Materials research and white-knuckle air travel
- PDF / 324,442 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 4 Downloads / 181 Views
Materials research and white-knuckle air travel
I
have been supporting MRS Bulletin this year as one of the 2012 Volume Organizers and it has been an interesting process. Two of the theme issues that I helped to commission are connected to air travel. The first was on Plasmonics that appeared in the August issue. The Guest Editors were Jennifer Dionne of Stanford University and Harry Atwater of the California Institute of Technology. I have known Harry for many years through our volunteer activities with the Materials Research Society. The theme issue came out of a discussion that Harry and I had on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles after the Fall Meeting of 2010, when I knew that I would be a Volume Organizer, but before work on the 2012 volume had actually begun. Harry was in the row behind me. We discussed a variety of possible hot topics for theme issues, including the one on plasmonics which he was willing to do with Jennifer. I put that on my list of topics to discuss during the Volume Organizer meetings and it was chosen as one of our themes. It is possible that we, the 2012 Volume Organizers, would have arrived at this theme independently of that flight, because plasmonics is such a hot topic with potential applications across a broad range of technologies. However, it is also possible that we would have chosen one of the other candidate topics that did not make our final list. The other theme topic connected to air travel is ThermalBarrier Coatings for Gas-Turbine Engines that appeared in the October issue with David R. Clarke of Harvard University, Matthias Oechsner of Technische Universität Darmstadt, and Nitin P. Padture of Ohio State University as Guest Editors. This one is explicitly connected to air travel in that the thermalbarrier coating applications discussed included those for turbine engines in jet aircraft. That connection became somewhat more real for me on a recent flight from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas, in August. I am a “white-knuckle” flier. I always have been, and probably always will be. There are no nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Little Rock. Most of the connecting airports are in the southwest of the United States. On this day, our intermediate stop was in Phoenix, Arizona. As we began our descent into Phoenix, the pilot came onto the intercom advising
1112
MRS BULLETIN
•
VOLUME 37 • NOVEMBER 2012
•
www.mrs.org/bulletin
everyone (including the flight attendants) to take their seats for the remainder of the flight, because Phoenix was experiencing a sandstorm and that we would likely be flying through some amount of airborne sand on our way to landing. Now, ordinarily that would be enough by itself to significantly concern me, but one of the manuscripts included in the theme issue was an excellent article by Carlos G. Levi, John W. Hutchinson, Marie-Hélène Vidal-Sétif, and Curtis A. Johnson on “Environmental degradation of thermal-barrier coatings by molten deposits,” which discusses catastrophic systems failure when thermal-barrier coatings are breached by de
Data Loading...
