Frank Walsh retires from university
We were notified recently of Prof. Frank Walsh’s retirement as Professor of Electrochemical Engineering at Southampton University, and feature a short report on this elsewhere in this issue. Frank has been a prolific author of publications in a number of fields related to electrochemistry, many of these publications for Transactions. Indeed, in the last 5 years or so he has had 13 papers published in the journal. His papers have been invariably very well received by the metal finishing and electrochemistry community and often well cited.
His strong support for Transactions over the years has not been limited to publishing in the journal. He has been a member of the Editorial Board and Publications Committee for a long time, giving many a constructive comment on particular issues when they arise. He was co-editor of the Institute’s Surface Finishing Tutorial Series, which evolved from tutorial articles previously published in the journal, and has been a consistent help to the editors with comprehensive reviews of submitted papers.
While we wish him a happy retirement we are, however, delighted that Frank is not disappearing into a retirement black hole, but intends to continue much of the publication effort he has been engaged in, and we look forward to featuring more of his insights into our field.
‘This can’t possibly work’ metal finishing research moments
Recently, casually reading about seemingly impossible, or at least unexpected research moments, my mind went back to my early metal finishing research days, as I searched for ‘this can’t possibly work’ events in my own working life, and one such came to mind immediately.
I was researching composite gold electrodeposits incorporating moderately conducting refractory carbides as possible replacements for alloy gold deposits being developed for electronic sliding connector surfaces. There were concerns regarding the much reduced conductivity of alloy gold versus pure gold surfaces, and the possibility that base metal additions (nickel and cobalt), used to harden and strengthen the deposits, may cause tarnish layers of high resistivity resulting in problems with the light electrical loads being envisaged for future connectors. The thinking regarding composite gold deposits with conducting carbides was simply that a matrix of pure gold would remain highly conducting and the carbide islands, being also conducting, would not compromise the electrical connector application, but would improve mechanical and physical properties.
Part of the research involved tensile testing of the deposits, after electroplating deposits of 20 microns thick, in itself an achievement with the acid gold and alkaline sulphite gold solutions intended for use in the electronics world expected to deposit 2–5 microns only. Having carefully deposited my thick composite coatings on a tensile specimen shape thin copper shim, and carefully dissolving away the copper at the specimen fracture area, I was then horrified to be confronted by my metallurgist colleagues’ tensile test machine, a floor to ceiling cast iron monster (Instron TT-DD machine) weighing many tons. Looking at my fragile 20 micron specimens and this machine was definitely a ‘this can’t possibly work’ moment, but such was the sensitivity of this monster’s equipment jaws in gripping the ultra thin samples, and its smoothness of operation that reliable and repeatable data were obtained that were included in a subsequent paper on the properties of the gold composite electrodeposits.
Of course modern tensile test machines can now be obtained as bench top models, giving much more of a believable match of sample and machine, but more than 40 years ago it was impossible for a chemist with, then, limited metallurgical experience to accept that anything but disaster was to strike.
If you, the reader, have a similar ‘this can’t possibly work’ metal finishing experience, which turned out to confound you, and indeed did work, why not let us know. We would be delighted to share it with other readers.