On Tuesday, Dr. Narasi Sridhar gave an overview of assessing the aging of materials, including anticipating failures that have not occurred yet. His presentation remarks were made at the AMPP Annual Conference + Expo 2025 in Nashville.

As the 2025 AMPP Willis Whitney Technical Achievement Award winner, Dr. Sridhar has spent much of his career studying localized corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, and corrosion prediction. His studies have made lasting impacts on the field and continue to drive how we look at modeling aging systems.

In his Whitney Award lecture, he explained to the audience that we need to think about predicting leading indicators and not simply waiting for failures to occur. He shared the evolution of some of the models used to predict failure, as well as some of the gaps they face.

Addressing time problems, he said there are two options: model failure rate explicitly or, his preference, to give the problem to someone else. He explained that in his career, he will establish the limit states, then engage the appropriate team (whether they are chemists or another discipline) to help establish more of the information needed to model it.

Dr. Sridhar emphasized that our knowledge is key to predicting future performance—using data to validate as well as predict failures is essential. He also explained that limit state models give the flexibility needed to consider a variety of materials and systems. A final thought from Dr. Sridhar was that there would be immense benefit to having complete identification of the hallmarks of materials aging.

If you are interested in learning more about Dr. Sridhar’s career and the Whitney Award, listen to a recent podcast he recorded with AMPP Media here: