This article discusses the occupational health hazards related to industrial protective coating application and removal. It explains the health hazards associated with coating constituents such as lead, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, silica, and asbestos. The article also discusses hazard evaluation, hazard controls, Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, and industry consensus standards. It concludes with a description of containment systems to prevent environmental exposures from industrial paint removal projects.

This article discusses the need, purposes, and objectives of codes and standards. It describes several types of codes, such as safety and trade codes, and the different types of standards, namely, industry consensus standards, product definition standards, and commercial standards. The article provides information on organizations that prepare codes and standards. It tabulates sponsoring organizations for the standards published by the American National Standards Institute and concludes with a discussion on a designer's responsibilities.

This article is a brief guide to information sources on nondestructive testing (NDT). It provides examples of some of the standards bodies commonly used by NDT personnel. These include the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) International, European Committee for Standardization (CEN), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), American Welding Society (AWS), American Petroleum Institute (API), and American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT). All of these organizations used industry subject-matter experts and a consensus process in the development of their codes and standards.

This article provides a summary of the concepts discussed in the articles under the Section “Introduction to Testing and Certification” in ASM Handbook, Volume 21: Composites. The Section covers the basics of what to test, how to test, and how many to test to obtain specific properties of common advanced composite materials.

This article provides a perspective on United States (U.S.) Department of Defense (DOD) specifications, standards, handbooks, and related documents, as well as their role in the corrosion prevention and control activities in the U.S. military.

Concurrent engineering is product development that is done by concurrently utilizing all of the relevant information in making each decision. This article discusses the three aspects that must be taken into account for all product development decisions. The aspects include product functionality, production capability, and field-support capability. The concurrent process is carried out by a multifunctional team that integrates the specialties. The article schematically illustrates product design team configurations with subsystem teams and team of subsystem leaders. It discusses the three-step decision-making process, such as requirements, concepts, and improvement, followed by multifunctional product development teams. The article describes the two types of requirements development by multifunctional teams, namely, quality function deployment and functional analysis. It schematically illustrates the integration of product requirements and concept development. The article concludes with a discussion on the improvement of concepts in terms of robust design and mistake minimization.

The purpose of accreditation is to evaluate and assure high-quality results from suppliers of products or services without incurring the costs associated with auditing each supplier. This article describes laboratory accreditation based on the general requirements of International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) Guide 25, "General Requirements for the Competence of Calibration and Testing Laboratories." The Guide 25 is a balanced standard that addresses quality system requirements of ISO 9000 and the technical requirements needed to perform testing or calibration. The article describes an accreditation process that would enhance the international acceptance of test data for mechanical testing laboratories.

Environmental and worker health regulations have increased the costs associated with cadmium coating application and cadmium-beating waste disposal, thus creating economic incentives for industrial users to seek cadmium plating replacements. This article presents a cadmium replacement identification matrix that includes information on the specifications, corrosion control performance, environment-assisted cracking, coating lubricity, environmental and worker health regulations, and cost and performance factors for various replacement processes.

Weathering steels contain deliberate additions of alloying elements intended to increase the atmospheric corrosion resistance of steel. This article provides an overview of atmospheric corrosion testing. It describes the estimation of the atmospheric corrosion behavior of weathering steels by two methods such as short-term exposure tests and calculation of a corrosion index based on the steel composition. The article highlights some generalities about corrosion mechanisms. Based on the mechanism of atmospheric corrosion resistance of weathering steel, working rules for creating the protective oxide film have evolved. The article also provides case histories that illustrate both the violations of these rules and suggestions on how to avoid certain maintenance problems that may be encountered with weathering steels.

This article reviews the steps involved in presurface-preparation inspection: substrate replacement; removal of weld spatter, rounding of sharp edges, and grinding of slivers/laminations; and removal of rust scale, grease, oil, and chemical (soluble salt) contamination. It focuses on surface preparation methods that range from simple solvent cleaning to hand and power tool cleaning, dry and wet abrasive blast cleaning, centrifugal wheel blast cleaning, chemical stripping, and waterjetting for the application of the coating system. In addition, the article provides a description of the Society for Protective Coatings' (SSPC) standards and NACE International standards as well as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards and International Concrete Repair Institute (ICRI) guidelines for surface cleanliness.

Life-cycle engineering is a part-, system-, or process-related tool for the investigation of environmental parameters based on technical and economic measures. This article focuses on life-cycle engineering as a method for evaluating impacts. It describes the four steps of life-cycle analysis, namely, goal definition and scoping, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation, and improvement analysis. The article discusses the applications of life-cycle analysis results and presents a case history of life-cycle analysis of an automobile fender.

The organizations that are most active in the development of standards for powder metallurgy (PM) are the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), Metal Powder Industries Federation (MPIF), and International Standards Organization (ISO). This article presents the test method standards, materials standards, and material designation codes for PM materials. It provides information on the codes for structural parts, PM soft magnetic materials, PM self-lubricating bearings, metal injection molded materials, and powder forged materials.

Hardness characterizes the resistance of the ceramic to deformation, densification, displacement, and fracture. It is usually measured with conventional microindentation hardness machines using the Knoop or the Vickers diamond indenters. This article discusses the metrology issues of the Knoop and the Vickers hardness in ceramics. It explicates how to estimate fracture toughness from Vickers indentation cracking. The article also provides information on instrumented hardness testing and the Meyer law.

Any threat to personal safety should be regarded as a hazard and treated as such. This article discusses threats from several sources, such as kinematic/mechanical hazards, electrical hazards, energy hazards, human factors/ergonomic hazards, and environmental hazards. It describes hazard analysis in terms of failure modes and effects analysis, failure modes and criticality analysis, fault tree analysis, fault hazard analysis, and operating hazards analysis. The article examines fail-safe designs, such as fail-passive designs, fail-active designs, and fail-operational designs. It also provides information on various types of warnings, such as visual warning, auditory warnings, olfactory warnings, tactile warnings, and tastable warnings.

This article addresses the major heat-transfer components of the water-steam loop of a power plant. It describes the various types of condensers, including water-cooled condensers and air-cooled condensers. The article explains the corrosion mechanisms encountered in the condensers, including erosion-corrosion, galvanic corrosion, and pitting corrosion. It discusses the types of deaerators and deals with their corrosion problems. The article provides a discussion on two types of feedwater heaters: channel feedwater heaters and header feedwater heaters. It summarizes the corrosion problems associated with common feedwater heater tube materials.

This article provides information on the nominal compositions of high-carbon bearing steels and carburizing bearing steels. It discusses the bearing fundamentals with emphasis on surface contact, stresses, and fatigue life of bearings. The article describes bearing life prediction using three factors, namely, reliability, material, and application. It analyzes the bearing damage modes and concludes with information on fatigue failure considerations.

This article discusses the concepts of quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA), and clarifies the differences and similarities in the roles and responsibilities of QC and QA personnel. It describes the inspection procedures used to verify proper surface preparation and installation of the protective coating/lining system. Prior to beginning surface-preparation operations, many specifications will require a presurface-preparation inspection to verify the correction of fabrication defects and removal of surface contamination such as grease, oil, cutting compounds, lubricants, and chemical contaminants. When inspecting concrete prior to coating installation, three areas of concern exist: surface roughness, moisture content in concrete, and acidity/alkalinity of the surface. The article provides information on the industry standards for assessing surface cleanliness. It details postcoating application quality requirements, including measuring of dry-film thickness, assessing intercoat cleanliness, verifying minimum and maximum recoat intervals, performing holiday/pinhole detection, conducting cure/hardness testing, and assessing adhesion of the applied coating system.

The steam turbine is the simplest and most efficient engine for converting large amounts of heat energy into mechanical work. This article discusses the primary corrosion mechanisms such as corrosion fatigue, stress-corrosion cracking (SCC), pitting, corrosion, and erosion-corrosion, in steam turbines. It illustrates the various causes of the corrosiveness of the steam turbine environments through a Mollier diagram. The article describes the four parts of design disciplines that affect turbine corrosion, namely, mechanical design, heat transfer, flow and thermodynamics, and physical shape. It lists the ways to control the steam and surface chemistry, and design and material improvements to minimize turbine corrosion.

This article describes design factors for products used in engineering applications. The article groups these factors into three categories: functional requirements, analysis of total life cycle, and other major factors. These categories intersect and overlap, constituting a major challenge in engineering design. Performance specifications, risk and hazard analysis, design process, design for manufacture and assembly, design for quality, reliability in design, and redesign are considered for functional requirements. Life-cycle analysis considers raw-material extraction from the earth and product manufacture, use, recycling (including design for recycling), and disposal. The other major factors considered include evaluation of the current state of the art for a given design, designing to codes and standards, and human factors/ergonomics.

This article discusses issues that impact a good casting design. The focus is on the casting design in general, and on sand and permanent mold aluminum casting in particular. The article examines the casting design process from a variety of design and processing perspectives. It summarizes several strategies for improving the traditional casting design process. The article also proposes some possible approaches for implementing these strategies. It presents a vision for the development of comprehensive casting design guidelines along with specific development objectives.