Cody Pratt Email & Phone Number

In my work as an undergraduate, and now graduate researcher, in the Quantitative Ultrasonics for Inspection and Structural Prognosis (QUISP) laboratory, and under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Turner, I have been involved with projects all across the board relating to mechanical and materials engineering. My first experience in research was to develop a repeatable sample preparation procedure for a series of additively manufactured metal samples that provided optical micrographs of high quality to allow for the determination of microstructural characteristics, such as grain size, grain morphology and features, and phase content. A love for materials that began in my sophomore materials science class blossomed with my very first micrographs, illuminating a microscopic world both aesthetically pleasing, and abundantly rich with data and questions, as we seek the physical mechanisms behind the microstructural formations that we see, and grew only more when I was able to apply the techniques I had learned to real world research into some very interesting samples.I quickly delved into the world of electron microscopes, performing scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and electron backscatter diffraction on numerous samples to investigate things from the particle size distribution of a stainless steel powder (for additive manufacturing), to the microstructural behavior of additively manufactured samples produced under various input conditions. The usefulness of these techniques have grown leaps and bounds over the past twenty years, and with the worldwide growth in computing power, the real-world data that they allow us to obtain will only become more valuable in the coming decades.That leads to the work I've done for my thesis, where I have made my biggest contribution to my fellow researchers. In the lab I work in there was one group predicting ultrasonic wave scattering behavior out of a synthetic sample using various computer codes developed by researchers in our lab. Another group was using ultrasound to investigate real samples, with that investigation ranging from macro-scale defects to estimating microstructural properties. My contribution was to provide a method by which they can compare the predicted scattering results from a sample to the real sample. I worked on a process using EBSD to create simulated microstructures containing microstructural information from a real sample, and completed the link between both group's research.

Listed skills include Leadership, Writing, Mechanics Of Materials, Research And Development, and 46 others.