Cast-Iron Colossus: The Watervliet Arsenal

Cast Iron Metallurgy

Cast iron (CI) is one of the oldest materials in commercial use. It has excellent compressive strength and is commonly used for structures that require this property, as well as for water and sewer lines. This article explains CI metallurgy and why the understanding of this metallurgy is key to understanding other ferrous materials and alloys. The composition of cast iron (CI) varies significan...

Gray cast-iron water pipe metallurgy

The results of a metallographic study of grey cast iron water pipes are reported. These pipes had been installed between 1885 and 1973 in eight different water systems. Each pipe had been extracted during scheduled maintenance or failure repairs to provide data for a larger study to produce a methodology for determining the residual life of grey cast iron pipes. This metallographic study was co...

Circumferential failures in grey cast iron pipes

Cast iron component failure: A metallurgical investigation

A fractured nutcracker was examined for determining the root cause/s for premature fracture/failure. This is one of the common tools used typically for cracking hard nuts. In this study, metallurgical failure analysis techniques namely, visual inspection, optical microscopy, SEM, and hardness tests were used in investigating the broken product. From the metallurgical analysis, it was determined...

Lorenz and Colossus

The Vernam system enciphered the message text by adding to it, character by character, a set of obscuring characters thus producing the enciphered characters which were transmitted to the intended recipient. The simplicity of Vernam's system was that if the obscuring characters were added in a rather special way (known as Modulo 2 addition) then exactly the same obscuring characters added in th...