A team of three students took third place in the Best Idea Contest 2009. Participants were asked to submit an idea that would incorporate a feasible application of clad metals.

“Clad metals provide design engineers with characteristics that cannot be obtained in a single metal,” said Chuck Tuffile during the award ceremony Monday. “As all of the contest entrants have demonstrated, the combinations of metals that can be clad provide designers with opportunities not available any other way.”

The team, which consisted of John Solomon, junior in materials engineering; Luke Klosterman, junior in materials engineering; and Mitch Rock, senior in materials engineering, received a prize of $3,000 for their project that looked at corrosion of nurse tanks, which commonly hold fertilizer. The team found that if the inside of the tank was lined with a nickel-chromium alloy, it would protect the steel from cracking.

“It was a lot of fun,” Solomon said. “We were competing against groups of graduate students. Most of the others were older than us.”

Soloman said the team presented their idea to a lot of companies at the award ceremony June 14 in Socorro, N.M.

Sponsors included the Wickeder Westfalenstahl from Germany and Engineering Materials Solutions from Massachusetts.

The first prize of $15,000 went to a team at New Mexico Tech.