Painting is a generic term for the application of a thin organic coating to the surface of a material for decorative, protective, or functional purposes. This article provides a detailed account of the types and selection factors of paints and the various application methods, including conventional air atomized, airless, and electrostatic spray; roller coating; dip coating; flow coating; curtain coating; tumble coating; electrocoating; and powder coating. Surface preparation methods and prepaint treatments for coating systems are also discussed. The article includes information on quality control procedures, causes of paint film defects, cost calculation, and safety and environmental precautions. The composition and characteristics of organic coatings, coating system selection factors, the types of paints for structural steel, and the applications of paint on structural steel are also reviewed.

The liquid nitriding process has several proprietary modifications and is applied to a wide variety of carbon steels, low-alloy steels, tool steels, stainless steels, and cast irons. This article discusses the applications, subclassifications, operating procedures, and maintenance procedures, as well as the equipment used (salt bath furnaces) and safety precautions to be undertaken during the liquid nitriding process. It describes the different types of liquid nitriding process, namely, liquid pressure nitriding, aerated bath nitriding, and liquid nitrocarburizing. Environmental considerations and the increased cost of detoxification of cyanide-containing effluents have led to the development of low-cyanide salt bath nitrocarburizing treatments. The article reviews the wear and antiscuffing characteristics of the compound zone produced in salt baths with the help of Falex scuff test.

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.

This article presents an overview of the rules, regulations, and techniques implemented to minimize the safety hazards associated with welding, cutting, and allied processes. Safety management, protection of the work area, process-specific safety considerations, and robotic and electrical safety are discussed. The article explains the use of personal protective equipment and provides information on protection against fumes, gases, and electromagnetic radiation. It concludes with a discussion on safe handling of compressed gases as well as the prevention and protection of fire and explosion.

Safety is an important consideration in all welding, cutting, and related work. This article discusses the basic elements of safety general to all welding, cutting, and related processes. It includes safety procedures common to a variety of applications. The most important component of an effective safety and health program is management support and direction. The article reviews the role of management, training, housekeeping, and public demonstrations in welding safety to minimize personal injury and property damage. It provides information on the safety measures for eye and face protection in various welding and cutting operations. Injuries and fatalities from electric shock in welding and cutting operations can occur if proper precautionary measures are not followed. The article discusses the electrical safety aspects to be considered for various welding and cutting operations.

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 the dip brazing process and the principal types of furnaces used for molten-salt-bath dip-brazing applications. It provides information on equipment maintenance, which is divided into temperature control, control of the liquid, and maintenance of the vessel. The article presents the typical salts used for molten-salt dip brazing of carbon and low-alloy steels with selected filler metals in tabular form. It concludes with information on dip brazing of stainless steels, cast irons, and aluminum alloys and safety precautions of the process.

During metal powder production, powder and/or dust handling, compaction, and part finishing operations, many safety and environmental risks exist. This article is a detailed account of the types of safety hazards that can exist and the issues that occur during metal powder handling, as well as recommendations and strategies that can be employed to both prevent and protect against damaging effects from powder exposure, fire and/or explosions, or environmental impact events.

Explosion welding (EXW) is a solid-state metal-joining process that uses explosive force to create an electron-sharing metallurgical bond between two metal components. This article discusses the process attributes of EXW, including metallurgical attributes, metal combinations, size limitations, configuration limitations, and bond zone morphology. It provides an overview of the common industrial applications and shop welding applications of EXW products. The article reviews different safety standards and regulations, such as noise and vibration abatement and process geometry. It concludes with a section on the EXW process sequence for welding a two-component flat plate product.

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.

The gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) process derives the heat for welding from an electric arc established between a tungsten electrode and the part to be welded. This article provides a discussion on the basic operation principles, advantages, disadvantages, limitations, and applications of the process. It describes the equipment used for GTAW, namely, power supplies, torch construction and electrodes, shielding gases, and filler metals as well as the GTAW welding procedures. The article concludes with a review of the safety precautions to avoid possible hazards during the GTAW process: electrical shock, fumes and gases, arc radiation, and fire and explosion.

The recreation industry covers a huge number of sports, games, and activities that take place in environments as diverse as the activities themselves. This article addresses the corrosive attack on recreational equipment, such as recreational boats, firearms, bicycles, playground equipment, and climbing gear. It discusses the procedures for base materials selection, surface treatments and coatings, and good practice of maintenance to mitigate corrosion while addressing other functional issues for a given piece of equipment.

Aluminum, a commonly used base material for brazing, can be easily fabricated by most manufacturing methods, such as machining, forming, and stamping. This article outlines non-heat-treatable wrought alloys typically used as base metals for the brazing process. It highlights chloride-active and fluoride-active types of fluxes that are used for torch, furnace, or dip brazing processes. The article explains the steps to be performed, including the designing of joints, preblaze cleaning, assembling, brazing techniques (dip brazing, furnace and torch brazing, fluxless vacuum brazing), flux removal techniques, and postbraze heat treatment processes. It concludes with information on the safety precautions to be followed during the brazing process.

This article focuses on failure analyses of aircraft components from a metallurgical and materials engineering standpoint, which considers the interdependence of processing, structure, properties, and performance of materials. It discusses methodologies for conducting aircraft investigations and inspections and emphasizes cases where metallurgical or materials contributions were causal to an accident event. The article highlights how the failure of a component or system can affect the associated systems and the overall aircraft. The case studies in this article provide examples of aircraft component and system-level failures that resulted from various factors, including operational stresses, environmental effects, improper maintenance/inspection/repair, construction and installation issues, manufacturing issues, and inadequate design.

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.

Vat polymerization (VP) is an additive manufacturing (AM), or three-dimensional (3-D) printing process in which 3-D objects are produced by hardening a liquid polymer into the desired shape. With the introduction of new materials and improvements in material properties, VP offers a good alternative for AM for low-volume production. This overview of the VP process begins with an introduction to two main processes of VP, namely stereolithography apparatus and digital light processing, and then moves on to discuss the characteristics of the feedstocks used as well as their selection criteria. The article then covers safety issues associated with feedstock handling and the manufacturing constraints related to part orientation and design, providing some key tips for VP support structures. This is followed by a discussion on postprocessing/finishing of VP parts. A brief concluding section considers some special topics related to AM process.

Very high density materials are used for such applications as counterweights and radiation shields. This article focuses on the metallurgy, processing, properties, fabrication, design considerations, health and safety considerations, and applications of the most commonly used very high density materials: depleted uranium and tungsten and their alloys.

This article describes the fundamental theory of magnetic pulse welding (MPW). It reviews the equipment used for MPW, namely, work coil, capacitor bank, high-voltage power supply, high-voltage switches, and field shapers. The article discusses the MPW process and explains the critical parameters needed to obtain acceptable welds. Applications and safety guidelines of the MPW are also presented.

Heating time and holding time refer, respectively, to the time required to bring a part to temperature and the time a part is held at the required heat-treatment temperature. This article provides information on heating times and holding times with different types of furnace systems during steel hardening and tempering.

Solvent cleaning is a surface preparation process that can be accomplished in room temperature baths (cold cleaning ) or by condensing vapors of a solvent on a workpiece (vapor degreasing). This article provides a detailed discussion on solvents, equipment, process limitations and applications, and safety and health hazards of cold cleaning and vapor degreasing. It also includes information on control of contamination, conservation and recovery of solvent, and disposal of solvent wastes.