Molybdenum bar rolling failure (Philips Elmet)

Tom visits former undergrad Charlie's plant in Maine. Hot rolling Mo plate at ~1800 °C in air; volatile MoO₃ forms a dense white smoke fog and coats the mill walls. Backofen sample (now bisected) shows alligator-style splitting from inhomogeneous deformation; white MoO₃ residue visible in the cracks. Customer in the 1980s: IBM for computer chip interconnects.

Backofen has a picture of this type of defect — cracks formed in molybdenum bar rolled under high Delta conditions. He's passed away and I can't ask him, but he probably went up to Maine to get this. He was probably hired by a little firm up in Maine called Elmet — E-L-M-E-T — Corporation. It was later bought by Philips, the big Philips that makes the DVD players and stuff in the Netherlands. It was called Philips Elmet when I went there. I went there because one of my former undergraduate students was from Maine. Charlie wanted to go back to Maine. He's still a Mainiac. Speaks Maine, almost Canadian. Philips Elmet makes tungsten and molybdenum alloys. When I went there, IBM was buying most of their molybdenum sheet to make the interconnects for the fancy computer chips. This was in the 1980s. They weren't the biggest computers, which were 16K rather than 64K type stuff. You were down in 20 megabytes of storage in your computer or something. Sounds ridiculous to you now, but that's what it was back in the '80s.