How Stuff Breaks (or: Failure IS an Option)
Channel: Nerd Nite East Bay
Date: 2014-05-12

Heather Jackson at Nerd Nite East Bay #11, The New Parkway, 26-August-2013

Materials are like people...it's their defects that make them interesting. If real materials were perfect, we'd be missing out on steel, laser pointers, pop-top soda cans, and much more. On the other hand, defects sank the Titanic as well as square windows on airplanes. So, stuff breaks, and the structure and properties of materials has something to do with it. But how? Everyone knows that windows shatter and car bumpers dent, but what about the chassis that crumples in some places and is rigid in others? When design tweaks only take us so far, how can materials and process engineering optimize the performance of the structures, machines, and vehicles we depend on, and make them less likely to kill us or waste our money?

As a consulting engineer at Structural Integrity Associates in San Jose, Heather Jackson helps keeps the lights on. She works to prevent failures of structural components at nuclear and fossil power plants by harnessing lessons learned from metallurgy, corrosion, and fracture mechanics. Before that, she kept busy breaking stuff at Sandia National Labs and figuring out how stuff broke at NASA Johnson Space Center. Heather is an alum of MIT and Imperial College London and reckons the terrible weather helped by never distracting her from her studies.

Credits
Bosses: Rick Karnesky and Rebecca Cohen
Video Editor: Ami Eaton and Rick Karnesky
Videography: Rebecca Cohen
Audio Recording: Katelyn Knight
Additional Thanks: Amber Crabbe and Kishore Hari