McHenry recognized by NATO

MSE Professor Michael E. McHenry, has been recognized by NATO for an outstanding technical achievement as part of team studying the issue of “Rare Earth Criticality” at the June, 2019 NATO Applied Vehicles Technology Meeting in Liptovski, Slovakia.

To support and provide direction to NATO’s Applied Vehicle Technologies (AVT) concerns as to materials criticality, a Specialist Meeting was held at AVT-231 in Brussels, Belgium, 2014 entitled "Scarcity of Rare Earth (RE) Materials for Electrical Power Systems" for which Michael E. McHenry served as the Technical Evaluator for and contributed to a follow up document: N. Carsen, R. Fingers, M. E. McHenry, D. Chaumette, L. Alger, Risks to the Rare Earth Elements Supply Chain. NATO Report Unclassified (2015).  

Subsequently Regular working group meetings were facilitated by conference calls and the group met with Technology Briefings and planning efforts at AVT-231, Rzeszow, Poland, Apr. 20-24, 2015; AVT Prague, Czech Republic, Oct. 12-17, 2015; and AVT Tallin, Estonia, April 29, 2016; A recommendation to provide educational outreach was accomplished through a Research Lecture Series (ATO-RLS-AVT-285-9, 2016-17) at venues in Canada, Germany (General Electric Research), Spain and Washington, DC in 2016-2017. Michael E. McHenry served as a Distinguished Lecturer at the Canadian and German venues.

A meeting was held at NATO AVT, Athens Greece, Dec, 10-14, 2018 where efforts to address the concerns arising from rare earth criticality were presented. April 24-26, 2019, Carnegie Mellon University hosted an AVT-ET-188 (Exploratory Team) that resulted in new recommendations for efforts on the subject of Rare Earth Criticality. Work in this important effort will continue.