Original release date:  April 25, 2008

Columbus, OH—If a person could predict with great accuracy when something was going to break, the world would beat a path to that person’s door.

Dr. Pingsha Dong already did it.

Dong was named Inventor of the Year at Battelle’s April 25, 2008 Recognition and Reward banquet at the Columbus Aladdin Shrine Temple, where he and 82 of his peers were recognized as Battelle’s best and brightest in 2007.  The annual event honors individuals and teams who made significant achievements during the previous year.

“I am honored and proud to be given this award,” Dong said.  “To be singled out for this recognition when Battelle has so many brilliant scholars and researchers is a humbling experience.”

Dong is Manager and Senior Research Leader for Battelle’s Center for Welded Structures Research and revolutionized the welding world.  Dong, a native of China who escaped working in farm fields in that country’s Cultural Revolution only to be forced to study welding at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, says he thought about a way to predict welding fatigue for years before his “Aha” moment.

Determining the life span of welds was imprecise and calculated incorrectly for 60 years until Dong’s method, called Verity®, was born.  Ask auto makers if it’s useful to know how long a welded joint will last.

In 2007, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) published its latest version of the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Codes to include Dong’s work, known as Battelle’s Mesh-Insensitive Structural Stress method as an alternative means for predicting fatigue and fatigue life.  The method is also known as the master S-N curve method because of its ability to correlate a massive amount of actual fatigue test data into a single S-N curve.  The Verity® method is implemented in fe-Safe^TM — a leading fatigue software package distributed by UK- based Safe Technology Ltd.

Because Dong’s mesh-insensitive structural stress method is revolutionary in that it provides a level of predictability never before seen and can be easily applied, many thought it was too good to be true.  But years of rigorous testing through a Joint Industry Project proved to be a more reliable method of predicting the point at which a weld would fail than any previous technology.

“Pingsha not only is a brilliant person, he is a tremendous asset for Battelle and a great representative of our company,” said Battelle President and CEO Carl Kohrt.  “His ground breaking work on welds has helped position Battelle as a leader in the field, especially once you consider that his invention has been codified in the ASME manual.”

David Osage, President and CEO of The Equity Engineering Group Inc. and lead consultant in the re-write of Section VIII, Division 2 Code, praised Dong. “There are two aspects of Battelle’s method that make it such a monumental achievement for industry,” said Osage.  “First, we have never been able to achieve the consistent and accurate results that this method provides and secondly, and maybe equally as important, is that it is very easy to apply and can be incorporated seamlessly into current codes and standards.” 

Dong said he never intended to relent in his pursuit of this dream.  “For the past 20 or 30 years, experts in the field have been trying to address the inadequacies in stress analysis for the fatigue design of welded structures so that companies would not have to compensate for poorly correlated test data,” Dong said.  “Eventually, industry and academia gave up, concluding that the significant variability inherent in existing empirical-based stress analysis approaches, such as various surface-extrapolation-based hot spot stress methods, is a fact of life.”

The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code establishes construction rules for new boilers and pressure vessels as well as nuclear power plant components.  This code is required for use by most regulatory bodies in North America, but is used internationally as well.

Any breakthrough of this magnitude is sure to raise eyebrows, and the path to adopt Dong’s method into the codes was not easy.  Since there had been little advancement in fatigue prediction, and Dong’s methodology produced results that were previously thought to be impossible, many industry veterans questioned that such a solution could exist.  Years of validating data and presentations to ASME’s constituency were required to turn skeptics into believers.  It was this battle, and the support Dong received not only from Battelle, but also from members of the ASME, that makes this achievement so special, he said.

Dong was honored by Time Magazine in 2005 as one of the Innovators of the Year for Verity and was a 2003 Henry Ford II Distinguished Award for Excellence in Automotive Engineering award winner.  He also has served as the United States delegate to the International Institute of Welding.

Battelle is the world’s largest non-profit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses:  Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy Technology, and Health and Life Sciences.  It advances scientific discovery and application by conducting $4 billion in global R&D annually through contract research, laboratory management and technology commercialization.  Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Battelle oversees 20,400 employees in more than 120 locations worldwide, including seven national laboratories which Battelle manages or co-manages for the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Battelle also is one of the nation’s leading charitable trusts focusing on societal and economic impact and actively supporting and promoting science and math education.

For more information visit www.battelle.org or contact National Media Relations Manager Katy Delaney at 410-306-8638 or at delaneyk@battelle.org or Media Relations Specialist T.R. Massey at 614-424-5544 or at masseytr@battelle.org.