World Food Safety Day on 7 June 2023 draws attention to food standards. Foodborne diseases affect 1 in 10 people worldwide each year, and food standards help us to ensure what we eat is safe.
Materials selection for any piece of equipment or a process system is rarely a simple task, unless you are exactly replicating something successful. Often engineers will have a checklist to help them narrow down the choices, eliminating groups of materials that are not suitable for various reasons. Austenitic 300 series stainless steels containing 7-35% nickel will have most if not all of the boxes checked for being suitable where a stainless steel is desired.
The sudden failure of a building or bridge is mercifully a rare event, thanks largely to international or national standards: structures are designed in accordance with a design standard, using products conforming to a product standard and manufactured using techniques and to a quality level defined in a construction standard.
A new generation of designers, materials specifiers, architects and engineers is being introduced to the wealth of technical information curated by the Nickel Institute. An archive of technical guides and know-how for working with nickel-containing materials, including stainless steel, that has been built over thirty years is now being updated and made freely available.
New advances in the use of Artificial Intelligence have the potential to speed up the process of alloy development.
When Courtney Love wrote this she was not thinking about rockets. It is, however, a perfect description of the history of rocketry. Until the Elon Musk revolution.
Space is hard but nickel makes it possible. The United States of America, through the private company SpaceX, imminently expects to regain its independent way into space.