This article discusses the requirements for safe design, installation, operation, inspection, testing, and maintenance of sintering atmosphere generators and atmosphere supply systems for both personal and environment safety. The four intrinsic dangers associated with producing and using common sintering atmosphere gases are explosion, fire, toxicity, and asphyxiation.

Metallic nonelectrolytic alloy coatings produced from aqueous solutions are commercially used in several industries, including electronics, aerospace, medical, oil and gas production, chemical processing, and automotive. Nonelectrolytic coating systems use two types of reactions to deposit metal onto a part: electroless and displacement. This article explains the various types of electroless and dispersion alloy coating systems. It provides information on the processing of parts, process control, deposit analysis, and equipment used for coating nonelectrolytic displacement alloys. The article concludes with a discussion on the safety and environmental concerns associated with nonelectrolytic deposition processes.

This article provides an overview of the concepts of environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) risk incidents, then discusses these concepts relative to additive manufacturing (AM): the multiple intrants, process parameters, and equipment, as well as the resulting products and wastes. The article discusses additive manufacturing hazards, which are broken down into material hazards, equipment/process hazards, and facility hazards. The environmental impact of AM and the development of EH&S standards for AM also are covered in the article.

This article discusses Allenby's two streams for environmental aspects of design: generic and specific concerns. Generic concerns include guidelines that provide the structure in which specific techniques can be developed and used. Specific methods are environmentally responsible for design and specific information that engineers can use. These methods include life cycle assessment, environmental impact assessment, quality function deployment, design for “X”, failure modes and effects analysis, and design for disassembly.

This article describes the role of the full-scale testing in assessing composite structural systems of aircraft and qualifying them for in-service use. The typical full-scale tests include static, durability, and damage tolerance. The article discusses the parameters to be considered when developing the basic requirements for the static test. These parameters consist of material considerations, moisture and temperature effects, structure size, load application alternatives, instrumentation requirements, test procedure considerations, ultimate load requirements, and test results correlation. The basic requirements common for durability and damage tolerance tests, including environmental effects and inspection requirements, are also discussed.

This article presents an overview of the different types of coating and lining materials available. It provides information on the various means of surface preparation and the equipment and techniques of coating application. The article discusses the coatings industry's response to the enacted as well as proposed legislation of limiting the use of potentially harmful or toxic raw materials or surface preparation and/or application techniques. The article summarizes the existing federal regulations affecting the coatings industry categorized according to the requirements of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as well as the corresponding Code of Federal Regulation numbers.

Bitumen for coating usage can best be categorized as two fundamental but very different types: asphalts and coal tars. This article provides a detailed discussion on asphalt and coal tar hot-melt applications; asphalt and coal tar emulsions; asphalt and coal tar cutbacks; and coal tar epoxies. It reviews the similarities between asphaltic and coal tar coatings and discusses the health and environmental concerns of these materials.

This article describes selected U.S. environmental statutes and regulations that are pertinent to material surface finishers. It provides information on the applicability, requirements, and permitting conditions of the Clean Air Act, the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act, the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act, and the Clean Water Act.

This article focuses on marine coatings associated with protecting commercial and military vessels. It provides detailed information on the common issues and requirements encountered when coating ballast tanks, freeboard, topside, and decks of the vessel. The article describes the advent of ultra-high solids coatings technology, and reviews the marine-specific coatings such as antifouling and their mechanisms and common failure modes.

This article provides a discussion on the mechanical properties of metals, ceramics, and polymers and fiber-reinforced polymer composites at low temperatures. It reviews the factors to be considered in tensile and compression testing of these materials. The article details the equipment used for low-temperature tensile and compression tests with illustrations. It concludes with a discussion on the various test methods and their ASTM standard for compression and tension testing.

This article describes common design criteria and identifies the design considerations that have a significant effect on the end product. The design criteria include cost, size, mechanical properties, repeatability and precision of parts, damage tolerance and durability, and environmental constraints.

Grinding is an extremely complex process that requires the consideration of a number of elements in order to make a reasonably adroit initial selection of a fluid or fluids for a manufacturing plant. In addition, the disposal of grinding wastes must meet the minimum requirements as recommended by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) regulations. This article explains the selection considerations of such fluids, as well as the applications and environmental issues related to the grinding processes.

This article provides a summary of the concepts discussed in the Section “Corrosion in Specific Industries” in the ASM Handbook, Volume 13C:Corrosion: Environments and Industries. This Section applies the fundamental understanding of corrosion and knowledge of materials of construction to practical applications. The industries addressed are nuclear power, fossil and alternative fuel, land transportation, air transportation, microelectronics, chemical processing, pulp and paper, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and medical technology, petroleum and petrochemical, building, and mining and metal processing.

Maintainability is a function of the durability, damage tolerance, and repairability of a structure. This article discusses the configurations of composite structures, such as sandwich, stiffened-skin, and monolithic structures, used in commercial aircraft composites. It describes the considerations for maintainability of the composite structures during the conceptual design phase. Sources of the defects and damage, such as manufacturing defects and in-service defects, are reviewed. The article describes the nondestructive inspection methods that are used in the repair of composite structures to locate damage, characterize the extent of damage, and ensure post-repair quality. It lists suggestions that can be used as design guidelines for adhesive bonding, general composite structure, sandwich structure, material selection, and lightning-strike protection. The article also provides the basic considerations for personnel, facilities, and equipment during maintenance.

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.

Risk and hazard analysis can be effectively used during design reviews to provide valuable feedback to the design to avoid failures. This article discusses the types of risks, namely, real risk, statistical risk, predicted risk, and perceived risk. It describes the principle and technical methods of risk/hazard analysis practiced in the industry to identify possible hazards and the resources necessary to avoid or reduce risks. These methods include the failure mode and effect analysis, fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, risk/benefit analysis, safety analysis, and probabilistic estimates.

This article discusses the safety issues associated with the design and operation of thermal spray booths and spray box structures and the equipment or systems required for operating thermal spray processes. It describes the design elements necessary to mitigate sound, dust and fume, ultraviolet light, and mechanical hazards. The means selected for safeguarding personnel must be based on a formal risk assessment that meets ANSI/RIA standards. The safeguards include sensing devices, barriers, awareness signals, procedures, and training. It also provides guidelines that are intended to increase the safety awareness and the use of safety practices for gas and liquid piping and electrical equipment within thermal spray installations.

Iron has been electroplated from a variety of electrolytes, whose bath parameters result in coatings that have widely divergent characteristics according to the specific characteristics desired in the finished product. This article provides an overview of the process description and processing equipment and discusses the properties, advantages, limitations, and principal applications of iron plating. It also describes the environmental, health, and safety considerations of iron plating.

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.

An alkyd is an ester-based polymer derived from the polycondensation reaction of polyhydric alcohol and polybasic acid. This article provides useful information on the chemistry, production, coating formulations, modification, commercial products, and application methods of alkyd resins. It also provides a section on drying oil, which is used in the manufacture of resins. The article describes the three categories of metals that have been used in drier compounds: primary driers (active or oxidation driers), secondary driers (through-driers), and auxiliary driers. It also provides information on the oil length of an alkyd resin and on solvents, which play a critical role in the formulation and use of the coating. The article concludes with a description of the concerns that a user, specifier, or applicator should be aware of when using alkyd coatings.