U of A materials engineering professor Patricio Mendez, who holds the Weldco/Industry Chair in Welding and Joining, conducted research that would use a common piece of equipment called a button melter (seen here) to quickly develop new welding and joining materials.

Edmonton—A Faculty of Engineering professor has won a Best Paper award for research that could revolutionize the way new welding and joining materials are developed.

Patricio Mendez, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alberta, led a research project that devised a new way to develop welding materials in a shorter period of time and at a greatly reduced cost.

When new materials are developed—stronger steel in pipelines for example—new materials must be designed to weld or join it.

“It’s like making glue to stick two things together,” Mendez said. “Traditionally what you do is try small variations on what already exists but the manufacturing process requires that you make very large batches that can be in the order of many hundreds of kilograms or tonnes. You cannot make anything less. A furnace is not a nimble piece of scientific equipment.

“That is the problem we set out to address.”

Mendez and his team got creative with a small, common piece of lab equipment called a button melter, used to melt and cool small ‘buttons’ of metal.

“The device is used to melt for analysis—it’s the famous melting pot. We realized we could use it for this new application.”

Mendez and his team created single welds using experimental ingredients for “filler” material to join metals that they could study, and assess its strenghts.

Developing new alloys for welding “isn’t completely guesswork” said Mendez, but the bigger the change in materials, the less researchers can rely on common knowledge.

“If you’re dealing with a completely new alloy you have a significant amount of guesswork. When someone doubles the strength of the steel they use to make pipe, we can’t join that new metal by simply tweaking the fillers we’re already using.

“But we can answer the ‘what if’ questions when we have a lot of latitude. That is the most import stage of innovation, when everything is open, when you have lots of flexibility,” he said. “Once things start to settle into place it’s no longer a matter of just getting it into the ballpark anymore, you have to start doing the fine tuning and that involves a lot of smaller more precise experiments.”

The new process developed by Mendez can be applied from the earliest stages of research to finding the final ingredients for new fillers. Manufacturers can then go on to produce large quantities.

The research was finished in 2009 at the Colorado School of Mines, just as Mendez was being recruited to the U of A Faculty of Engineering as the Weldco/Industry Chair in Welding and Joining and to lead a new welding and joining research project. It was published in the October 2010 issue of the Welding Journal of the American Welding Society (AWS), and won the 2011 AWS William Spraragen Memorial Certificate Award for Best Research paper.

Mendez says he and his U of A research team are ready to put the technique into practice.

“We’d like to start using this technique to design new filler material for pipelines or pressure vessels or applications with other special materials,” he said.

“When you think about it, here in Canada and especially in Alberta we have challenges with abrasion in the oilsands and cold temperatures, and you cannot buy products off the shelf to meet these challenges. We have to develop our own technologies, we have to be innovative, and we are ready to do it.”