I always wondered why quench cracks were intergranular. That’s one of the questions that I did not notice wasn’t answered when I was in school. But some years back I realized that if two grains are adjacent, and during cooling one is getting smaller due to normal thermal contraction and the adjacent one is getting bigger at the moment of transformation to martensite, then there could be a lot of stress at the grain boundary.

Steel is an exciting and versatile material. I still think that after working with it and studying it for 42 years!

My “Indian sister” who attended the seminar also wanted to know WHY the curvature reverses.

Back to the curvature issue...

One of the participants of the two-day India seminar that I taught for the Chennai Chapter of ASM International and the Madras Metallurgical Society in February 2017 sent an interesting question

One of the participants of the two-day India seminar that I taught for the Chennai Chapter of ASM International and the Madras Metallurgical Society in February 2017 sent an interesting question.

In February, I had the pleasure of doing a two-day failure-analysis seminar for the Chennai Chapter of ASM International.

The essence of materials science and engineering is that every material must be made into a part by a process, which creates a multilevel structure.

One of the most interesting and exciting projects I ever worked on was the evaluation of a large industrial building constructed in the mid-1920s that had a fire in the early part of this current century.