Greetings from a guest columnist and Exponent colleague of Dr. Richard Martin. I am a scientist with 20 years of experience investigating human behavior. I conduct research in areas related to human learning, perception, memory, decision-making and information processing. As a human-factors consultant, I focus on the cognitive factors that affect risk perception and safety, including hazard communications such as labels, signs and instruction manuals. This column aims to highlight some considerations for the safety-minded manager from a human-factors perspective.
At Industrial Heating, our goal is to provide value to you, our reader. We do this in a number of ways through multiple channels. We strive to provide technical content that will help you to do your job more effectively, efficiently and productively.
For the heat treater, the concept of hardenability is often more difficult to grasp than that of hardness. Part of the reason for this is that we seldom perform the tests that measure or predict this property in our shops. The reason why it is important to measure the hardenability of steel is to make sure that we are making the right material choice for a specific engineering application. With the supply of raw material coming from multiple worldwide sources, there is renewed emphasis on predicting how a material will respond to heat treating. Let’s learn more.
As usual, we will cover too much material in one page. However, joining the two issues of U.S. energy policy distorted by politicians with public knowledge about what is going on makes a commanding and entertaining topic.
