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Expert has extensive foundry experience with a strong emphasis in melting steel using both acid and basic processes. He developed metallurgical and operational melting procedures that optimized the acid and basic slags. He is very familiar with the use and abuse of oxygen to refine steel.

Expert has worked in research to develop new steel alloys for high hardness and toughness applications. He has also considerable expertise in analyzing microstructures and relating to process issues in heat treatment. He has developed metallurgical and process specifications for alloy steel including melting, refining, heat treatment and welding.

Expert has developed hundreds of weld procedures for steel castings and is familiar with ASTM A488 and ASME Sec IX for procedure qualifications. His procedures have been accepted by DOT, Military, Railroad, Mining and Oil and Gas market sectors.

Expert has developed metallurgical and foundry procedures for austenitic, ferritic, martensitic and duplex stainless steel castings. The procedures include melting in arc furnace and induction furnace, deoxidation, heat treatment and welding. He has developed these at a foundry during his 10 years in the metallurgical and quality departments and with many other foundries and OEM's during his more than 10 years of consulting.

The brinell hardness test is commonly used for assessing the hardness of ferrous castings. Expert has performed guage R&R and developed procedures for such testing.

Expert is very familiar with surface preparation after excavating a defect either by carbon arc or grinding. He has conducted numerous repair procedures for arc melting of steel by tungsten inert gas, flux cored or manual metal arc welding. He is familiar with the application and limitation of each process.

Expert has approximately 25 years of experience in research, manufacturing, development, management and testing of carbon steel, low alloy and stainless steel and manganese steel.

Expert has extensive experience analyzing casting defects determining root cause and implementing corrective actions. Over the last 10 years he has helped analyze processes in foundries to identify process or procedure issues to improve productivity, quality and safety.

Expert has developed casting specifications for engineers to ensure that the quality of the finished casting meets the customers’ expectations. He has also been retained as an expert witness in litigation cases involving failed castings.

Expert is very familiar with all alloy steel castings including carbon, carbon manganese, manganese molybdenum, chromium molybdenum, nickel chromium molybdenum.

Expert has developed equipment and procedures to enhance the cleanliness of steel castings. One particular technology he helped develop was plasma refining of steel.

Expert has considerable experience in heat treatment including annealing, stress relieving, quench and tempering, normalizing, solution annealing, preheating and post heating.

Expert has considerable experience with first article casting requirements including foundry engineering, solidification modeling, and non-destructive testing procedures (radiography, ultrasonic, magnetic particle, liquid penetrant and visual). He is also familiar with destructive testing of castings both from a soundness and mechanical property assessment.

Expert has consulted with many iron foundries to improve the process for quality or productivity reasons.

Expert is very familiar with tensile, charpy and fracture toughness testing for steel castings. He has perfomed testing in very heavy sections and analyzed microstructures to correlate results. He is also familiar with hardness testing including rochwell, brinell and equotip.

He performed a quality and process audit of a large steel foundry and made recommendations to owners and implemented procedures to successfully turn-around the business.He assessed all the plant activites at major gray iron and ductile iron foundries to improve quality, productivity and profitability.He performed a due diligence assessment of the operations, equipment and processes for the buyer of a major steel foundry.He modified the melting, pouring and melting processes to improve the quality in stainless steel castings and nickel based castings.He developed specifications for an OEM for the successful production of large steel and gray iron castings.