Henry B. Linford Award for Distinguished Teaching awarded to John Scully

Professor John Scully has been selected as the 2016 winner of the ECS Henry B. Linford Award for Distinguished Teaching. The award will be presented at next year's ECS Meeting in San Diego, California, USA in May 2016.

The awards are named for Henry Linford, ECS
secretary for 10 years and president from 1961-62

Founded in 1981,  Linford Awards are only granted only every other year and honor distinguished excellence in teaching in areas pertaining to the Electrochemical Society. The society presents winners with a the Linford medal, a wall plaque, a private dinner in their honor. Lindford awardees are invited to deliver an address to the Electro-chemical Society at the symposium of their choosing.

Professor Scully follows one of the co-founders of what is now the Center for Electrochemical Science and Engineering, Glenn E. Stoner, who in 2000 earned the prestigious award as well.

Understanding corrosion from the nanoscale to the macroscale

Associate Professor Petra Reinke and Charles Henderson Chaired Professor John Scully are collaborating in a new Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) sponsored by the Office of Naval Research to understand, predict, and control the role of minor elements on the early stages of corrosion in metal alloys. The multimillion dollar effort, Understanding Corrosion in 4-D, will involve researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, The University of Akron, and UCLA. 

Corrosion, which is the environmental degradation of materials due to electrochemical reactions with the environment, accrues an annual cost of several percent of the nation’s GDP. In 2010, the Department of Defense (DOD) estimated the costs exceed $23 billion annually.  Corrosion affects the longevity of infrastructure and assets ranging from DoD/ONR warfighters and warships to gas transmission pipelines.



Professor Scully has studied many aspects of corrosion for decades, and Associate Professor Reinke specializes in the observation and understanding of surface reactions. This complex problem is being analyzed by a team of experimentalists, alloy designers, and theoreticians who will apply this knowledge to design new materials with improved performance by linking electrochemistry, high-resolution microscopy, tomography and simulations to capture all aspects of the corrosion process on selected, technically highly relevant alloys.

2015 Robert W. Cahn Prize awarded to Brad Richards, Hengbei Zhao, and Haydn Wadley

The best paper of the year award in the Journal of Materials Science has been awarded to Brad Richards, Hengbei Zhao, and Haydn Wadley. The Cahn Prize was named in honor of the founding editor of the Journal of Materials Science, Robert Wolfgang Cahn who founded the journal in 1966. The paper, "Structure, composition, and defect control during plasma spray deposition of ytterbium silicate coatings" was published in the December issue.

From Springer's Press Release | 1 December 2015 | Heidelberg, Boston
  

Springer’s Journal of Materials Science has awarded the 2015 Robert W. Cahn Best Paper Prize to Bradley T. Richards, Hengbei Zhao and Haydn N.G. Wadley of the University of Virginia for their study on the important issue of how to protect ceramics that have applications in advanced, high efficiency, gas turbine engines.

Ceramics can withstand operating temperatures exceeding those of superalloys, but they need protection from the water-rich oxidizing environment they will encounter in service. Richards, Zhao and Wadley have proposed using ytterbium silicide as a protective coating. Their study, "" examines how to optimize the deposition process used to apply these coatings.

C. Barry Carter, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Materials Science, said, "When a journal covers the entire field of materials science and receives more than 5,000 submissions each year, the winner of the Cahn Prize, selected by members of our editorial boards, epitomizes the outstanding quality of the papers that the journal publishes."

Charles Glaser, Springer’s Executive Editor for the journal, added, “The Journal of Materials Science is honored to publish the findings of excellent researchers. In order to recognize their achievements, we award the Cahn Prize to the best of the best and hope this recognition will help and encourage the winning scientists in their careers. Springer is proud to play a role in making their research more accessible, thereby accelerating further discovery.”

The Cahn Prize was named in honor of the journal’s founding editor, the late Professor Robert Wolfgang Cahn. This annual prize recognizes a truly exceptional original research paper published in the journal in a given calendar year. Each month the editors select a paper published in that month's issue through a rigorous nomination and voting procedure. The winning paper is then selected from the 12 finalists by a separate panel of distinguished materials scientists.

Extreme Challenge: UVA engineer Haydn Wadley and his team push materials to their failure point

"Sometimes spectacular failures inspire you to investigate the fundamental processes that are responsible, and that knowledge then sets the stage for designing new materials and new structures that can survive under even more extreme conditions.”

November 13, 2015 | UVa Today | by Charles Feigenoff

“Things get pretty interesting when you take materials to their point of failure,” said Wadley, a University Professor and Edgar Starke Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Virginia. One extreme environment that has drawn Wadley’s attention is the interior of jet engines.

In 2016, the International Air Transport Association expects airlines to carry 3.6 billion passengers, the equivalent of half the world’s population. Jet engine performance affects all of those people, and increasing the performance protects the environment by reducing carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.

Surfaces in a jet engine’s combustion chamber and in the turbine immediately behind it routinely reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures, even the most advanced engine alloys rapidly oxidize and fail. In response, engine manufacturers coat these parts with heat-resistant materials. Over the years, Wadley’s research group has done pioneering work exploring the mechanisms that enable coatings to protect an underlying surface, determining mechanisms that cause the coatings to fail with rising temperatures, and developing longer-lasting coating materials. Wadley and his colleagues also have developed vapor deposition processes that deliver more effective coating protection.

But 2,500 degrees is not as extreme as engine manufacturers would like to go. Combustion at even higher temperatures would increase fuel efficiency and further reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They are experimenting with engine components made from ceramic composites that have tremendous strength at ultra-high temperatures. Principal among these are SiC/SiC ceramic matrix composites, named because silicon carbide is used for both matrix and fiber.


“If we want technology to continue to provide greater services for society, we need to understand failure in extreme environments and so design materials and structures that withstand them,” Wadley said.

- See more at: https://news.virginia.edu/content/extreme-challenge-award-winning-engineer-pushes-materials-breaking-point#sthash.nfYAWru9.dpuf