The award is judged by the IOM3 Surface Technologies Leadership Team.

2021 -
2022 Prof Robert Wood FREng FIMMM

2010 - 2020
2020 Prof Michael Fitzpatrick, 2018 Prof Allan Matthews, 2012 Professor David Rickerby, 2010 Professor John Nicholls 

Tom Bell, the Founding Editor of Surface Engineering, died on 17 April 2008, just over a month before his sixty-seventh birthday. His research contributions in surface engineering and heat treatment enjoyed an international reputation, but he will be remembered especially for his innovation, for his rare facility to bridge academia and industry and for his successful transfer of technology to commercial applications.

Most notable in the current context was his role in the emergence of surface engineering as a multidisciplinary concept in the early 1980s: indeed, he has a strong claim to have invented the term. In 1985, he established the world’s first surface engineering research group, the Wolfson Institute for Surface Engineering, at Birmingham. Tom’s early definition of surface engineering, as ‘the design of a substrate–surface (coating) system to give a combination of properties that neither component is capable of providing alone’, identified the key principle of integrated design of substrate and surface which was to prove so fruitful as a range of new surface engineering technologies emerged and achieved industrial maturity. Many established technologies also received new impetus from this approach, leading in some cases to the emergence of novel treatment combinations, i.e. duplex surface engineering.

An obvious corollary of substrate–surface design is the need for surface engineering to be involved from the start of the design process. This too was something Tom worked constantly to promote – in academia, where he spent many years teaching mechanical engineers to appreciate the subtleties of materials; and in his industrial collaborations, particularly with the automotive and medical sectors.

The term ‘surface engineering’ is now so routinely used – often interpreted loosely to include surface treatments of any type – that it is easy to forget the effort Tom and fellow champions expended to establish and gain acceptance for this approach. This vision and enthusiasm were characteristic of Tom’s approach and achievements.

The threads of Tom’s thinking on surface engineering can be traced back to the ‘Survey of the heat treatment of engineering components’ he compiled in 1972, as British Steel Corporation Heat Treatment Fellow at the University of Liverpool, for the Heat Treatment Joint Committee of the Iron and Steel Institute, the Institute of Metals and the Institution of Metallurgists. The report covered selected general heat treatment topics, but focused principally on austenitic and ferritic thermochemical treatments. On the basis of surveys and visits to heat treatment companies and equipment suppliers in the UK, Europe and the USA, he authoritatively identified areas of weakness in fundamental understanding and made a number of far sighted recommendations to enhance industrial performance, and to promote the effective collection and dissemination of information relating to best practice. As the heat treatment industry adapted newer technology and process/quality control became routinely established, it was a natural step to consider the property and performance enhancements offered by further innovation, via the principles of surface engineering. This insight led him, in 1985, to launch Surface Engineering as a means of furthering his vision of a new discipline.

Two recommendations in the survey were particularly influential and long lasting in their effects. The call for a UK centre of expertise laid the ground for the foundation of the Wolfson Centre for Heat Treatment at Aston University in 1973; and the recommendation to establish an international coordinating body for heat treaters marked the birth of the International Federation for Heat Treatment over the period 1971–72.

Tom began his academic career at the University of Liverpool, gaining BEng and PhD degrees, before being appointed lecturer and senior lecturer in Metallurgy and Materials Science. He moved to the University of Birmingham as Hanson Professor of Metallurgy in 1981, a position he continued to hold until his death. A survey of his contributions over more than 40 years of active research will perforce be selective, but his body of work on plasma diffusion treatments, which employ an energetic plasma around the workpiece to enhance diffusion of nitrogen or other species at relatively low temperature, had profound influence. The process had been developed in Germany as ion nitriding – although Tom had an intuition, confirmed many years later by plasma diagnostics and modelling, that energetic neutral species played a critical role in enhancing diffusion. He was a pioneer in introducing plasma nitriding (and the related carburising and boronising processes) to the UK and over many years, with colleagues in Birmingham, did much to characterise the mechanisms involved and to develop the understanding necessary to control diffusion layer and compound layer formation – so enabling surface properties to be tailored to the desired application. ‘Duplex surface engineering’ was another of Tom’s coinings, a principle which led to the combination of plasma diffusion treatments with bulk substrate hardening and surface engineering technologies such as PVD coating and ion implantation to enhance profoundly the performance of cutting tools, dies and gears, among diverse other components. More recently, his attention and enthusiasm turned to active screen plasma nitriding, in which the potential is applied to a cage surrounding the workpiece rather than to the workpiece itself. The active screen approach overcomes some problems experienced with conventional dc plasma nitriding, such as plasma instability and arcing, and also permits treatment of non-conducting materials such as polymers and oxidised steels.

The unique characteristics of plasma thermochemical treatments also facilitated the formation of the ‘expanded austenite’ S-phase on austenitic stainless steels and cobalt–chromium alloys, which enhances hardness and wear resistance without compromising the intrinsic corrosion resistance of these alloys. The paper by Bell and Zhang, presented at the Shanghai Heat Treatment meeting in 1983 and subsequently published in Surface Engineering (1985, 1, 131), was probably the first to report this phase and Tom’s group at Birmingham was one of several leading worldwide groups efforts to characterise S-phase structures and advance their practical application.

Another facet of enhanced diffusion treatments was Tom’s contribution to the development of ferritic nitrocarburising treatments as an alternative to austenitic carbonitriding, with benefits that include reduced distortion. The lower treatment temperatures also reduce energy consumption, and Tom was ahead of the curve in seeing how plasma treatments could be sold as environmentally friendly technologies: low energy, low emissions. He was also active in promoting plasma treatments as environmentally more acceptable alternatives to cyanide salt bath treatments.

This brief survey would be incomplete without mention of Tom’s work on the surface engineering of titanium alloys to improve wear resistance. Duplex treatments that combined laser or electron beam surface melting and alloying with nitrogen or oxygen were successful in increasing load bearing capacity and galling resistance by orders of magnitude. The technology has been successfully applied to Formula One components since the 1990s and is attracting increased interest from the aerospace and automotive sectors as the prospect of low cost titanium from electrolytic reduction and other novel approaches commercial reality.

Tom’s acumen in identifying opportunities for commercial exploitation and technology transfer – often in unexpected applications and industry sectors – was outstanding. He served as a consultant or adviser to many companies, including UKAEA, UNIDO and Micro-Materials Ltd, but his longest association was with Bodycote. As a non-executive director of Bodycote International from 1983 to 2005, and technical adviser to Bodycote Technology (and before that to Nemo Heat Treatment, the company from which the group developed) he was involved at a strategic level with the evolution from a UK heat treater to an international group consisting of more than 100 companies in surface engineering, hipping and materials testing. He was also the author or coauthor of numerous patents.

Selling an idea by tailoring the message to the audience was another facet of this innovative approach. For example, learning from experience that surgeons were not receptive to talk of hard, bioinert coatings, he developed the concept of ‘ceramic surfaces’, by analogy to the ceramic implants with which they were already familiar, an approach that proved promising.

His standing in and contribution to the engineering community was recognised by election to the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1997, as Fellow of the Institute of Materials in 1976 and as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2001 – only the second UK citizen to receive this honour. He received honorary professorships from universities that included Xi’an Jiaotong University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Technische Universita¨t Clausthal, Chongqing University, Wuhan Research Institute of Materials Protection, and Beijing Research Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Technology, and numerous other international awards. He was a Hatfield Medallist and Harold Moore Lecturer of the Institute of Materials, Donald Julius Groen Lecturer of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and recipient of the George H. Bodeen Heat Treating Achievement Award of ASM.

Tom had the foresight to identify the opportunity presented by collaboration with China at an early stage, and spent decades building up high level contacts following his first visit in 1982. The Shanghai Heat Treatment ’83 conference, of which he was the main architect, organised jointly by IFHT and the Chinese Heat Treatment Society (CHTS), was the first technical meeting of its type since the Cultural Revolution and formed the template for subsequent successful technical collaborations, including a twenty-first anniversary conference in 2004.

His contributions to the broader materials community were also extensive. To pick out only two instances, he was an ever present member of the Council of the International Federation for Heat Treatment, uniquely serving two terms as President (1983–84 and 2000–01) – and eventually prevailing in arguments to change the name to the International Federation for Heat Treatment and Surface Engineering. Similarly, he experienced the transition from the Heat Treatment Joint Committee mentioned above to the Surface Engineering Division of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, during a continuous period of service extending for some 40 years. This ethic of public service was ingrained in his personal philosophy: he served as chairman of governors of St Mary’s College, Crosby, his former school, for 19 years.

Tom’s enthusiasm and activity continued unabated to the end. In 2007, he accepted the prestigious and onerous position of full professor and director of the International Surface Engineering Research and Development Centre at Xi’an Jiaotong University. This post involved spending up to six months of the year teaching and researching in China, while advising on a restructuring of the university’s engineering teaching and research activity. In 2007, he also launched, as co-editor, International Heat Treatment and Surface Engineering, a new journal promoting technology transfer via the communication of efficient industry practice – involving a partnership of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, IFHTSE, Shanghai Jiaotong University and the CHTS.

Tom is survived by Catherine, his wife of 38 years, and six children.

Tom Bell (1941–2008)
2008 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute DOI 10.1179/174329408X309965 Surface Engineering 2008 VOL 24 NO 3 167

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