The Philadelphia Section of the STLE is pleased to award a $1,000 scholarship to Farida Ahmed Farida, a second-year graduate student in Mechanical Engineering. Working under the direction of Professor David Burris, Koly is investigating the scuffing mechanism in fuel pumps under low lubrication conditions.
Farida is doing this work as part of a joint project with researchers in the US Army and Argonne National Laboratory working with fuel-lubricated 52100 and 1045 steels in reciprocating contacts. Using synchrotron X-rays at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), she was able to study scuffing in real time to a depth of 20 μm in the contact area. Scuffing is a highly variable process and difficult to replicate experimentally but Farida has become adept at making the process highly predictable. She has also become a skilled instrument-designer and capable of analyzing the large amount of data generated by the APS experiments.
Farida is preparing her first paper for journal submission. She has also presented a poster on “In-Situ Methods to Study lubrication Failure on Self-Mated Steel” at the 2022 Gordon Research Conference and presented a paper at the 2023 STLE Annual Meeting.