The role TEM in a government laboratory serving industrial clients

Abstract

The challenge of meeting demands for enhanced performance while maintaining a competitive price has become the norm for industries producing engineering materials. A government laboratory intending to assist such industries in a formal manner must adapt its policies, structure and capabilities as the needs of its clients change. TEM would come under close scrutiny in this process because of the relatively high financial and intellectual investment required to produce good results. The following project examples illustrate secondary, but quite important aspects of the prime goal of solving the client's problem(s). They include judicious facility/methodolgy upgrading (including in-house development and external networking), fruitful interactions with project scientists (including accurate prediction of resource usage) internal and external marketing, and dealing creatively with personnel shortages, all while producing what is hopefully the ‘good science’ needed for institutional and individual recognition!Fig 1 shows typical precipitates in a pipeline steel for which the distribution and composition vis-a-vis various microalloying elements were crucial to the mechanical behavior of the product (via austenite grain size control). Before acquisition of a suitable in-house TEM, university work was funded which demonstrated the complex nature of coprecipitation in these steels, a fact not then appreciated by the steel industry. Subsequent in-house work built upon these findings to the point where characterization of such precipitates has become a most useful component of formalized collaborations with steel companies in that both resource usage and delivery of useful information have become quite predictable.