Brody and Ashley

I thought it would be nice to post a post on what it is I have been doing with my life for my last 6 years in school... Then I realized I hadn't really done much, but some of the stuff I have done in my last semester is interesting, to me at least.

All students who want to graduate from WSU with a BS in Material Science and Engineering MUST complete a Senior Thesis project. We get to chose and advisor, a project, and then are let loose to figure it out on our own. I choose to work for my current advisor, and he asked if I was interesting in participating in the new big thing with Magnesium. Now, you all think Magnesium (Mg) is a highly volatile metal, and well it is. I caught some on fire, which is actually hard to do when it is solid....

My research goal was to increase the ductility, or to make it more malleable. I did not achieve that goal. It is the big new thing people want to replace Aluminum with Mg because it will decrease weight, and save fuel, and use consumers money! It is really hard to improve the ductility of Mg, which why it is the bug deal it is.

I though I would include some of the images and tell you about them. I like to talk about what I do, but it is a specific thing and I have a hard time explain it.

This image above is the internal structure of the as-received magnesium specimen I was working with. The different colors correspond to different grains, kind of like the grains in a piece of wood. The colors also signify which way the grain is oriented.

 This image is of one of the specimens after I completed my experiment. You can see that it looks very different from the previous one. There are different grains but they are all oriented the same way, and the grains are a lot smaller here. The orientation of this piece is good and bad. My experiment failed to do what I had planned but interesting phenomena was recorded, and new things about magnesium was learned.