Jason Sebastian | Mitigating hydrogen materials challenges at Questek Innovations

In this episode, we learn from Jason Sebastian, EVP of Market Operations at QuesTek Innovations, focusing on the challenges of using hydrogen in various industries and the application of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) to address these challenges. He discusses the impact of hydrogen on materials, the need to mitigate its effects, and specific examples of how ICME has been used to design materials resistant to hydrogen embrittlement, emphasizing the importance of understanding and adapting materials to the unique properties of hydrogen across different industries.

As EVP of QuesTek Innovations LLC, Jason T. Sebastian, Ph.D., is focused on overall company growth and management, and on the entire spectrum of commercial- and government-sponsored alloy modeling, development and deployment activities.

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This article is part of the series: Hydrogen Innovators Podcast

Transcript

[00:00:00.00] [Music Playing]

[00:00:02.97] Jason Sebastian: It's a very difficult molecule to deal with, a very difficult atom, hydrogen. As an atom itself, it's a single proton. So as it finds itself-- as it makes its way into, say, a steel and iron-based material, where the nuclei are much more massive, it's kind of like a single proton wandering around inside of a sea of much larger things.

[00:00:27.03] We've got a lot of excitement about hydrogen engines, but the sort of industry approach these days is just sort of pumping hydrogen into existing engines, existing engine materials, and there's going to be issues there. We're going to really need to understand and we're going to need to adapt those materials. We can't just use standard cast irons. We can't just use standard cast aluminums. We're going to have to modify these materials a little bit.

[00:00:52.52] I get inspired by these sort of interdisciplinary connections. For the materials science side of things, really, when you're able to link a fundamental understanding of a phenomenon to something that's actually measurable or observable or improvable, that's really inspiring to me. So even the stuff we're talking about here, when I can talk about the atomic scale segregation of individual atoms to interfaces deep within a material and relate that back to something that you can see with your eyes, embrittlement or effects on strength, that's pretty cool and inspiring to me.

[00:01:35.04] [Music Playing]

[00:01:40.42] Karen Baert: Welcome back to the Hydrogen Innovators podcast. This is a podcast series is produced by the Stanford Hydrogen Initiative, where we spotlight bold innovators, all the way from academia to industry. And you can find our podcast series, Hydrogen Innovators, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

[00:01:56.94] I'm Karen Baert. I'm an entrepreneur, a Stanford MBA graduate. And today, I'm really excited, because we have the privilege to welcome Jason Sebastian. He's executive vice president of market operations at QuesTek Innovations, the materials and engineering design company. As EVP, Jason is mainly focused on the overall company growth and management on the entire spectrum, all the way from commercial activities, as well as more government, alloy modeling, development and deployment activities.

[00:02:28.94] Jason has been at QuesTek for a while. He joined in 2006, so two decades ago almost. And his technical activities have been focused mainly on the development of high-strength steels for structural and power transmission applications, and a range of other alloys as well.

[00:02:47.10] Jason is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Illinois, where he earned a bachelor's in ceramic engineering and a bachelor's in philosophy. That's a cool combination. And after a year of postgraduate studies at Cambridge University, he earned a PhD in materials science and engineering from Northwestern.

[00:03:05.79] So you might be asking, why is Jason on our podcast today? Well, Jason is a materials and materials science expert, and the hydrogen industry faces lots of material challenges. Why? As we all hydrogen is not the easiest molecule to deal with. There is hydrogen embrittlement, which is the fact that hydrogen diffuses into metals, and that causes failure because hydrogen is one of the smallest elements on Earth.

[00:03:31.30] Secondly, there's hydrogen permeation. So hydrogen diffuses through other materials, and that causes leaks. And there's material degradation because of exposure to hydrogen for many years. So classic materials engineering methods can have a major impact on materials in the hydrogen industry. And that's why we're talking to Jason today. So, Jason, welcome to the Hydrogen Innovators podcast.

[00:03:56.24] Jason Sebastian: Thank you very much. Thank you, Karen. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the introduction. I think you covered, boy, a lot of what I'm going to talk about here. And I'm very excited to talk about these things.

[00:04:07.67] Karen Baert: That's great. Well, let's dive into it. So Jason, could you start with giving our listeners a quick lesson on Integrated Computational Materials Engineering, or ICME? When was that developed? And how does it really have an impact on materials engineering?

[00:04:24.20] Jason Sebastian: Yeah. ICME, Integrated Computational Materials Engineering, that's what we do at my company at QuesTek. That's what I do. And it involves the computational modeling and design of new materials. So you have to understand things in the whole historical context.

[00:04:42.48] Traditionally, material science was a very-- and metallurgy was a very kind of empirical branch of engineering and science, very trial and error. This goes all the way back to the ancient alchemists and such. So there was a lot of lore and tribal knowledge around material science and metallurgy, a pinch of this, a pinch of that.

[00:05:03.53] And gradually that started to change as we got into the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries now. We got a better physical understanding of why certain things were happening in materials, and in particular, in metals. We've got advances in microscopes and microscopy and experiments that allow us to see better what's happening inside of materials at atomic scale and that sort of thing.

[00:05:28.77] We've also got a better understanding of the physical metallurgy and the physics of what's going on. So those are the computational models, this understanding of the physics and the physical metallurgy. And you combine that now with the advances in computing power, it doesn't take days and days and days to run a computational model or to use it to analyze things the way it used to, especially when we talk about some of the atomic scale modeling that's very relevant to the hydrogen effects that we're going to talk about.

[00:05:58.70] But you combine all these models and this computational power. You combine it across length scales in a material, all the way from the atomic to the more macro scale. You combine it across the various processing steps of a material. Process determine structure, structure determines properties.

[00:06:16.28] And that's what ICME is. It's combining all these computational models across length scales, across the process structure, property chains of materials, to better understand how things work and to better model things and better improve materials. The acronym itself, it's kind of getting trite, maybe blase these days, because it's been around since, I think, about 2008. Computational modeling has been around for a long time, but pulling it all together into a discipline and a framework, the acronym ICME only goes back about 15 years or so.

[00:06:48.56] And I say trite, because these days, material scientists are educated from the get-go to appreciate and use computational models. It's no longer a trial and error type experimental science, empirical science. It's very much a computational type of science. And that's where ICME comes into things. So, yes, that is what ICME is. It's not that old, but the roots of it go back quite a while.

[00:07:15.44] Karen Baert: So it's basically applying the latest advances in computational modeling to better understand how materials look, act, change. Now, my understanding is that at QuesTek Innovations, you work on ICME across different industries. What industries have you seen having the most impact and benefits from ICME? And can you give us some specific examples?

[00:07:43.25] Jason Sebastian: Yeah. Well, all industries, really, that are driven by materials innovation and advanced materials have seen benefit from this computational ICME-type approach. But the ones that are most driven by those types of advanced materials, technologies, and stuff, aerospace, defense, space, you can look at companies like SpaceX, developing brand new materials for their rockets and using ICME to do it. The shiny outside of the Starship, some of the materials inside of the engine. There's been application of ICME to improve the materials in oil and gas industry, in the medical industry, where they're using advanced materials like shape memory alloys.

[00:08:27.97] In consumer electronics, Apple has been known to be using ICME to design some of the materials that are now in the Apple Watch and the new titanium phone. But last, but not least, energy. ICME has found a lot of traction in the energy sphere because there's a lot of extreme materials environments within energy.

[00:08:49.50] So you've got industrial gas turbines, nuclear energy, and then, of course, hydrogen. You have an entire energy economy based around hydrogen now presents a whole unique set of materials challenges. So ICME has been used across all of these places, and I think we're very excited to be talking about it in terms of the hydrogen space.

[00:09:10.98] Karen Baert: Absolutely. And I'm impatient to get into the hydrogen world, so let's do it. I mentioned some of the material challenges that I have seen in the hydrogen world, embrittlement, permeation, degradation. are these some of the things you work on in the hydrogen space with ICME? And again, can you give us some examples on what that means?

[00:09:29.63] Jason Sebastian: Yeah, absolutely. You said it. It's a very difficult molecule to deal with, a very difficult atom, hydrogen. As an atom itself, it's a single proton. So as it finds itself-- as it makes its way into, say, a steel and iron-based material, where the nuclei are much more massive, it's kind of like a single proton wandering around inside of a sea of much larger things.

[00:09:54.09] And I'm saying it this way because it really does things within materials that are unique to hydrogen. It presents challenges inside of a material that no other element does. It moves very quickly within materials. It can diffuse into materials at much more rapid rate than other elements. It has a tendency to segregate hydrogen, now, to the various interfaces within the material, and it affects the cohesion of those interfaces.

[00:10:20.63] And that's where it has the strongest effects, the things where the materials scientists get most concerned. It goes to interfaces inside of a material. That weakens the cohesion. And then, depending on what you're concerned about, it can degrade properties.

[00:10:37.02] So in the case of, say, strength, it can lead to weak links within a material, where the material is more easy to deform or more easy to fracture in the presence of hydrogen. For the case of surface phenomena, like corrosion, where there's a protective oxide scale on top of the base steel, it can go to that interface between oxide and base metal and start to affect things. The interactions that it has within a material are more like electronic in their nature than they are physical.

[00:11:11.06] And I'm saying-- I'm using all these kind of idioms and metaphors and such because it really is a different beast when it comes to material science. You need to use entirely different methods to understand what's going on, because most of the interactions are electronic in nature. You've got to go to the quantum mechanics and really go to the fundamental physics of, what is this proton doing inside of my material? And where does it matter?

[00:11:35.01] Different materials have different types of interfaces. There are interfaces in steels that relate to the grain boundaries, that relate to the precipitates and the carbides inside of the steel. And in every case, it's a matter of how can we look at the effects that hydrogen is having and how can we mitigate those effects?

[00:11:55.47] In some cases, it's a matter of identifying which interfaces are the sort of weak links and minimizing the amount of those interfaces. In other cases, it's using other elements to segregate to those interfaces to counterbalance the negative aspects of hydrogen. I've gotten into a bunch of different examples here, but that's the point with hydrogen. In all different materials, it's affecting things in lots of different ways. And understanding that across all different materials is a difficult task. And so that's where the computational modeling comes in.

[00:12:31.68] Karen Baert: That's very helpful. And thank you for sharing these examples. So to take one very specific example here, do I understand correctly that, let's say, you would analyze hydrogen pipelines and the effects that hydrogen has on pipelines after a long period of time? Would you then run simulations where you basically look at the material and how it changes over time, and then, based on that, can think about mitigation strategies to reduce the negative impact of the hydrogen on the pipe material?

[00:13:04.32] Jason Sebastian: Yeah, exactly. Like a pipeline carrying hydrogen is going through cycles of hydrogen concentration, high-low cycles of pressure, cycles of temperature, sometimes, having to do with the hydrogen itself, sometimes, the outside environment. All of these things are driving hydrogen into the pipe material, into the metal where it segregates to interfaces and starts to have effects.

[00:13:27.18] So depending on what types of interfaces are in your metal, you can have some-- you can look to mitigating effects, depending on whether you're rate limited by the diffusion at the surface versus the diffusion in the bulk. There are some strategies in terms of coatings and stuff that you can employ. But exactly that. As you're operating a pipeline with hydrogen in it, the hydrogen itself is diffusing into the metal. Now, in some cases, it may be relatively benign, low concentrations, long cycle times, but in other cases, it can be catastrophic. Hydrogen can lead to very accelerated failure of materials, particularly with high concentrations of hydrogen when the metal itself is under a lot of stress.

[00:14:10.36] Karen Baert: So we talked about pipelines. Let's move to engine components. Existing materials really falls short when it comes to hydrogen engines. Can you elaborate on that? And then, do you work on that to ICME? How? And what are some of the solutions to these challenges?

[00:14:31.93] Jason Sebastian: Yeah. Engines are-- there are many different types of materials used in an engine for just a internal combustion-type engine using hydrogen. The baseline materials are things like cast aluminum for engine blocks or engine headers, or cast iron for some of the larger scale truck engines. Cast iron is essentially a composite of iron plus graphite. And so that becomes the weak link interface within a cast iron.

[00:15:02.05] So you really have to examine, how does the hydrogen get into a cast iron as a function of the pressure and temperature cycles inside of an engine? And now, we're talking about a combustion engine, where the cycles are very rapid and the temperature is very, very high. So the propensity or the ability for hydrogen to get into the material and wreak havoc is real. So it's already been understood that this is going to be the weak link, the kind of graphite-iron interface.

[00:15:30.02] So really understanding, how quickly does the hydrogen get into a cast iron? And what does it start to do in terms of the interface at the graphite-iron, atomic scale level? It weakens the interface, and then you end up with a tiny crack that can start, and then, after subsequent cycles of pressure and temperature, the crack can grow, and then you can get failure.

[00:15:51.68] And this is not something you would experience if you were just burning gasoline. There isn't this concentration of hydrogen diffusing into the metal in that sort of a situation. There's the same sort of temperature cycles, of course, but not the same presence of hydrogen thing. In a casting, just an aluminum casting, there's the dendritic, snowflake-type of structure that develops in a casting. That itself presents a bunch of interfaces at the micro scale that hydrogen can get into and start to reduce cohesion.

[00:16:25.52] There's porosity in castings, small bubbles and empty space that isn't typical in, say, like a forging. All of these become sort of traps or reservoirs for hydrogen and places where it can migrate to. So, yeah, engines, just by nature, by virtue of their operating conditions, pressure and high temperature cycles, even in the hydrogen engine, present a real challenging environment. And especially in the presence of hydrogen.

[00:16:54.73] Karen Baert: So for these weak links, how can we mitigate these challenges? Can we do a certain pretreatment to these materials, or apply certain coating, or is it really about we need to find different materials that are more resistant to hydrogen?

[00:17:08.95] Jason Sebastian: Well, it's both. There are things you can do to the surface where hydrogen comes to the surface and then dissociates from a molecular form into the atoms. And there are things you can do to the surface to prevent that dissociation, and at that point, you're preventing the hydrogen from getting in the first place. But once it gets in, there are things you can do with the material to make traps for the hydrogen.

[00:17:35.37] The interface of very small precipitates is known to trap the hydrogen as it migrates around within a material. So you can increase the number of those trapping sites. Or ultimately, you can look at what the weak links are inside of a material.

[00:17:50.01] So if the weak links are a certain type of, say, grain boundary, you can reduce the presence or the number frequency of those grain boundaries, or you can add other elements to the material that segregate to the grain boundary and kind counteract the negative cohesion effects. Maybe I'll talk about that later in a specific example. But, yes, there are absolutely things you can do to the material, both the inside and the-- both the outside, and the inside microstructure of a material that can reduce the effects of hydrogen.

[00:18:23.36] Karen Baert: Great. OK. Let's talk a bit more about hydrogen transport and storage. Because that's one of the main areas where material challenges really come to the surface in the hydrogen world. So there's these issues that we discussed, embrittlement, permeation. The hydrogen is a very small molecule, but then, it also doesn't help that you need to get the hydrogen to very high pressure or low temperature to get it liquid. But what are some of the specific material challenges presented by storing hydrogen? And what materials engineering work do you work on with QuesTek to meet these challenges?

[00:19:03.68] Jason Sebastian: Well, some of it, we've already talked about. Within a storage situation, there's a very high pressure, and that pressure of hydrogen has the effect of pushing it into the material. So you're in a hydrogen-rich environment, you can't escape it. So that's in the realm of storage.

[00:19:20.86] And believe it or not, when you cycle things from low to high, from low to high, you probably are exacerbating some of the issues rather than staying static at a single high pressure. There's this notion, even though you may be dealing with stainless steel, stainless steel is stainless because it has a chromium oxide coating on top of the steel, but that has nothing to do with what the hydrogen would be doing inside of the material. Once it gets past that chromium oxide barrier, because there may be a scratch or some sort of compromise, it's open season for the hydrogen.

[00:19:55.82] These hydrogen effects that we're talking about, even though they're sometimes grouped under the heading of corrosion, they're not the same as rust. So the problems of transport and storage are real. Also, because these things sit for such long times-- in certain situations, yeah, they're under pressure for long, long times without cycling, and that's not the same as just seeing hydrogen, say, in the air environment or in a naval sea environment.

[00:20:25.49] But ultimately, it comes down to these issues of cohesion and hydrogen getting into the material and reducing the cohesion in certain parts of its microstructure. And what can you do in terms of either trapping the hydrogen or adding elements to the material that would improve the-- improve the baseline cohesion. So we have worked on stainless steels and non-stainless steels where we make additions to the steel, a separate element that segregates to a boundary, improves the cohesion of that boundary, and then, the effects of hydrogen are sort of counteracted in that way.

[00:21:01.89] Karen Baert: Yeah, cohesion is really the theme to remember here.

[00:21:05.68] Jason Sebastian: Yeah.

[00:21:06.15] Karen Baert: So you mentioned specific examples. I'd love to go there. Can you talk to an example where there was a certain client in the hydrogen space facing a material challenge? What did you do to help them? And what was the outcome?

[00:21:22.32] Jason Sebastian: Yeah, the best example is some work that QuesTek did for the United States Navy. It's a great example, because it's the US Navy, but also, because we can talk about it publicly. But we designed a high strength, ultra high strength structural steel called Ferrium M54. And this is for Naval landing gear. So these operate out in the saltwater environments, which are, essentially, very hydrogen-rich environments in terms of moisture on surfaces and the presence of even salt as an electrolyte.

[00:21:55.60] This all has the tendency of driving up the environmental hydrogen. It's not the same as a pressurized storage tank, but they are very much concerned with hydrogen embrittlement in these structural steels. They call it stress corrosion cracking. You can have the landing gear of a Naval aircraft snap under stress cycling, or even just sitting there as fully loaded because of this phenomenon.

[00:22:20.92] So they were very interested in steels that would reduce this phenomenon of stress corrosion cracking. And we looked at these types of steels, and we could see pretty clearly that the weak link in the presence of hydrogen was the grain boundaries. These are the little crystallites inside of a steel. When you tested these types of steel in the presence of hydrogen, they would fail along the grain boundaries.

[00:22:44.41] So we were looking at elements that would segregate to the grain boundaries inside of a steel, that would improve the cohesion of the grain boundaries, and hopefully, counteract the negative cohesion effects of hydrogen. And we settled on the element tungsten. So in the spirit of the alchemists, we add a dash of tungsten to the steel. It segregates to the grain boundaries, it improves the baseline cohesion, such that even in the presence of hydrogen, as much hydrogen as is in this particular type of environment, you no longer get failure at the grain boundaries. You get a more traditional failure that cuts across the grain boundaries.

[00:23:21.55] So this is the way we improved the stress corrosion cracking resistance, the hydrogen embrittlement resistance of this Navy structural steel. It was a big success for ICME, the thing we were talking about in the beginning here, because this steel was designed computationally. And it went from clean sheet to full flight qualification in about seven years. Which doesn't sound like it's that fast, but traditional aerospace materials take 10 to 20 years or so to get to this sort of a finish line. And that's with the support of big, big companies and such.

[00:23:54.57] So we used these sort of ICME computational methods to do the things that I was just saying, a steel that would be resistant to stress corrosion cracking. And it works. And it's a commercial product, and they're making landing gear-type components out of it today.

[00:24:11.57] So we have applied these same sort of methodologies and thinking to the optimization of steels for oil and gas. We've looked at stainless steels, as I was just talking about, in terms of improving their fundamental intrinsic resistance to hydrogen embrittlement. And we've looked at other material systems, like aluminum, and the list goes on. Always in the spirit of examining what the cohesion of boundaries are and the ways that we can improve that cohesion, and/or mitigate the effects of hydrogen.

[00:24:45.35] Karen Baert: That's a really cool example. In this specific case, and also more broadly, this classic innovation played a role all the way from identifying the challenge to coming up with a solution, and potentially even testing that new solution.

[00:25:00.96] Jason Sebastian: Yeah, we did. In that case, we had to figure out what the weak link was, these grain boundaries and grain boundary cohesion. And then, we designed the steel that had the additional elemental and heat treatment modifications to eliminate this problem. And then, we scaled that steel up to full industrial scale, licensed it to a producer. And we even got involved in some of the production of the components that we delivered to the Navy for them to put on the jets.

[00:25:28.61] So that's what we do as a material science company. We take materials from clean sheet all the way to full deployment. We develop the software and the models that allows other folks to do that, too. It's just this is a specific example that involves some of the hydrogen mitigation that we're talking about here.

[00:25:46.13] Karen Baert: That's great. Very cool. It's clear that there's a lot of material challenges that still need to be solved in the hydrogen industry. Who do you think will try these innovations?

[00:26:01.02] Because a lot of the storage and transportation infrastructure is public. Some of it is private to-- who will invest here? Is it the hydrogen producers? Is it other players playing your role? What's your perspective there?

[00:26:15.00] Jason Sebastian: Yeah, there's a lot of innovation here. Who's going to drive it? Of course, we have seen a lot of the government, DoE Department of Energy style programs that are sponsored-- that are sponsoring this type of research, improved materials for the hydrogen economy. But ultimately, it's going to have to come from industry.

[00:26:33.71] And then, on the industry side, you've got two groups. You've got the hydrogen suppliers, the makers of hydrogen, the suppliers of hydrogen, and then, you've got the users, to pick up on a theme like the folks that design engines. I think it needs to come from the engine side. That's what's going to-- or the kind of user side.

[00:26:52.01] The folks that use things really know what the challenges are, and they will drive the innovation. But I think it's going to be sort of a three-way thing with the users, like the engine designers, the suppliers, and then, maybe even the government chipping in. We've certainly seen a lot more interest in activity on the user side, folks that use landing gear steel coming to us to say, how do we mitigate this stress corrosion cracking resistance, or folks that make-- that are looking to start producing and designing hydrogen engines.

[00:27:23.12] If we're going to make a hydrogen engine out of cast iron, what do we need to worry about that we don't worry about when it's burning diesel fuel? And we've got some active programs in that very area looking at those effects for engine OEMs. So I think it's going to be everybody. But I think, ultimately, it's the user engine designer and the consumer that's going to really drive the innovation.

[00:27:46.34] Karen Baert: So we might have some representatives from some of these hydrogen users listening in today. What types of companies or customers should be reaching out to you and the broader QuesTek team?

[00:28:01.06] Jason Sebastian: Engine manufacturers, people looking to design new hydrogen combustion engines where there are usage of metals, aluminum, cast iron, steel, hydrogen storage production or distribution, tanks, piping, nozzles, even the coupling of nozzles involves some materials challenges where hydrogen embrittlement comes into play. But, yes, anywhere where a material is used, really. We're familiar with all types of materials, steel, titanium, aluminum. And we're familiar with the hydrogen effects on all those kinds of materials.

[00:28:38.21] Karen Baert: So, Jason, last bonus question before we move to the very last question of the podcast here. What's, within the hydrogen industry, material challenge that you're most worried about? If there's one that keeps you up at night, what is it?

[00:28:57.11] Jason Sebastian: I think, on the engine side, this is fresh for us. Because I think we've got a lot of excitement about hydrogen engines. But the sort of industry approach these days is just sort of pumping hydrogen into existing engines, existing engine materials, and there's going to be issues there.

[00:29:16.43] We're going to really need to understand and we're going to need to adapt those materials. We can't just use standard cast irons. We can't just use standard cast aluminum. We're going to have to modify these materials a little bit if the hydrogen combustion engine economy is really going to take off.

[00:29:31.86] But the good news is these folks are thinking about that actively, and they know that. We can't have engines that only last a couple years in the field. We need them to last the decades that current gasoline and diesel engines last. So, yeah, I think the engine issue, more so maybe than the storage or the transport, although I know that's a big issue. Ultimately, you're going to need to have the engines that are using things.

[00:29:59.90] Karen Baert: Absolutely. Jason, this was so informative. I learned a lot about materials challenges in hydrogen, but also, solutions and how we need to increase cohesion. I'd like to move to the last question of the podcast, and this is one that we ask every guest. Some [INAUDIBLE] believe that we all stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us, and using Isaac Newton's words, "Standing on their shoulders is what makes us see further." Now, in that context, who inspires you most and why?

[00:30:30.79] Jason Sebastian: What or who inspires me? You covered my background. I had a degree in engineering, and also, liberal arts, so I really look at things through this sort of multidisciplinary lens, sort of polymath. I have interest in all sorts of things, science, and math, and the arts, and music.

[00:30:49.93] I'm always inspired when I can see a connection across these sort of disciplines. If I can explain a physical phenomenon in terms of something like that we're watching in a sports competition, or relate some physics back to what I'm looking at in sports or what I'm listening to in music. So I get inspired by these sort of interdisciplinary connections.

[00:31:12.91] For the materials science side of things, really, when you're able to link a fundamental understanding of a phenomenon to something that's actually measurable or observable or improvable, that's really inspiring to me. So even the stuff we're talking about here, when I can talk about the atomic scale segregation of individual atoms to interfaces deep within a material and relate that back to something that you can see with your eyes, embrittlement or effects on strength, that's pretty cool and inspiring to me. Because, ultimately, it shows you the road or the path to improvement. So yeah, those are the kind of things that inspire me. I don't know what the analogy in sports or music space is to hydrogen embrittlement, but if I figure it out, I'll let you know.

[00:32:03.26] Karen Baert: Sounds good. And I'm sure that will resonate with many scientists and engineers that are listening in today. Jason, thank you very much for your time today. Thank you for educating us. And we will continue to follow your progress at QuesTek Innovations. I hope many of our listeners will reach out to you. And I look forward to staying in touch.

[00:32:26.45] Jason Sebastian: Yeah, great. Thanks, Karen.

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