Yaiza Rodriguez successfully defended her master’s degree on the diffusion bonding of Inconel 600 to silicon carbide for next generation high temperature applications and graduated in May 2020.
Yaiza started at Boise State not as a scientist, but as an athlete. She came from Barcelona to Boise State to play women’s basketball, all while studying materials science & engineering. She started for the Broncos all four years, was a three-time Academic All Mountain West honoree and was named to the Mountain West championship All-Tournament Team twice. The Broncos won the Mountain West Championship twice in her four years. Yaiza was 1st in team assists all four years, becoming the first Bronco and the fourth player in Mountain West history to have over 600 career assists.
In her senior year, Yaiza joined the Advanced Materials Laboratory to get some hands-on experience with materials science. She worked on a project with HiFunda LLC (Salt Lake City) on a novel way to join high temperature to metals to ceramics. Increased operational temperatures resulting in greater thermodynamic efficiency in energy conversion processes. Ceramics offer high temperature corrosion resistance while metals offer robust/versatile solutions to assemblies, but joining the two types of materials together can be complicated. Yaiza found that the joining the materials together led to unique microstructures (shown below), and she decided to stay and study these microstructures for her masters research.
Yaiza studied how changing the bonding process (pressure, temperature and time) would affect the interfacial microstructure. She used SEM with EDS, XRD and mechanical testing to determine how the process parameters affected the metal-ceramic bond. In most cases, brittle interfacial solid-state reaction phases of Ni, Cr, and Pd-silicides were formed. The thickness of the reacted layer was used to determine that the diffusion mechanism for both interlayer systems followed parabolic kinetics, which is indicative that the process is diffusion-controlled.
Throughout her time in the AML, Yaiza presented her work at multiple conferences, including posters at the Boise State Undergraduate Research Conference, a poster at MS&T 2018 in Columbus Ohio, and a presentation at MS&T 2019 in Portland, OR.
Yaiza has accepted a position with Applied Materials in Boise. Congratulations!