City native turned NASA engineer develops career-defining metal alloy
Using nanotechnology and a 3D printer, Tim Smith, a 2007 Bellefontaine High School graduate, has created a metal alloy that will conceivably revolutionize the spacecraft and airline industries. Not bad for someone who’s only been in the business for eight years.
It all started when Smith was studying mechanical engineering at Wright State University. While there, he took an internship at the Air Force Research Laboratory. That’s where he first started working with materials, which sparked enough interest to want to go into that line of research.
After earning his PhD in material science and engineering at The Ohio State University in 2016, Smith took a job at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Since then, he’s worked on developing new high-temperature metals.
“We looked at what goes into metals that last longer at high temps,” Smith said. “We wanted to better understand why they’re breaking and how to stop that.”
Specifically, they hoped to strengthen the metals used for jet and rocket engines. They needed to answer a simple question: how could they make new metals that could withstand extreme heat?
There are a few tricks, Smith said, but the one they focused on was changing the type—creating a metal alloy by combining different elements to optimize the metal. For instance, they threw chromium in with nickel to see what would happen.
But what worked came from ceramic. They found a way to incorporate nano ceramic particles into a metal engine part using a 3D printer. This helped oxides disperse in a way that will significantly improve the strength and life of the metal.
The result? Smith and his team have developed a metal that can withstand temperatures reaching thousands of degrees for thousands of hours. It will, he admitted, completely change what companies will be able to do with metal parts.
According to Smith, the hope is to create more reliable engine components “so things won’t go wrong as much or maybe not at all.” He added, “That’s the long-term goal.” And it should save companies a lot of money as they won’t have to replace parts as much.
With the metal ready to go, Smith said they have four metal-producing companies that are licensed with NASA and plan to go into production and get it on the market soon.
“Growing up in Bellefontaine, I never honestly thought working at NASA on producing new space parts for a rocket was something I could do, but it’s a really exciting time,” Smith admitted. “We’ve been able to accomplish something that, in my wildest dreams, I wouldn’t have thought we could do.
“I’m just enjoying the ride at the moment.”
Smith, who’s the son of Bellefontaine residents Tim and Mary Smith, lives in the Cleveland area with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Liam, Nora and Aiden.
“Timothy’s intelligence, tenacity, perseverance and competitiveness were all traits we felt would allow him to be successful,” Smith’s parents wrote. “But we never imagined all he would accomplish.”