E. Neville Pugh, Chief
Stephen C. Hardy, Deputy Chief
June Toms, Secretary

This report describes the technical activities of the Metallurgy Division in 1995. The format this year is different from that in preceding years in that the descriptions of the Division's projects are grouped under major Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory (MSEL) program rather than under specific Groups. This approach emphasizes the collaborative nature of our activities, which cross both Group and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Division boundaries, and also the degree to which the Division's interests have become focused.

It also should be noted that the Division underwent considerable reorganization in 1995. The 1995 Organization Chart shows five Groups, reduced from the seven in preceding years. Two Groups, Electrochemical Processing and Magnetic Materials have remained essentially unchanged programmatically. However, the former modified its name from Electrodeposition to more accurately reflect its activities, and the latter was strengthened significantly by the transfer of W.F. Egelhoff from the Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory. In addition to his international reputation in the area of surface science, Dr. Egelhoff brings an unique facility for the synthesis and characterization of nanoscale multilayers, thus further augmenting the Group's thrust in this technologically important area.

The Metallurgical Processing Group has retained its name and function but underwent a modest downsizing, several staff members transferring to a new unit, the Materials Structure and Characterization Group. The Metallurgical Processing Group continues to focus on solidification and powder synthesis, but the solder activities, a major Division thrust, are now centered in the new Group, which also incorporates the Microscopy Facility. The fifth Group, Materials Performance, was formed by combining the former Corrosion and Mechanical Properties and Performance Groups. The latter restructuring resulted from the decision to concentrate our efforts on corrosion to its effects on mechanical behavior, namely on stress-corrosion cracking, hydrogen embrittlement and corrosion-fatigue.

The two other former groups, Metallurgical Sensing and Modeling and High Temperature Materials Chemistry, have been eliminated and the staff re-distributed within MSEL. This action was driven largely by programmatic decisions. It was decided that the primary responsibility for sensor development within MSEL will reside in our Boulder Division (Materials Reliability), although the Metallurgy Division should maintain sensing capability to support its processing projects. Thus some members of the former Metallurgical Sensing and Modeling Group transferred to Boulder and others were distributed among the Metallurgical Processing and other Metallurgy Division Groups. In the case of the High Temperature Materials Chemistry Group, its program had evolved in recent years to the vapor deposition of thin films, and consequently it was considered more effective to transfer the Group to the Ceramics Division which had several projects in this area.

These reorganizations have caused a small downsizing but have led to increased focus. It will be seen that our major projects in 1995 lay in materials processing, electronic packaging and interconnections, and nanostructured materials, the latter concentrating heavily on multilayers. In each of these, the Division has continued to emphasize its traditional strengths in measurement science and materials characterization, and has maintained strong collaborations with U.S. industry. The Division also has maintained strong projects in the traditional NIST areas of standards and data that are essential to the nation's technological infrastructure.

Selected fiscal year 1995 (FY95) Accomplishments are listed below. Additional accomplishments and more extensive descriptions are given in the project summaries.

• In work with the Consortium on Casting of Aerospace Alloys, a "multicomponent- phase diagram subroutine" of code was prepared that gives the liquidus temperature, solid concentrations, liquidus slopes and the liquid and solid enthalpies as functions of the liquid concentrations for use in various kinetic models of alloy solidification. This subroutine employs a thermodynamic database that describes the free energies of the relevant phases.

• In the technology transfer phase of the industrial consortium on Metal Powder Atomization, our industrial partners were provided with a list of the sensors, data acquisition and control hardware, and software necessary to implement NIST technology for intelligent control of the atomization process.

• Developed a non-destructive method for determining the yield strength of high strength, low alloy (HSLA) sheet steel from the measurement of Barkhausen Noise and other magnetic properties. This work is part of an on-going American Iron and Steel Institute-Department of Energy (AISI-DoE) Advanced Process Control Program.

• As part of a National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) Consortium on Alternatives to Lead-Base Solders, melting point/freezing ranges were measured for promising lead-free alloys produced at NIST.

• In another NCMS organized consortium (on Printed Wiring Boards), predictive models were developed for the rate and extent of reactive wetting of solder during area-of-spread and wetting balance solderability tests. Complicating factors in these models are solute diffusion and the Marangoni flow from temperature gradients expected under these conditions.

• Awarded a patent for Magnetic Nanocomposite Refrigerants.

• Organized and hosted the third NIST Workshop on Nanomaterials that was attended by 83 representatives from industry, universities and government agencies.

• Research in the Division's Nanostructured Materials Program in FY95 led to the achievement of the highest levels of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect ever recorded in multilayer samples having the commercial spin valve configuration.

• In the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE)-NIST Corrosion Data Program, five material advisory expert systems from the CHEM™COR series addressing the handling and storage of chemical process industry corrosives were released for public distribution in FY95.

• The tomographic scanning acoustic microscope technique developed at NIST was used successfully to obtain the distribution of residual stresses in spot-welded steel samples provided by the Ford Motor company. The technique also was applied to a welded steel pipe provided by DuPont.

• The Division moved a step nearer to the development of a traceable U.S. hardness standard by completing the construction of a computer controlled high precision dead-weight Rockwell hardness tester. Work has begun with U.S. hardness block manufactures to develop test blocks for the preparation of Standard Reference Materials (SRMs).

Back to Table of Contents

Last modified: Mon Jan 06 09:46:15 1997 Metallurgy Webmeister