Jacob M. Dutler - 2016 Steel Intern Scholar
This scholarship will assist me with the expense of college tuition and will allow me to be more financially stable after I graduate. Furthermore, it provided me with an internship that gave me real-world experience in a very interesting field. This summer I worked at ArcelorMittal Riverdale in Riverdale, Ill., USA, as a metallurgist in quality assurance. I was assigned to a main project that I was to head by myself. In short, the project’s objective was to reduce the amount of calcium wire that is added when making steel. Calcium is added to ladles of steel in order to clean the steel of unwanted inclusions. However, in high-carbon steel grades, it is believed that calcium is not needed due to lower oxygen activity. In order to find out if this theory was true, I collected and prepared many samples and observed the amount of inclusions under a scanning electron microscope. I then ran trials where the amount of calcium added was reduced and they proved to be successful.
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Jacob Dutler completed his internship at ArcelorMittal Riverdale. |
I was able to save the company about US$200,000 a year from this research. This internship helped guide my interest into certain types of metals. It taught me that there are many different types of metals that I did not know about before entering the internship. What exactly I will do following graduation is still uncertain, as it is still two years away. I would like to get into more complicated and innovative metals, such as transformation-induced plasticity steels or 3D printed metals. My interest in the metals has grown significantly after this internship.