The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Md., announced a competition to create an Advanced Materials Center of Excellence to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between NIST researchers and scientists and engineers from academia and industry. The center will focus on accelerating the discovery and development of advanced materials through innovations in measurement science and in new modeling, simulation, data, and informatics tools.
Sarah Byrnes, Claire A. Campbell, and Timothy De Hennis of the Boeing Company, Chicago, presented “An Investigation of Case-Core Separation in Carburized Steels” at Heat Treat 2013 in Indianapolis in September. They presented an in-depth description of the mechanism that drives the occurrence of case-core separations in carburized steels. They reported on case studies of known case-core separations, and identified and discussed contributing factors for crack initiation.
Rubig Group, Austria, announces that it opened its first facility in the United States on July 19, in Rockford, Ill. The facility is a service center for furnace maintenance and troubleshooting, and provides support for application engineering in the field of heat treatment. It will also include plasma surface treatment equipment, and will offer sales, service, and spare parts focused on the aviation industry.
Ipsen USA, Cherry Valley, Ill., will present two papers at the 27th ASM Heat Treating Society Conference and Exposition, “Redefining Quenching Technology” and “Bright Tempering: Achieving High-Quality Appearance during Tempering.” The Ipsen booth (#1529) will feature several technologies covering the range of Ipsen’s premium vacuum and atmosphere product lines. Additionally, furnaces well-suited for low-pressure carburizing, such as the Turbo2Treater, will also be represented.
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md., and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have demonstrated a new design for an instrumented nanoscale indenter that makes sensitive measurements of the mechanical properties of thin films. The NIST solution is a touchless surface detector in which the frequency of a pair of tiny quartz tuning forks changes as they get close to the test surface.
