Lead University: Lehigh University
PI: Wojciech Z. Misiolek
Quaker Chemical Corporation is interested in better understanding of the mechanism by which the newly developed chemical solutions interact with the surface of the hot deformed and/or cold deformed metal plates and sheets. Some of these chemical products are developed to limit chemical interactions between a metal and environment such as oxidation. These products may have a very significant impact on metal processing in terms of the process yield, infrastructure investments as well as financial and environmental impact. The main goal of the proposed project is to build a test bed allowing testing and analysis of interaction between sprayed liquid chemicals and metal substrate under different test parameters representing corresponding various industrial processing conditions. The proposed test bed would allow application of chemicals of different composition and concentrations and testing under broad range of parameters allowing in depth process analysis as well as material characterization of surface and subsurface layers in the treated and untreated materials. Optimizing the chemical solution application process including parameters such as temperature, pressure, flow rate, nozzle distance from the metal surface and solution chemical composition in laboratory experiments is another important mile stone of the proposed collaboration. The development of new chemicals and their optimized application during metal processing can lead to elimination of environmentally unfriendly chemical processes such as pickeling. The proposed test bed will be verified for the first selected chemical and applied to mild steel at elevated temperature. We have already characterized first steel samples treated under industrial conditions using light optical microscopy. After laboratory testing we will perform standard metallography analysis on the tested material to evaluate how well we can reproduce the industrial processing conditions in the laboratory testing bed. The long term objective is to expand this type of testing to a broad selection of new chemicals treating other metals and alloys.