Jeremy Heisserer – 2022 Steel Intern Scholar
This summer I worked at Amsted Rail Granite City Plant. This plant is a green sand foundry with more than 100 years of expertise in the railroad industry. Throughout my time at Amsted Rail, I was able to expand my knowledge of metallurgy in an industrial setting with hands on experience outside of the classroom.
I had the privilege to work at this facility for my third internship. I gained experience working in an electric arc furnace meltshop where I learned to calculate scrap charges, alloy additions and ensure the furnaces were in safe operating condition. This was a challenging yet rewarding experience, calculating and ensuring that melt chemistries would be correct in real time was much different than doing the calculations in class. The melt shop supervisors worked with me and helped answer any questions I had, and I gained a large amount of hands-on experience that I am excited to use as I further my career.
When I was not working in the meltshop, I worked in the sample room which is an area of the plant where we complete non-destructive testing evaluations of our castings as well as parts from other facilities to ensure dimensional accuracy and product quality. This work included magnetic particle inspection, ultrasound thickness measurements, utilizing a 3D laser scanner for dimensioning parts and gauging our larger castings. On top of ensuring the product quality I worked closely with process engineers in the foundry to validate changes such as a pattern or core change or evaluating process changes.
Throughout the last three summers Amsted Rail has been a great place for me to work, I have enjoyed working alongside my coworkers and I appreciate the challenging experiences that have furthered my career as well as my interest in the iron and steel industry, I would like to thank Amsted Rail for the chance to return as an intern and especially AIST for this scholarship opportunity.