Workforce development is more than developing undergraduate programs. Three sessions at ICC4 will address the global, diversity and career development issues for building a robust ceramics and glass workforce. The bottom right image that looks like hot chocolate with marshmallows is an AFM  image of tin oxide nanostructures used by Brian Huey in a demonstration to high school students and teachers. Credit: Lynnette Madsen, NSF.

Who is going to do the work?

It is a question that comes up often in STEM disciplines. Recently, for example, we reported about a webcast featuring leaders from several important (to STEM fields) federal agencies alerting us to the shortage of qualified people who can handle “big data.” Similar issues exist in the ceramics and glass STEM niche.

The issue of workforce development is complex and must be thought about in multiple contexts. Some questions to consider are: How is a worker different from an entrepreneur? How is diversity defined, nurtured and maintained? Why do students choose to study ceramics, and how can more be attracted (and should they)? Where would they work? How does career development differ in industry, academia or government? What is the global impact on workforce development? What opportunities are available at the BS, MS and PhD levels? Are there mid-career workforce issues?

Shaping the Future of Ceramics is the theme of July’s ICC4 meeting in Chicago, and appropriately, one of the themes is Workforce Development. It will have three sessions and is being organized by Lynnette Madsen, program director in NSF’s Division of Materials Research.

The three sessions are: Global Challenges; Creating an Effective, Competitive Workforce; and International Challenges and Opportunities. In a summary of the theme, Madsen lists some of the big issues that the sessions will tackle, such as entrepreneurship and crossing “the valley of death,” defining and reaching grand challenges, effective collaboration between theorists and experimentalists, diverse workforce development, mentoring students at all levels (undergrad through post-doc, global trends in materials science and more.

Many of these topics are much more subtle and nuanced than one might think from the titles. For example, Mario Affatigato is giving a talk on undergraduate research, which seems simple enough. A theme that emerged over and over during my Materials Football Game of the Week series last year, is that today’s undergraduates choose their majors by first choosing the ‘Grand Problem’ they want to work on — such as renewable energy, health, environment, etc. — and then they look at which undergraduate programs offer the best pathway for them. Thus, undergraduate research opportunities have become absolutely essential to attracting and retaining materials scientists.

Similarly, I admit to having been tired of hearing about the problems of recruiting women to the STEM professions. After all, I see many of my kind when I go to meetings. But, last year I got to hear Christianne Corbett from the American Association of University of Women present the results of a study they conducted and available in the report (pdf), “Why so Few: Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.” She makes a compelling case that the issue is far from resolved.

The report is chock-full of interesting results that can apply across other categories of diversity, I think. The example that sticks with me is the influence of stereotype bias on test performance. The report cites a psychology paper showing that if a test-taking group was told that men tend to do better on the exam, they did, by a factor of five. On the other hand, if the group was told that men and women tended to perform about the same, they did. There are subtle ways to induce stereotype bias, too, but few professors are likely to be aware of them.

Here is a listing of the sessions, talks and presenters. I’ll be there, and I hope you will be, too.

Global Challenges
Monday afternoon, July 16
Moderator: B. Erik Svedberg, The National Academies

• Entrepreneurship, Angus Kingon, Brown University
• Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering, Umesh V. Waghmare, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, India.
• European Science Foundation’s Expert Committee in Materials Science and Engineering, Patrick Bressler, Fraunhofer‐Gesellschaft Brussels Office
• Materials Science in the Developing World: Challenges and Perspectives for Africa, Federico Rosei, Université du Québec, Canada.

Creating an Effective, Competitive Workforce
Tuesday afternoon, July 17
Moderator: Tom Oder, Youngstown State University

• Why so few?, Christianne Corbett, American Association of University Women
• Diversity Changes in Materials Science and Engineering, Keith J. Bowman, Illinois Inst. of Technology
• Involving Undergraduates in Research, Mario Affatigato, Coe College
• Career Opportunities at Coca‐Cola in Glass Science and Engineering, Louis Mattos, Coca‐Cola

International Challenges and Opportunities
Wednesday morning, July 18
Moderator: Martha Mecartney, University of California, Irvine

• Joint Doctoral Programs, Jean‐Luc Adam, University of Rennes, France.
• Opportunities to Work with Scientists in Japan, Fumiyo Kaneko, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, DC Office.
• Programs for Foreign Scientists from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hongjie Luo, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, China
• Mentoring of Postdoctoral Scholars, Judith A. Todd, Pennsylvania State University (winner of a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring)
• Strategies to Encourage International Cooperation, Mary Lynn Realff, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Energy gurus often talk about reducing CO₂ emissions. Why not be more aggressive and talk about eliminating CO₂ emissions? And, why not start with a heavy CO₂-producing industry, such as cement?

Some estimate that cement production generates five to six percent of all anthropogenic (human-generated) CO₂ emission. There is an almost one-to-one correspondence of CO₂ generated to cement made — 10 kg of cement generates 9 kg of CO₂. The global annual consumption of cement is more than 3 x 10¹² kg , and 90 percent of that is a lot of CO₂. That translates to about 3,300 million tons of cement and just under 3,000 million tons of CO₂.

Indeed, cement researchers often ponder how to to significantly reduce the emissions problem, and many strides have been made in partnership with large cement makers.

The cement-making process generates CO₂ from the decomposition reaction of calcium carbonate to calcium oxide (lime) and from the combustion of fossil fuels to fire kiln reactors (to about 900˚C). Ninety percent or so of the total energy needed to make concrete is used just to make the cement.

Decomposition is a brute force approach to making lime — heat the stuff until it gives up its bonds and falls apart. Professor Stuart Licht at George Washington University is a STEP ahead, though, and has demonstrated the feasibility of making lime by electrolysis with a process he calls Solar Thermal Electrochemical Production. In a paper published this month in Chemical Communications, (DOI: 10.1039/C2CC31341C), he describes a solar-driven process that exploits “a new thermal chemistry, based on anomalies in oxide solubilities, to generate CaO, without CO₂ emission.”

In the process, molten carbonates heated by solar energy are electrolyzed and form oxides, which in the presence of calcium carbonate precipitate as lime. The solubility of calcium carbonate is high in molten carbonates at high temperatures (in the 750-950˚C range). However, the solubility of calcium oxide in molten carbonates is low, up to 100 times lower than calcium carbonate.

The team experimented with two kinds of electrolyte, a eutectic mix of carbonates and pure lithium carbonate. The paper explains how lime forms in the electrolytic cell, “when molten carbonates undergo electrolysis to form oxides, added calcium carbonate will precipitate the desired CaO product for extraction, and the added carbonate replenishes the electrolyte for continued, ongoing CaO production.”

At temperatures below 800˚C, the calcium carbonate electrolyzes to CaO, C and O₂. Above 800˚C, the reaction products are CaO, CO and O₂. (CO is a commercially valuable compound.) No CO₂ is produced in either temperature regime.

Electrolysis of carbonates is endothermic, which means much of the thermal energy required to drive the process can be provided by solar energy. And, if all of the heat is provided by solar energy, no fossil fuels are burned and no CO₂ is generated by the process itself.

The resulting calcium oxide is high density and appears to be easy to harvest as it “forms a slurry at the bottom of the vessel where it may be removed by tap in the same manner in which molten iron is removed from conventional iron production kilns.”

The authors realize that scaling-up to industrial production levels and incorporation into production systems will be challenging. But, this is familiar territory for industries and engineers. There is precedent, too, for industrial-scale electrolysis processes. Electrolysis is the basis of the Hall-Heroult process (pdf) for extracting aluminum from bauxite. Similar to Licht’s experiment, the key step is to dissolve alumina in a molten salt, in this case, sodium aluminum fluoride.

Cementiers will be interested to know that the American Ceramic Society’s Cements Division is holding its Third Advances in Cement-based Materials meeting in June. The theme is “Characterization, Processing, Modeling and Sensing.” The plenary speaker will be Edward Garboczi from NIST whose talk is titled, “Computational Materials Science of Concrete: Past-Present-Future.”

Also watch for the June issue of The Bulletin, which will cover new cement technologies.

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An app released last week by ACerS showcases ceramic artwork. A free version offers one image per day, and a modestly priced upgrade version allows users to save more favorites, share images with friends and sort. Credit: CPC; ACerS.

In graduate school, my experiment involved melting glasses made of fly ash in silica crucibles in a six-burner, gas-fired Remy furnace. It was great — fire, heat, the white-orange glow of a furnace at temperature, the final burst of flame from bleeding the gas lines. Making glass was very satisfying.

Every now and then, though, the furnace got too hot for the glass composition. I’d open up the furnace to grab a crucible for quenching and instead find a slumped freeform shape with glass flowing out like lava and foamy slag gurgling up and over the sides.

Art!

Our field of engineering is unique. Our medium — ceramics — has intrinsically common ground for science and art. Just enough of our technical ceramics world overlaps with the art ceramics world that we can appreciate artisans’ mastery of form, dimension, composition, color and technique.

The American Ceramic Society is very active in the art ceramics community through its affiliated Ceramic Publications Company. CPC publishes Ceramics Monthly and Pottery Making Illustrated and produces the Ceramic Arts Daily blog, and just last week CPC introduced the Society’s first app: Daily Clay. It is currently available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

The app offers seven images per week (one per day, on a rolling basis) and users can save images in their favorites library in order to keep them beyond that seven days. They also can add notes to store with saved images, share images via social networking and sort their favorites by category. The free version allows up to 20 favorites, while the full version (US$2.99) offers unlimited favorites. The images are selected by the editors of Ceramics Monthly and Pottery Making Illustrated, and its website, Ceramic Arts Daily.

Sherman Hall, managing director of CPC explained how the app was born.

Our intent with Daily Clay was to make an app for ceramic artists that was useful in the studio, in the classroom — really wherever a customer happened to be — and to satisfy a market need in a way that other media can’t. In surveys of our current audience for preferred content, the type of content that scored highest was (not surprisingly) images of finished ceramic art. As it turns out, we have a lot of those, so it became a matter of structuring the delivery package and coming up with the proper depth of functionality (sorting by type of work, links to further info, social sharing, etc.).

Even with virtually no formal publicity, Daily Clay has been downloaded more than 2,000 times in its first week in the iTunes App Store. An official launch is planned for the second week of April (after the launch of a completely redesigned Ceramic Arts Daily website). Hall says, “One major launch at a time is all we can handle!”

He is expects the app to be well received. “Our surveys also suggest that our current Ceramic Arts Daily audience of 100,000+ registered users should include at least 25,000 iPhone and iPad owners, so we’ll be looking for that download number to jump significantly in the near future. “

For us tech-types the app is a nice way for us to admire the beauty of our favorite material and the skill of the artists who create them.

The app is available through iTunes.

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ÉireComposites’ new large-blade tooling uses alternating layers of ceramic cement and carbon fiber/PEEK, with embedded heating elements. Credit: ÉireComposites.

Check ‘em out:

Direct influence of residual stress on the bending stiffness of cantilever beams

Researchers perform both theoretical analyses and finite element simulations to demonstrate for the first time that without changing the material tangent stiffness, residual stress within the beam can directly influence the bending stiffness of the beam. The direct influence arises from geometry nonlinearity and Poisson’s ratio effect. For a cantilever beam with adsorbed macromolecules on its surfaces, we find that longer macromolecular chains with lower normal stiffness and larger intermolecular forces would make the effect of the residual stress even more pronounced. The present work provides guidelines for improving the sensitivity of cantilever-based sensors.

Major Cold War cleanup milestone reached at the Savannah River Site

The DOE announced it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to clean up the Cold War legacy at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, laying the groundwork for closing two underground storage tanks that previously held radioactive liquid waste from nuclear weapons production at SRS. The determination signed by DOE Secretary Steven Chu paves the way for SRS to begin closing the massive tanks that make up the F Tank Farm. The site will start this year by closing two tanks that pose the greatest risk to the environment: Tanks 18 and 19. These tank closures will be the first DOE tanks closed nationwide since 2007, the first closed at SRS in 15 years, and some of the largest underground storage tanks closed by the DOE to date.

Move over aerogel, engineers say they have the new ’World’s Lightest Material’ (a metal!)

(Discover) Faced with a DOD charge to manipulate well-known materials in new ways, Alan Jacobsen, a research scientist at HRL Laboratories in California, constructed delicate lattices of polymer fibers 
less than a millimeter thick. He then coated the lattices with nickel and dissolved the polymer, leaving behind the spindly metal mesh. Surprisingly, minimizing weight does not mean sacrificing strength and resilience. “I was playing with it, marveling at the weight, and I squished it between my fingers,” materials scientist Tobias Schaedler says. “It bounced right back to its original size.” The lattice can recover after being compressed to half its volume. The mesh’s low weight and high durability, Jacobsen says, make it promising for use in airplane wings and automobile shock absorbers. A brick-size piece of the new mesh would weigh less than a paper clip.

Rare earth association set for launch

(China Post) China’s long-awaited rare earth industry association is due to be established early this month and will cover the majority of companies in the industry chain, in the latest move to consolidate the ill-regulated sector. The association, which will have more than 100 members, will be formally launched in Beijing on April 8, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation, who declined to be named. Several rare earth exploring and processing companies confirmed they have received notification to attend the launch ceremony in April, without elaborating. There has been widespread market speculation for years that the government would set up an official organization to strengthen ties among the industry’s players. The major functions of the organization will include providing production guidelines, market research and channels of communication between companies and the government, the [National Business Daily reported], adding that the association will play a role in influencing rare earth import and export quotas.

Thermoplastic Wind Blades: To be or not?

(Composites World) ÉireComposites (Galway, Ireland) has successfully produced a 12.6m/85-ft long blade using a reactive thermoplastic, cyclic butylene terephthalate and unique processing technology. …While the Dutch see great promise in APA-6, ÉireComposites found it difficult to process and eventually chose CBT instead. What made this possible was the further development of ÉireComposites’ patented MECH tooling system to enable processing at 200°C to 400°C (392°F to 752°F) without the issues of thermal expansion and with sufficiently fast heat-up and cool-down rates. The new tooling is formed from alternating layers of ceramic cement and carbon fiber-reinforced polyetheretherketone, with electrical heater elements embedded close to the tool surface within a ceramic layer. Because the ceramic becomes rigid at 60°C/140°F, tooling can be built on inexpensive patterns, removed from the pattern after this initial lower temperature cure and then processed to full temperature (200°C to 400°C) via a freestanding postcure. But, CBT availability is an issue. Therefore, ÉireComposites began looking for other materials. Indeed, alongside its TPC blades, ÉireComposites now offers a unique thermoset alternative, using its ceramic carbon fiber/PEEK composite tooling to enable one-piece wind blade production using powdered epoxy technology. [A company official] claims that this thermoset alternative can cut overall blade production cycle time by 65 percent, based on actual processes in use today, and is not limited in terms of part size. The first commercial application is a 12.6m/41.3-ft blade for ACSA Eólica’s (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) A27, a 225-kW turbine.

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