EPMA Distinguished Service Awards recognise commitment to powder metallurgy
November 18, 2010
The European Powder Metallurgy Association (EPMA) presented Distinguished Service Awards to Professor Paul Beiss and Peter Brewin at the PM World Congress in Florence, Italy, October 10-14. The awards recognise their outstanding contribution to the growth and development of the powder metallurgy industry over many years.
Professor Paul Beiss has already been recognized internationally for his work, and in 2008 was the first non-American resident to be named an APMI Fellow. He received the Skaupy Lecture Award from the German Joint Committee on Powder Metallurgy and the Ivor Jenkins Award from the British Institute of Materials.
Professor Beiss studied mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and after graduation joined the University’s Institute of Materials Science, preparing a thesis on the hot extrusion of copper.
In 1979 he moved into industry and joined the R&D department at the former Sintermetallwerk Krebsöge to set up a vacuum sinter process for high speed steel structural parts. In 1983 he was appointed Technical Manager of the Krebsöge production plant and became Vice President of Engineering of the whole Krebsöge group in 1988. In a further step he took on the position of president of the Bad Brückenau plant in northern Bavaria which at that time was the largest manufacturing plant of the Krebsöge group. In total, he spent almost 15 years in the PM industry.
In 1994 he returned to academia as head of the Institute of Materials Science at RWTH Aachen University, where a research group was established dealing with PM materials. The need for predictable fatigue performance and functional relationships between porosity and properties or performance were the main drivers of this work, which is documented in about 170 publications on PM related topics.
Peter Brewin obtained his degree in engineering at Cambridge University and began his career in the chemical industry in both research and line management.
In the early 1970’s there was considerable interest from Europe and the USA in the use of powder metallurgy processes to produce high alloy steels in bar form, and in 1972 Peter Brewin was invited to carry out research at Imperial College London into a new process based on water atomised powders. A number of patents came out of this work, and the “Powdrex” pilot plant was established. He became Managing Director of Powdrex in 1977, leaving the company in 1995 to start his own consultancy.
As President of the then British Powder Metal Federation from 1986, he supported the initiative of Ivor Jenkins, Lothar Albano Muller, Per Lindskog and others to establish the EPMA. He became the association’s first full time Technical Director in 2001, with responsibility for projects, working groups, industry sectoral groups and technical aspects of the association.
Other awards presented to Peter Brewin have included the Institute of Metals Stokowiecz Prize in 1988, for his work on alloy steels, and the Ivor Jenkins Award in 2009.
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