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Ingeniería e Investigación

Print version ISSN 0120-5609

Ing. Investig. vol.33 no.1 Bogotá Jan./Apr. 2013

 

 

 

Editorial

Professor Óscar Fernando Castellanos Domínguez has left his job as editor of Ingeniería e Investigación following a 9-year period in the post to take on his new role in managing the Universidad Nacional de Colombia's publishing branch. During the aforementioned period the journal became consolidated as a means of disseminating research in the field of engineering and became a national reference point. A token of this would be that Publindex IBN updating has shown that the journal was classified in category C in 2004 and had risen to A1 by (and since) 2009. The journal has been entered in CAB Abstracts, SciELO Colombia and ISI (Web of Knowledge) indexes as part of such classification, thereby increasing its visibility by facilitating readers' access to published content. It is also worth highlighting his participation in creating, the positioning and continuity of the Colombian Engineering Journals' Network (Red Colombiana de Revistas de Ingeniería - RedCRI).

Such results show professor Castellanos' commitment and dedication to the task entrusted to him by the Faculty and for which I wish to thank him in the name of the academic community.

Many challenges face the journal in this new era which has begun under my leadership. One of the most important challenges is that concerning making it become an additional tool in educating our undergraduate and postgraduate students, especially through activities aimed at improving their communication skills and promoting the writing habit by recognising it as a stage in R&D which consolidates results and shares them with the community, whether this be to enrich them through academic discussion or to attract the interest of actors who could implement them for the benefit of society. Other challenges which could be considered as being instrumental, but which could modify the journal's mission and vision, would be the need to increase the number of citations, implementing the Open Journal System and reducing the time which elapses between an article being received and accepted.

The strategies used for achieving such objectives could have a significant impact on the role played by the journal in our Faculty, which is why some of them should be discussed openly by the academic community. I hope that such discussion can be jointly addressed through an approach involving an overall vision during the time I stay managing the journal, considering the different dimensions of a means of communication like this is, above all concerning the sectors where its impact is felt so that action can be taken which will lead to our journal continuing to be positioned as an effective and useful means of communication for society.

This issue (the first in volume 33) includes 12 articles covering engineering's different areas. They deal with topics ranging from data storage and image recognition to biotechnology and designing materials' measurement, characterisation and evaluation equipment. In spite of such variety, many of the articles deal with materials' engineering, which is why I will briefly refer to this topic.

Materials science and engineering have been of great importance for humanity since the dawn of civilisation. Developments in this field have defined historical periods regarding ground-breaking innovations; the stone, bronze and iron ages would be examples of this. Likewise, they led to the progress arising from the industrial revolution, thereby facilitating the exploration of space and current progress being made in medicine, electronics, computation, chemistry, construction and transport, just to mention a few of the many other related fields. The main objective of materials science lies in understanding the effect (on several levels) of structure on materials' properties, whereas determining the relationships between structure, technological process, functional properties and selecting materials and technological properties for their use in complex manufacturing systems represent materials engineering's main interest (Dobrzański, 2006)1. Day by day fresh products require new materials having properties making them much more resistant, lighter, environmentallyfriendly and cheaper than existing ones. Such conditions imply measuring their properties, establishing relationships between them, their structure and how new manufacturing and transformation processes are used and developed.

Bearing the above in mind, in this issue of the journal readers will find a review article concerned with asphalt and asphaltic mixtures' aging and its effect on flexible pavement performance, plus four research articles presenting valuable information and results regarding materials science and engineering concerning coal, concrete, some coatings and types of composite flour. The article concerned with coal presents morphological differences regarding Colombian coal from four regions, comparing processed and nonprocessed coal (original and benefited). That dealing with concrete evaluates the effect of adding a catalytic residue from a fluidised bed reactor (i.e. cracking unit) in protecting against sulphate attack. The influence of 140MXC, 530AS and 560AS coatings, produced by electric arc thermal spraying, was studied concerning their resistance to corrosion in a layersubstrate system, evaluating three different ways of depositing the coating. The article studying rice-, corn-, sweet potato-, bean-, yucca and yucca leaf-based composite flour investigates how the conditions involved in their composition and extrusion and drying on rollers affected their solubility in water, water adsorption capacity and consistency and viscosity properties.

I earnestly hope that our readers will find the information contained in these and other articles useful and that their publication in our journal may become the start of a new era in technological R&D being developed by their authors.


1 Dobrzañski LA. 2006. Significance of materials science for the future development of societies, Journal of Materials Processing Technology, 175, 1–3:133-148.


Ing. Paulo César Narváez Rincón
Associate Professor – Chemical and Environmental Department - Engineering Faculty
Director – Ingeniería e Investigación Journal
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá