Physical Metallurgy at the Imperial College, London: Mr. J. G. Ball

In his inaugural lecture at Imperial College, Professor J. G. Ball pointed to the tendency of metallurgy to become a scientific discipline of logical inference, making teaching centred on plant skills, and the parrot‐learning of facts and alloy specifications quite out of date. The principles and practice of teaching with special reference to metallurgy have not received the attention accorded to allied subjects such as chemistry. The purpose of this article is to provoke thought, criticism and free discussion among those engaged in the dissemination of metallurgical knowledge.

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Rosenhain Centenary Conference - 4. The future role of physical metallurgy in relation to engineering practice Discussion

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences ◽

10.1098/rsta.1976.0058 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 282 (1307) ◽

pp. 460-466

Keyword(s):

Mineral Resources ◽

Imperial College ◽

Point Of View ◽

Engineering Practice ◽

Physical Metallurgy ◽

Primary Metal ◽

Government School ◽

The Arts ◽

The Government ◽

Extraction Metallurgy

I was naturally extremely interested in the points which Sir James (Keynote) raised on the re-unification of the field of metallurgy, and particularly as he started from the point of view of the definition given by Rosenhain in his 1914 textbook. We have been trying to do this for the past 15 or 16 years in Imperial College. Appropriately, it was in the forerunner of Imperial College, the Government School of Science Applied to the Arts, that the teaching of metallurgy in this country really started, initially to exploit the mineral resources of the top 23 cm of the surface of this country. At that stage, it was the winning of the primary metal from the mineral that dominated, and it was Percy’s task to organize teaching of this subject when he came from the practice of medicine in Birmingham, to take up the chair of metallurgy in the Government School. This Government School, as a result of a wrangel with T. H. Huxley, became the Royal School of Mines. Percy left in rather a huff because of an argument with Huxley, but his successors such as Sir William Roberts Austin and Sir Harold Carpenter, in fact devoted their energies to what was essentially physical metallurgy. While this was going on, the teaching of chemical or extraction metallurgy extended into the teaching of chemical analysis, which was practiced near the mine where the primary metal was extracted. Subsequently a lot of the teaching spread from the Royal School of Mines to the growing number of academic departments in the country. The chemical side of metallurgy tended to be rather arid, concentrating as it did on chemical analyses which were pursued by ancient methods bearing no relation to the interesting physical techniques which we have at the moment. Thus, in the minds of many students, physical metallurgy burgeoned forth from the exploitation of X-ray and microscope techniques, and the development of dislocation and alloy theory to become an interesting and dominant topic in metallurgy teaching.

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Interfaces for the 21st Century. Edited by M. K. SMITH, M. J. MIKSIS, G. B. MCFADDEN, G. P. NEITZEL D. R. CANRIGHT. Imperial College Press, 2002. 317 pp. ISBN 1-86094-319-5. 42.

Journal of Fluid Mechanics ◽

10.1017/s0022112002243700 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 477 ◽

pp. 410-411

Keyword(s):

21St Century ◽

Imperial College

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The Nature of Delta Phase Precipitation in Inconel 718

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100055916 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 40 ◽

pp. 724-725

Author(s):

L. S. Lin ◽

C. C. Law

Keyword(s):

Inconel 718 ◽

Base Alloy ◽

High Strength ◽

Physical Metallurgy ◽

Nickel Base Alloy ◽

Phase Precipitation ◽

Weight Percentage ◽

Delta Phase ◽

The Subject ◽

Nickel Base

Inconel 718, a precipitation hardenable nickel-base alloy, is a versatile high strength, weldable wrought alloy that is used in the gas turbine industry for components operated at temperatures up to about 1300°F. The nominal chemical composition is 0.6A1-0.9Ti-19.OCr-18.0Fe-3Mo-5.2(Cb + Ta)- 0.1C with the balance Ni (in weight percentage). The physical metallurgy of IN 718 has been the subject of a number of investigations and it is now established that hardening is due, primarily, to the formation of metastable, disc-shaped γ" an ordered body-centered tetragonal structure (DO2 2 type superlattice).

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