Activities of the Materials Technology InstituteGalen Hodge - Materials Technology Institute
Mr. Hodge delivered a non-technical presentation summarizing the history, organization, and benefits associated with membership in the Materials Technology Institute. He also summarized the status of four completed and three current projects of MTI. These are:
Atlas of Microstructures
Terahertz Imaging to Identify Defects in FRP and Detect CU
Guidelines for Assessing Fire and Explosion Damage –2nd Edition of Publication No. 30
Operation, Maintenance and Repair of Glass Lined Equipment
Understanding Metal Dusting (MD) and the Development of MD Resistant Alloys
Detection of Hydrogen in Titanium
and
Improvements in Metal Casting Quality
MTI evolved from 5 attendees of the 1975 NACE (corrosion engineers) meeting in Toronto, Canada, who met in a bar and decided that there are common problems within the industry that the budgets of their individual companies could not solve, but by pooling funds and resources better progress could be made. Out of this was developed Metal Technology Institute, which through its 35 year history has evolved to an International organization.
The organization has six Associate Directors, and one consultant on staff (who deals specifically with China). Each member company holds one place on the Board of Directors. Membership has a sliding fee is based on company sales. In addition to the Board, there are three Technical Advisory councils in the structure of MTI. These are:
AmeriTAC (American)
EuroTAC (European)
and
AsiaTAC (Asian)
The councils address issues more specific to the regions they represent.
It is the philosophy of MTI to have the members define its activity, and to avoid any "staff driven" projects. The staff is there to facilitate the projects but each project requires a member Champion to get it started. MTI assemblies take on a "town meeting" type format. Specific technical issues are then dealt with by the TAC councils, Project Development Committees, and Project Teams.
The Atlas of Microstructures project has picked up on work by Battelle Institute documenting microstructure phase development of HK and HP reformer alloys in 1975. Newer, higher temperature alloys have been developed since that time, and the goal of this project is to document microstructural changes at the higher temperatures at which they are used. MTI secured long time aged samples from suppliers and users and funded Dechema to analyze the microstructure changes. The result is a reference book of such microstructures, and Dechema was awarded grand prize at the 2009 Metallography Congress in 2009.
Terahertz Imaging is considered to be potentially useful for the detection of corrosion in metal under layers of insulation as a non-destructive inspection technique. MTI is working with Rensselaer Polytechnic to employ this technology in this manner. To date image quality needs to improve, and the current equipment needs to be downsized to make field inspection possible.
Guidelines for Assessing Fire and Explosion Damage has been the most successful publication of MTI. It has been used as a key reference in the assessment of many chemical process or equipment failures including those facilitated by arson and sabotage. A second edition is nearly ready for press and bears the new title Incident Assessment. Much of the new content is inspired by forms of damage to the Gulf Coast chemical/petroleum industries from the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. The new edition is edited by a leading expert from Phillips Petroleum.
Operation, Maintenance and repair of Glass Lined Equipment is a how-to manual, on inspecting, maintaining, and repairing glass lined equipment used for corrosive chemical processing and handling. MTI's AsiaTAC will be using this to train Chinese, who often have problems with inferior glass lined equipment. The manual is written by industry experts and includes analysis and repair techniques for equipment failures.
Metal dusting in a corrosive mechanism brought about by carbon monoxide breaking down at the surface of metals. In a joint venture with some national laboratories, MTI has been addressing the problem. One effort has been to accelerate metal dusting effects for predictive purposes using temperature and pressure. Argonne National labs has come up with an alloy considered to be resistant to metal dusting. In accelerated tests it shows great promise, but in real application it has not been as successful. The project is currently taking a new direction to try to find atmosphere additives that will inhibit this form of corrosion.
A simple non-destructive test for the detection of Hydrogen in Titanium alloys is very desirable because of the brittleness this condition imparts on the products. MTI initially supported efforts to use electrical resistivity, but this has not proved to be as sensitive or reliable as required. Eddy current was also investigated without success. Currently thermo-electric properties of the metal (investigation of voltage of the alloy as a portion of a thermocouple pair at specific temperatures) is the new focus of interest
The final project we will look at is Prediction of intergranular solidification shrinkage during casting. Such microshrinkage is often not able to be detected by X-ray, and can lead to leakages in cast processing equipment, not to mention low casting yields. MTI is sponsoring research to develop a full set of parameters specific to Chemical Process Industry alloys that will enable prediction and elimination of such microshinkage. The work is primarily based on the work of Japan's Nyama who developed the Nyama value used in virtually all casting simulation programs. The Nyama value is essentially a ratio of Thermal Gradient to Solidification Rate, and is computed for all cells of an FEM casting model. It has been found that high Nyama values are necessary to avoid the shrinkage, but the level of magnitude of the value is unique to each specific alloy and mold material situation. The goal of MTI is to come up with a table of values to look up, (specific to each alloy and mold), that will ensure no intergranular solidification shrinkage.
This illustrates what MTI does to improve the industrial competitiveness of its member companies.