McCormick Prof. Jan Achenbach will join the company of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs when he is awarded the nation’s highest presidential honor for technological innovation on March 14.
Achenbach will go to the White House to receive the 2003 National Medal of Technology for his contributions to aircraft safety and engineering, President George W. Bush announced Monday.
The award is for 2003 because the application process and review take more than a year to complete.
Achenbach was chosen for his development of ultrasound methods to detect cracks and corrosion in aircraft. His methods, used by commercial airlines and the Air Force, do not hurt inner layers of planes and take less time than previous means of inspection.
“The kind of people who get this award have been people who have been credited with inventing the language that is used currently for the Internet,” McCormick Dean Julio Ottino said. “It’s usually for something that is (so) extremely common now that you don’t even think about.”
The medal is awarded to individuals, groups and companies who have made “lasting contributions to America’s competitiveness, standard of living, and quality of life,” according to the medal’s Web site, www.technology.gov/Medal.
Recipients usually are prominent and have changed technology in a fundamental way, Ottino said.
Achenbach is one of six laureates for 2003. Another laureate, Robert Metcalfe, was awarded for leadership in developing the Ethernet, according to the Web site.
Achenbach certainly is a preeminent scientist, Ottino said. He also has won the Timoshenko and William Prager medals for his research in mechanics.
“He has all the major awards that anyone in science and engineering can have,” Ottino said.
But Achenbach is different from other scientists because he transformed a basic scientific discovery into something applicable to the real world, Ottino said. He said most scientists develop one step of a concept and let other scientists go further with it.
“He has done something that goes from pure, basic science, something very early on and academic, to something which gets utilized in something really practical — the detection of cracks in civilian and military aircraft,” he said.
Achenbach’s techniques detect aircraft problems using acoustic microscopy, which uses sound waves to penetrate solids. His team developed a non-destructive, ultrasonic technique to test aircraft wings from the outside, without disassembling them. It reduced inspection time from 800 to 50 hours, a Northwestern press release said.
Achenbach said he has been interested in wave propagation in solids since graduate school. He began focusing on acoustic microscopy to detect cracks and corrosion in aircraft after 1988, when metal fatigue caused the top of an Aloha Airlines plane to blow off while the plane was flying at 20,000 feet. He said today’s aircraft are much improved.
“Planes are safe to fly,” Achenbach said. “No accidents due to structural failure have happened for a number of years.”
He currently is studying ultrasonic methods for detecting failure in helicopter components and in composites, combinations of materials such as graphite fibers. Composites are stronger and lighter than metals and are replacing aluminum in aircraft construction, he said.
“It’s a new material, and it’s important to find out how it behaves,” Achenbach said.
Reach Tina Peng at [email protected].
