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Joel J. Schubbe
U.S. Naval Academy
Annapolis, Md.
ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES •
JUNE 2014
26
F
ounded in 1845 and now the undergrad-
uate college of the Navy, the U.S. Naval
Academy (USNA), Annapolis, Md., pre-
pares young men and women to lead naval
forces as commissioned officers after four years
of classes and training. Because the naval fleet
has changed dramatically since its early days,
the classes and topics students must master in
order to maintain ships have also evolved.
Many organizations within the Department of
Defense (DoD) recognize the importance of the
next generation of leaders and their ability to
address material degradation and corrosion in
the aging—and sometimes irreplaceable—sys-
tems that the armed forces rely on.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense
through the Technical Corrosion Collaboration,
the Naval Research Laboratory, the Air Force Re-
search Laboratory, the Air Force Institute of
Technology, the Naval Air Systems Command,
and others, have all implemented efforts to ad-
dress expanded education efforts and technical
understanding of materials degradation. One of
the goals of the Naval Academy’s corrosion ef-
forts and corrosion-related STEM activities is to
educate students to understand materials degra-
dation processes and prevention methods for
aging defense systems. The USNA has a robust
undergraduate engineering program with many
research opportunities.
Recent corrosion research
Corrosion, corrosion fatigue, fracture and
fatigue, surface treatments, hybrid materials,
and composites are central subjects of the me-
chanical engineering faculty for materials and
mechanics, and have inspired many summer
internships and research projects in recent
years. For example, Peggy LeGrand, as a Bow-
man Scholar, with professor Michelle Koul pur-
sued “Environmentally Assisted Cracking
Evaluation of UNS N06686 Using Constant Ex-
tension Rate Testing” and presented results at
the 2010 NACE Conference.
In addition, Jennifer Jones produced “An
Evaluation of the Corrosion and Mechanical
Performance of Interstitially Surface Hardened
Stainless Steel” and is currently a graduate stu-
dent at University of Virginia studying with
Jimmy Burns. Eric Arnold, an independent re-
search student, with associate professor Joel
Schubbe and professor Patrick Moran pre-
sented work at the 26th ICAF Symposium and
published in the
Journal of Materials Engineer-
ing and Performance
with “Comparison of SCC
Thresholds and Environmentally Assisted
Cracking in 7050-T7451 Aluminum Plate.”
Follow-up work was performed by Martin
Bennett, a recent graduate of the Naval Post-
graduate School.
Battling corrosion fatigue
Corrosion is the most insidious formof dam-
age commonly present in DoD weapon systems
and infrastructures and has many facets. One of
the most dangerous and prevalent is
corrosion
fatigue,
damage that occurs due to cyclic stresses
combined with corrosive environments. It re-
duces the operational life of many systems and
infrastructures, such as aerospace structures,
ships, submarines, and bridges. Catastrophic
consequences can result when corrosion fatigue
is not prevented or corrected.
Midshipmen (MIDN) Sabrina Reyes and
Scott Bolstad, members of the USNA Bowman
Scholar program fostering nuclear expertise of-
ficers, were recently featured in
CorrDefense
Naval Academy Attacks Corrosion
with Education and Research
The U.S. Naval
Academy is
expanding
awareness
about
corrosion-
related
material
degradation,
its effects
on force
readiness,
and efforts to
manage it.
U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Md., founded in 1845.
Fig. 1
—
Professor Patrick Moran teaches high
school students about corrosion testing.