Thomas H. Sanders, Jr.

Biography

 Dr. Sanders joined the faculty at Georgia Tech after serving 5 years as a Materials Science and Engineering faculty member at Purdue University. He has worked as a Research Scientist at Alcoa Technical Center (1974-78) and the Mechanical  Properties Research Laboratory at Georgia Tech (1979-1980). Dr. Sanders has been actively engaged in various aspects of the physical  metallurgy of aluminum alloys, focusing primarily on precipitation hardening  aluminum alloys. He and his graduate students have worked in the areas of phase transformations, corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, fatigue and fatigue crack growth, fracture toughness, computer modeling of the development of  microstructure during aging in Al-Li alloys, and the kinetics of recrystallization. Over the past several years, Dr. Sanders has studied the relationships between microstructure and solidification parameters. This interest developed initially from his work on rapidly solidified aluminum and cobalt base alloys. He is currently studying the kinetics of the homogenization process in cast aluminum alloys. In addition to his work on aluminum alloys, Dr. Sanders has been involved in calculations of phase diagrams in glass oxide systems and in precipitation kinetics in nickel-base super-alloys. The computer modeling of thermodynamic properties of phases makes it possible to extend equilibrium data to metastable data and vice versa, and to calculate phase equilibria in multicomponent systems from binary data. These techniques are being employed to calculate binary phase diagrams, metastable subliquids miscibility gaps, and metastable subliquidus miscibility gaps in ternary systems. To date, the emphasis has been on alkali-borosilicate systems.  Nickel base superalloys are used in turbine applications which require their high temperature strength and resistance to environmental attack. A limiting factor in  improving turbines has been the capability of superalloys to withstand yet higher operating temperatures. Therefore, researchers are continuously looking for methods to increase the life and operating temperatures of superalloys . For this reason, improving resistance to creep crack growth and creep-fatigue crack growth have become important. An approach which has shown promise for improvement of cracking resistance of several nickel base superalloys has been the  formation of microstructures containing serrated grain boundaries. An objective of these studies is to better understand the formation of dendritic and serrated grain boundaries in nickel base superalloys and to increase understanding of dendritic growth in the solid state. Dr. Sanders is a member of TMS and ASM and is and ASM Fellow; Program evaluator for TMS (ABET); and has organized or co-organized ten international conferences on aluminum alloys. He has published more than 100 journal and conference articles. He was awarded a Research Fulbright Fellowship to work at  ONERA in Paris France in 1992. In 1994, he received the W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award.  

Research Interest

 Matels