Carbidic Austempered Ductile Iron in the news
This news piece at the AFS website states that Brandon Wervey, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, “won first place in the AFS/Foundry Educational Foundation (FEF) Student Technology Scholarship competition with his paper, ‘Carbidic Austempered Ductile Iron’.” Please follow the link to read more about it. The International Journal of Metalcasting (IJMC) is a prestigious place indeed to be published. Congratulations to Brandon! I can’t wait to read the paper!
ASM
Materials Camp
There
is a lot of talk about a lack of metallurgical talent (and that’s just in my
house!). With this in mind, ASM
Materials Camps are a worthwhile exercise.
You can read more about them here.
Yes, he was a Metallurgist
I was shocked … SHOCKED! … to learn that onetime USSR bigshot Leonid Brezhnev was a metallurgist. Oh it’s true; … I saw it on Wikipedia! In fact, he was a ferrous metallurgist, having “graduated from the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum in 1935 … and became a metallurgical engineer in the iron and steel industries.” Clearly he found politics more rewarding than metallurgy, but his life might have been different if he had learned more about bainite. I know that my life and the lives of many other comrades have been improved by the properties of austempered steel.
Vasko’s Reading Pick
It is too soon to make a book recommendation, but currently I am reading Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday”. This is a social sciences book that asks “what can we learn from traditional societies”. It discusses some neat topics, like trade in pre-modern markets. We all know about comparative advantage, such as people in Kansas producing and selling wheat and exchanging it (eventually) with people in Guatemala who produce and sell coffee. But it is interesting how Diamond points out that in pre-modern markets “they also do much trading of objects equally available to either party, and they do that trading to maintain relationships for political and social reasons.” I have seen something similar, but not the same, in business-to-business markets. Some purchasing decisions are made as a “tip of the hat” or a sign of respect or simply to maintain cordial relations, even when the numbers do not add up. The value of such a decision is difficult to quantify, but these purchases do indeed get made.