Interview with Professor Christopher Weyant: Exploring Material Science & Engineering Careers
Have you ever wondered what working with material science and engineering (MSE)* specialization looks like?
This field is not as well-known as other branches of engineering, but it underpins practically every human industry and provides outstanding careers to many individuals. To understand how MSE education can translate into real-world professions, we’ve decided to talk with Dr. Christopher Weyant, who holds a PhD in MSE from Northwestern University and is currently a teaching professor and associate dean of undergraduate affairs at Drexel University.
Throughout this interview, we share Dr. Weyant's route to the MSE world, experiences of working as a materials engineer and his outlook of the future of MSE.
Ready to join this conversation?
*From now through this entire interview, material science and engineering is denoted as MSE for the purposes of concision and a more comfortable reading experience.
Route to MSE
Dr. Weyant completed his bachelor’s degree in engineering science at Pennsylvania State University. Like many people today, he didn’t know that MSE existed as a separate engineering discipline; that is until he took an Introduction to MSE course in his junior year:
As I was thinking about my specialization, which I needed to do for my senior year anyway, this particular field was interesting to me. I think the primary interest came out of being more on the engineering side of things. I really like applied work, applied research, applied design, and I quickly recognized that if you're going to design something and make something, “Guess what?” It has to be made out of a particular material.
The professor that introduced Dr Weyant to MSE during his junior year, Dr Shaw, also hired him to do research in her lab the following summer. That season was a captivating dive into materials for Dr Weyant:
I realized that about half the faculty in the engineering science and mechanics department at Penn State were really materials people. Her [Dr Shaw’s] specialty was in corrosion or environmental degradation of materials. I spent that summer and then my senior year doing research studying aluminum alloys and ways to create aluminum alloys that were corrosion resistant. I've interacted with grad students, learned more and more about the field and became excited about it!
Materials Engineering: a Small Company
Dr Weyant’s first experience in the industry was with a small company (120-130 people) called Capstone Turbine Corporation. The company designed small gas turbine engines as backup generation power generation for buildings or as electricity generators for the areas where electricity was expensive. Being one of the two materials engineers on the team, Dr Weyant got to do everything required from a materials specialist in that industry.
One of my roles was working closely with mechanical engineers who were doing all the designing of the individual components. I would supply them with materials property data, but I would also have to do cost benefit analysis”. For example, Dr Weyant analyzed the cost-benefits of thermal barrier coatings: “There are these coatings called thermal barrier coatings, in which you use plasma spray processing, a process where you introduce ceramic powder into a plasma flame. That flame is about 10,000 degrees Celsius, and you melt that and put a ceramic layer as an insulation on components that get really hot. If we use this coating, which again costs more money, how much does that save us?
Another role Dr Weyant had at Capstone Turbines was to be a forensic engineer and determine why something broke in an engine. Once, Dr Weyant was stuck with solving a particularly puzzling and serious problem:
Story: Material Science Solves a Disturbing Riddle🕵️♂️
“We had two test engines that failed. Ultimately, when we pulled out the turbine, we saw that it looked like the blades on the gas turbine itself broke. It was disturbing. If it happened with a customer's cast turbine, that would not be a great situation to have to deal with.
One thing that we that materials engineers will do in this forensic failure analysis is to go ahead and look at the broken fracture surface under a microscope and more specifically, a scanning electron microscope. One of the reasons to look at the structure is because fatigue is a type of failure, where if a material is exposed to cyclic stress over time, you can have cracks that develop that propagate [such as when a turbine is spinning really fast and undergoing cyclic stress]. If fatigue was the problem, then the material we've used is not fatigue resistant enough. That's probably a bad thing because most all of our turbines are made out of the same material”.
Sometimes, when turbines break, their surface gets so distorted that the type of failure cannot be identified under a microscope. This is what happened with Dr Weyant’s turbine. However, after a while he came up with an idea that later proved to be spot on.
“Maybe there's something wrong with processing”.
To make those turbines, there are molds in which a liquid metal is poured and left to solidify. Sometimes, as the blades and their molds are very thin, the liquid doesn’t get all the way through the mold. Dr Weyant etched the surface of the whole turbine (about 6 inches in diameter) with acid to bring out the microstructure of the metal. Here was his long-awaited discovery:
“That particular company, when they got a turbine that had holes that didn’t fill completely, used a weld process to put weld material into the hole. No weld repairs were allowed on these critical components because that weld material is much weaker than the main metal. I found weld marks that you couldn't see just by looking at the turbine. I soon found out that that company no longer existed. What I liked about this failure is that I worked through step by step to try to figure out what happened and then ultimately had a real answer and a satisfying explanation”.
Materials Engineering: a Large Corporation
After getting his PhD in MSE from Northwestern University, Dr Weyant took up a materials engineer position in a much larger corporation, Honeywell Aerospace. They designed gas turbine engines as auxiliary power units to produce power on airplanes. He worked on research projects for technology and materials advances that could go into a product within the next two years.
It was also fun because I would work in a lab most of the time and do lab scale experiments with materials. It was also very much related to the work I did at Capstone with just a shift in the type of application.
Reflecting back on his experience with the two companies, Dr Weyant notes:
There was definitely pressure, feeling the need to deliver on a result to a certain experiment that you were doing because the result was ultimately going into a management decision whether this project was to continue or not. I would spend an 18 hour day at work, trying to get an experiment done because I knew I had an impending deadline.
On the other hand, Dr. Weyant benefited from one significant advantage of his position:
I really do like applied research. I want to know that what I'm doing is going to go into something. Even though there were definite times of pressure, I don't remember ever feeling overwhelmed by it or feeling that it wasn't worth it. It was always something interesting to research and discover.
Postdoctoral Research
After completing his PhD, Dr Weyant was planning to go back to Capstone and even had an interview scheduled for an open position. However, he was also receptive to other ideas:
I did my PhD research in an area called thermal spray or more specifically plasma spray – this is a way that you can make ceramic coatings by melting ceramics. It's not a particularly common technique. So, I did a Google search, you know, ‘Who's doing plasma spray across the country?’ And that's where I discovered Sandia National Labs. They had a thermal spray lab there. And I was like, ‘Okay, that's interesting’. So, I just blind emailed the leader of that thermal spray lab.
Ultimately, Sandia National Laboratories created a position for Dr Weyant - it was a unique area with few professionals graduating with his specialization.
A postdoctoral fellowship (postdoc) is a temporary position at another university that doctoral students can take. “You’re going to go and just do research and get a lot of good papers published to build up your credentials, so that you can get hired to be a professor”. However, for Dr. Weyant, “it was just a job opportunity to become a staff member at a national lab”.
Dr. Weyant greatly enjoyed his position and worked on lots of unique applications; however, most of his work was proprietary. A position at such an institution is not great ...
... if you want to be doing research to become a faculty member. Usually to become a faculty, you want to be publishing, and you want the world to know all the stuff that you've done.
The Academia & Future Outlook
Currently, Dr. Weyant is a teaching professor of MSE at Drexel University and teaches 3-4 classes per term. As an associate dean of undergraduate affairs, Dr. Weyant looks at the curricula of all engineering programs at Drexel, handles academic misconduct.
At the end of the interview, Dr Weyant shared his perspective about the future of MSE:
I have no doubt that there will be a blurring of the lines between materials experimentalists and computational material scientists. In 20 years, we won’t just be looking at existing materials to fulfill application needs. A list of required material properties for a component will be used to design a material computationally, both its composition and exact processing. Whereas now material science is mostly on the fundamental side of research and materials engineering – on the applied side, everyone will be able to use AI and machine learning to develop materials from scratch.
As a specific industry example, Dr Weyant mentioned that 3D printing will continue to evolve and become more versatile, so that there will be equipment to create new compositions of materials on demand informed by atomic modelling.
Conclusions
Working in MSE is not an enigmatic daydream - it is a real, globally important professional path. While material engineers ensure the efficiency and safety of our daily technologies, material researchers dive into laboratory experiments to develop better materials and advance human development.
Material science & engineering, just like any STEM subject, gives you not only an understanding of how the world works, but provides you an opportunity to choose your preferred method of creating positive change: research, engineering, teaching and more.
The question that comes to mind is "What type of materials would you want to specialize in within MSE?" Indeed, extensive knowledge of thermal coatings or biodegradable polymers would carry one in very different, but equally exciting directions.
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