken place without the help of student and industry support. The participating companies for this year’s camp include Yankee Casting (support for foundry), Swagelok (orbital welding station), Ultimate Wireforms, Inc. (shape memory alloys), and Pratt&Whitney. Additional support came from CRISP (Yale’s Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena) and IMS.
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Annual Student Speaking Contest
For our annual student speaking contest, sponsored by the ASM Hartford Chapter, we had two graduate students and one undergraduate student presenter this year. Erica Pehmoeller kicked off the presentation part of the evening with an overview of her senior design Capstone project. The presentation A process to avoid grain boundary penetration by copper and associated cracking of high strength steel weld-clad with NiCu filler highlighted the importance of welding metallurgy for applied industry problems, in this case for Electric Boat. Up next was Rishabh Jain who introduced an innovative spray deposition technique for thin films in his presentation (Reactive Spray Deposition Technology and its applications in thin film deposition). Rishabh joined the Materials Science and Engineering graduate program just about two months ago and the project he started using the novel spray deposition technique aims at clean energy applications. The third presenter, Gregory Wrobel, then demonstrated how new nanoscience-based coatings can retard the flammability of textiles (Synthesis and Thermal Degradation of Fire-retardant Zinc Hydroxystannate Nanocube Coated Textiles). At the end of the evening the audience had the chance to vote for the best presenter and the runners up and Greg took the first price while Erica and Rishabh came in at a tie. With 26 attendees this year the annual speaking contest continues to attract more and more attention and we look forward to an even bigger turnout and equally interesting presentations in 2013.
Three students presented their research on April 10, 2012 during the ASM Hartford Chapter's Student Night. Shown, from left, are Joe Kubinski (Past ASM Hartford Chair), Rainer Hebert (Faculty Advisor), Greg Wrobel (graduate student),
Erica Pehmoeller (undergraduate student), and Rishabh Jain (graduate student).
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