April AMP_Digital

A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | A P R I L 2 0 1 9 2 8 remelting furnace. OGC had six MS&E faculty members, 22 graduate students, and some additional research staff and adjunct faculty in the mid-1980s. Port- land Gas & Electric Co. gave $50K for OGC to melt and cast 2000-lb ingots for rolling by OSM or Northwest Copper Works Inc. Wood and University of Wis- consin-educated Prof. Jack H. Devletian developed a method for welding heavy steel sections in one pass, such as gird- ers and railroad rails [8] . OGC negotiated an agreement with Edison Welding Institute of Ohio and the Welding Institute of the Unit- ed Kingdom in August 1986 to form the second welding research facility in America, called EWI-OGC, with Wood as director. The other founding mem- bers of the institute were the Canadian Welding Society, ESI, ESCO, Freightlin- er, Northwest Copper Works, “Oregon” chainsaw blade maker Omark Indus- tries, and Oregon Steel Mills. The first projects were related to plasma coat- ing for enhancing the performance of alloys used in the severe environments of pulp and paper mills, power plants, and chemical processing industries. Wood described it as the largest reposi- tory of welding technology expertise in the world [9] . ELECTROSLAG WELDING DEVELOPMENT Wood, Devletian, and colleagues developed electroslag welding (ESW) circa 1987 in part to rejuvenate Port- land as a shipbuilding and repair hub, funded by a $50K grant from the Na- tional Coastal Resources Institute. ESW, dating back to 1940, enabled the join- ing of two 20-inch-thick steel plates in a single pass, and reduced the time from 25 hours with conventional methods to about one hour, according to Devletian. The mechanism of ESW is ohmic (also called Joule or resistance) heat gener- ated by resistance to current through a protective slag cover between filler wire feed and the weld pool between the plates being joined. Versions of ESW have also been applied to other pro- cesses, including ingot melting and re- fining, and cladding [10] . A program at OGC named “Ex- ternal Affairs and Development” drew two retired metallurgists back into the workplace in the late 1980s: Robert Briggs of Chevron Oil brought his exper- tise in tribology, while Lawrence Venne from ESCO Corp. brought his expertise in casting large Hadfield steel compo- nents and was named the first ESCO Distinguished Industrial Scholar at OGC. Venne served part-time as a liai- son between the MS&E department and metals-based industries [11] . Devletian developed an electro- slag cladding method for Inconel 625 on steel warship propeller shafts that reduced the repair cost from $200K to $60K in 1989. The crevice corrosion as- sociated with the earlier Inconel 625 sleeve on the shaft was virtually elim- inated by OGC’s surfacing technique. The slag in this case came from a pow- dered flux between the cladding strips and the shaft. The technology transfer to naval shipyards was aided by a $1M appropriation by the U.S. Congress [12] . OGC RENAMED OREGON GRADUATE INSTITUTE OGC was renamed the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Tech- nology (OGI) in 1989 [13] . A quarterly campus magazine— Visions —was first published in spring 1985 and provided much of the information for this article. President Dwight Sangrey sought to build OGI as part of an education-busi- ness complex along the lines of North Carolina’s hugely successful Research Triangle Park. OGI reached its peak of 153 faculty members and 1100 students Aerial view of the Oregon Graduate Institute, circa 2013.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjA4MTAy