Welcome to our summer intern, Atte Kadoma. Atte just completed her freshman year at Iowa State University where she is working towards a degree in Materials Engineering. We first met Atte in 2014 when she attended ASM-MN Materials Camp as a high school student.  MEE is a corporate  sponsor of Materials Camp and the students spend a day here getting hands-on experience in a materials testing laboratory.  We even found a photo in the Materials Camp photo archives of Atte at the Rockwell hardness tester!

Atte has long been interested in pursuing an engineering degree but said her experience at Materials Camp definitely influenced her decision to choose materials science engineering as her major. She has expressed a particular interest in failure analysis.

We were very pleased to be able to offer Atte an internship this summer and look forward to working with her.

 

Senior Materials Engineer, Dan Grice, will be speaking at the Minnesota Microscopy Society Spring Symposium this Friday, May 5th on microbiologically-influenced corrosion.

Although one of the least-known and least-understood corrosion mechanisms, microbiologically-influenced corrosion (MIC) is among the most damaging in terms of total cost to society. Recent estimates indicate that the annual cost of corrosion in the United States is around $300 billion, and as much as 20% of that cost can by attributed to MIC. For the most part, microorganisms do not actually consume the metal, but rather create an environment that fosters the corrosion processes. Microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, and microalgae, can accelerate the rates of corrosion processes or change the dominant corrosion mechanism through their presence and metabolic processes. MIC has been reported for almost all significant metal alloy systems and in applications including seawater, potable water, hydrocarbon fuels, food processing and sewage. This presentation will cover the mechanism for MIC, some of the significant organisms, methods for diagnosing the problem, and some of the mitigation techniques

MEE CEO and Principal Engineer, Larry Hanke, will be the keynote speaker at the UK Association of Fire Investigators summer training conference in London, England on July 3, 2017.

Larry and MEE engineer, Neal Hanke, recently presented a similar session at the 2017 International Association of Arson Investigators training conference in Las Vegas.

The following key concepts were covered in their presentation:

1. A fundamental understanding of how structural and electrical materials behave at elevated temperatures.
2. How material behaves under stress.
3. How to evaluate component failures that may contribute to fire and explosion
4. A better understanding of how to identify electrical arcing
5. How anomalous material behavior can lead to incorrect conclusions about the conditions during a fire

Larry  has  assisted with the investigation of hundreds of fires and explosions during his 40 year career as a Metallurgical Engineer.  In 1995 he founded Materials Evaluation and Engineering, Inc.  which has become one of the leading material testing and failure analysis laboratory in the Upper Midwest.

Neal  has been conducting materials evaluation investigations and testing with MEE. since 2011. Recently, he has become involved in the research of materials characterization for arc mapping in structural and automotive fires.