Michael Pfeifer
I’m a metallurgical engineer with over 25 years of experience working on product design, manufacturing, and root cause analysis.
Most engineers think of metallurgists only for failure analysis of component failures. While I do that, I also help design teams with component design. I help select alloys and coatings that have the corrosion, fatigue, wear, and creep properties needed to meet reliability requirements. Oftentimes, trade-offs are required between component form and materials to optimize a design for performance, reliability, and cost. I help do that, too.
I’ve worked on design, failure analysis, and root cause analysis across a wide range of applications and alloys.
I started Industrial Metallurgists, LLC in 2004 to provide complete metals engineering consulting services to companies that don’t have a metals engineer on staff. Many companies don’t have a metallurgical engineer on staff, but need occasional help with metal component design, solving reliability and quality problems, and reducing component costs.
I also teach metallurgy and metals engineering to design, reliability, quality, and manufacturing engineers. This includes training on corrosion, fatigue, failure analysis, component design, and metallurgy of different alloys. Training is offered on-demand, by webinars, and on-site.
I received a B.S. and M.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University. After grad school, I joined Motorola, when it was a big company.
I first worked six years in a Motorola semiconductor factory as a process engineer. There I got my first exposure to reliability through FMEAs and performed tests to characterize the electromigration characteristics of the aluminum conductors on the integrated circuits produced by the factory. The data I generated was used for design rules for our products.
Then, I worked for seven years in Motorola’s automotive electronics group to support product design, manufacturing process development, cost reduction, quality improvement, and root cause analysis of reliability failures and quality problems. There I got exposure to materials selection for performance, reliability, and cost. The main reliability concerns were corrosion and fatigue.
Michael also writes the article series Metals Engineering and Product Reliability. The topics should be of interest to product design engineers. He is writing about topics related to the metals engineering perspective to component design and metallurgical aspects of component reliability.
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