Work Catchup

I thought it was about time to give a brief update on where we stand with graduation. Krista is basically done with her research. Periodically she has to go in to do a couple of things, but mostly she's just writing. She is on track to complete her dissertation by the end of December and is planning on defending probably in January. In other news, Krista has another publication coming up! Carrie submitted a paper that Krista gave to her a while back. It was well received and now Krista is helping Carrie with some last minute touch ups to help it along the review process. My work is moving a little slower. My current nemeses are Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). The spectra above is from XRD. All I'm trying to do is figure out the spacing between atoms in my material. When I started this project, I didn't expect lattice misfit (spacing differences) to be as important as it has turned out to be. As a result, I was never trained on the diffractometers. Now I have to depend on a technician (a fellow student) that doesn't seem to get what I'm after. The last two days I've focused on this problem and I think I have a solution. So, back to work making new samples I went. I am now heat treating three more samples of each alloy (3 alloys, 9 samples total) for 6 hours, 96 hours, and 996 hours at 1080 Celcius. They have already been exposed to 1080 C for 4 hours. This will give me misfit measurements at 10, 100, and 1000 hours. I know you may have a few questions like these: How long is 1000 hours? About 6 weeks. When will it be done? Early January. Weren't you trying to defend in January? Yep.

All said and done, though, I feel good about this. I think I have finally figured out a route to the data I need to prove what I think is happening on the atomic level. We'll see in January I guess.