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ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES • AUGUST 2014 7
To measure elevation, ATLAS beams light with a green laser that pulses 10,000 times
per second. Only a few photons will bounce off the surface and return to the satellite,
but an incredibly sensitive detector counts those that do come back. Using the time of
the photons’ return trip, the speed of light, and some geometry, scientists can deter-
mine the distance the photons traveled and, therefore, the height of Earth below the
satellite’s orbit. ATLAS will provide scientists with measurements that create a global
portrait of Earth’s elevation, and will gather data that can precisely track changes, in-
cluding melting glaciers and thinning sea ice.
Metals collaboration to develop high-performance materials
FEI, Hillsboro, Ore., and The University of Manchester, UK, will collaborate on the
Metals Lab at The University of Manchester’s Electron Microscopy Centre in the
School of Materials. The lab will focus on steels and nonferrous alloys research in an
effort to develop high-performance materials for use in automotive, aerospace, nuclear,
oil and gas, and other industrial sectors where advanced metallic alloys play a critical
role. The multiscale workflow permits investigations of the root causes of behavior and
failure at the atomic scale, while ensuring that those small-scale observations accu-
rately represent the structure and composition of the material at larger scales. This
ability to characterize the same sample on different length scales is crucial to improve
properties like strength, creep, fatigue, and corrosion of metals, where these macro-
scopic properties are linked to microscopic effects down to the atomic scale. ,
.
A new book published
by Smithers Rapra,
Ravenna, Ohio, Engi-
neering Plastics, aims
to provide complete
coverage of the types
of plastics that are
increasingly speci-
fied in applications
as diverse as gears,
aircraft body construction, micro-elec-
tronics and extreme high temperature ap-
plications, steel replacement, and artificial
hip joints. The book also provides a com-
plete review of the use of engineering
polymers. Mechanical, electrical, and
thermal polymer properties are discussed
along with applications in food packaging
as well as solvent and detergent resist-
ance, plus frictional and hardness prop-
erties, and gas barrier data.
.