HIGHLIGHTS ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | JULY/AUGUST 2023 64 FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK Sustainability: Aviation and ASM International I just spent several days at the Paris Air Show as part of the State of Ohio team. Anyone who has flown would be amazed (and perhaps relieved) that a Boeing 777 and an Airbus 321 can do aerobatics—not that one would wish to be a passenger with a mere lap belt if subjected to such maneuvers on a commercial flight. The scale of the aerospace industry is evident as you walk the several miles of corridors between the chalets and booths housing over 2800 aerospace companies. The exhibition was a reminder to me of how critical the materials industry has been to aviation, starting with the aluminum engine block that made the Wright Flyer possible. Materials science and engineering continues to be essential to the future of both the aviation and commercial space industries. Of course, I’m preaching to the choir of those who regularly attend AeroMat. To see displays of the latest range of materials, e.g., metals, alloys, ceramics, polymers, glasses, and composites of all the above, and manufacturing processes such as additive, subtractive, casting, forging, welding, joining, thermal spraying, and other surface treatments, is a reminder of how ASM International, our affiliate societies, and our materials databases have provided the aerospace industry with essential, trusted property information for decades. Even though the airline industry contributes < 3% of the world’s CO2, the pressure on the industry to lower its carbon footprint to zero by 2050 is taken very seriously. Sustainable aviation is one of the major topics threading across the whole industry. Key issues include electric propulsion and sustainable aviation fuels. New materials and manufacturing processes are critical to the next generation of jet engines such as the open-rotor (no engine cowling) fans operating at higher input temperatures and bypass ratios many times greater than today’s largest engines. Electric-powered flights for short-haul travel (< 500 miles) and for personal/air taxi transport across cities require novel rotor technology, better and lighter batteries, and lighter yet stronger airframes. All in all, along with sustainable aviation fuels, hydrogen propulsion, managing of contrails, and flying wing designs, the aviation industry might well meet its zero-carbon goal by 2050. As I sit in Houston under the heat dome with the outside temperature in excess of 100°F for what seems Williams like forever, we can only hope that aviation and aerospace will meet their goal. In our parallel world, ASM has been operating with a deficit budget for 17 of the last 18 years. And this is not a sustainable operation. Our strategic plan under Executive Director Sandy Robert’s leadership has us reaching net zero (deficit) within the next five years. This will be achieved by a combination of increased revenue from marketing our various databases and a more efficient use of resources for our publications (increased use of electronic journals and handbooks and less paper) and better management of our many conferences and events. Just as the aviation industry is doing things differently in order to survive over the next 27 years to 2050, ASM International is doing the same. Aviation and ASM international must keep the pressure on themselves to be more sustainable. Then we will do more than survive. We will thrive. ASM President David B. Williams, FASM david.williams@asminternational.org 2023 Alpha Sigma Mu Lecturer Announced Tuesday, October 17 | 8:40 – 9:40 a.m. Dr. Robert O. Ritchie, FASM, Faculty Senior Scientists, Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and H.T. & Jessie Chua Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of California, Berkeley “Deformation and Fracture of Biological and Engineering Materials” The ability of a material to undergo limited deformation is a critical aspect of conferring toughness as this enables the dissipation of high stresses that would otherwise cause fracture. Indeed, resistance to fracture is a compromise— a combination of two, often mutually exclusive, properties of strength and deformability. It can also be considered as a mutual competition between intrinsic damage processes that operate ahead of a crack tip to promote its advance and extrinsic crack-tip shielding mechanisms that act at, or behind, the tip to locally diminish crack-tip stresses and strains. We examine here how such interplay is utilized to derive damage tolerance in natural materials, e.g., bone, skin, fish scales, and in engineering structural materials such as aerospace ceramic-matrix composites, nuclear graphite, and advanced metallic materials, such as high-entropy alloys. Ritchie
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