Yeah, that's about how we do it in class and in our summer camps.
I'm always on the lookout for decently filmed versions of labs that we do in class so that I can post videos for my students who miss those days.
So I'm happy to have found these videos. Thanks, Bird Among the Trees (?).
I'll post a couple more videos of the same processes but done differently than how we do them in class, but I'll put those after the jump.
"If there were a floor covering Olympics, marble would probably get gold. Hardwood would get silver. Bronze would maybe go to tile — and linoleum wouldn’t even make the trials. Arguably the most maligned flooring there is, these days linoleum is considered (at best) something you rip out to get to the real floor. But it wasn’t always that way."
That's the description from the YouTube description as Vox wrote and is shown below the video. I'm not sure I can do much better than that.
Linoleum sucks. That's the general, modern impression of linoleum, but there's a lot more to the fascinating history and construction of the composite flooring known colloquially as linoleum.
There's really nothing wrong with linoleum, but it's just way out of fashion. It does require some waxing, but according to this video, it's way more environmentally friendly than vinyl - which I have throughout my entire home, natch.
Oh, that shot at 0:09 makes me think that the red, gray, and white flooring at Princeton High School is linoleum.
And the YouTube description includes links to learn more about the history and modern revival of linoleum.
Again with the mAtallurgy Data channel...
Maybe they're trying to combine material and metallurgy into matallurgy?
Whatever portmanteau they're aiming for, their videos are excellent for understanding metals. This one goes over how different metallic ingredients affect the properties of alloy steels, the carbon-iron phase diagram, CTT and TTT graphs (something I haven't seen before, admittedly), hardenability, and ways to strengthen steel.
It's not necessarily written for my students' levels - most of them, anyway - but it's good background understanding for me to have.
Properties and Grain Structure: BBC 1973 Engineering Craft Studies
Yup, 1973...that means not only is the narration done with an English accent, it's also paced for a 1973 world meaning I ran the video at 1.5 speed to bring it up to a modern pacing.
The video shows the etching process for various metals then does it again after cold rolling the aluminum sample, then discussing how the material's properties (ductility, hardness, toughness) change.
The video then repeats things for heat treating after cold working the aluminium (sp?)...then various carbon steels being annealed, quenched, and tempered.
I absolutely love the hand-cranked tensile tester that we see at around 8:10 in the video.
It's a great video for showing the properties and crystal structures of aluminum (sp?) and steel and how the crystal structures coordinate to that.
Strength vs toughness is such a subtle concept for my students to understand.
That isn't really a tough (sorry) thing to reason out. The two words are used somewhat interchangeably in the non-material science world.
This video does a great job animating and showing the differences between those words and using the stress strain curve to do so.
Well, that just about covers the entirety of our metals chapter for both our summer camp and our year-long material science course.
If my students could understand the totality of this seventeen-minute video, they would rock my end of chapter test. It covers...
Thankfully the video is incredibly well laid out, animated, and presented. This would make a great end of the chapter review for students to watch.
Opals are pretty.
Full stop
And they are incredibly rare and labor intensive to mine.
So why not just make them at home?
All it takes is seven or so months, a fume hood, some ethyl alcohol (purer is better), tetraethyl othosilicate, ammonium hydroxide, a stirrer, water bath, hot plate, resin, a vacuum chamber, and apparently infinite patience.
I looked into buying them, and even the synthetic ones aren't terribly cheap.
 |
| From the CNN article |
Wind energy might be the solution - or at least part of the solution - to our energy problems. We absolutely need to stop burning things (methane, oil, coal, wood, trash, retired Beanie Babies) to make energy. That is not in dispute.
One of the things that is in dispute, however, is how to deal with the waste from retired wind turbine blades. From the same article, "[b]lade waste is projected to reach 2.2 million tons in the US by 2050. Globally, the figure could be around 43 million tons by 2050." The blades are, as a CNN article writes, "made from fiberglass bound together with epoxy resin, a material so strong it is incredibly difficult and expensive to break down."
Recycling the themoset resin is challenging, though a company named Vesta "has been working on in partnership with Aarhus University, the Danish Technological Institute and US-based epoxy company Olin, uses a liquid chemical solution to break down the blade into epoxy fragments and fibers. The epoxy resin is then sent to Olin which can process it into 'virgin-grade' epoxy"
There are other possible solutions mentioned in the article - pyrolitic separation of the resin and fibers allowing both to be reused, chopping the composite blades into fragments to then mix into cement, and...well...not much else.
A C&EN article explores the same issue and adds in an option of repurposing the blades rather than recycling them, showing an image of a playground made of decommissioned blades in the Netherlands and saying that they have also been turned into bus shelters and other public structures. The article also reports that there are companies exploring making the blades out of more easily recycled materials, though little detail of what those materials could be are provided as the materials and processes are still being devloped.
I love the John Wick series. It's ridiculous and phenomenally unreal that the main character would survive even the remotest bit of the damage done to him throughout the series of films.
With that being said, I guess a bulletproof dress suit similar to John Wick's is possible. I say that because this video is about the process of making just such a suit.
There is a lot of firing of guns - all on a controlled, safety-checked gun range, at least - in the video. The high quality stuff to me is the initial exploration of how they should do the testing to see which materials are bulletproof and the minimum of those materials that they can use. The try to cheap out on the testing methods initially but come to realize that the testing standards are written because the standards describe the ways that actually work. I appreciate that.
I also appreciate the discussion of composite materials even though the sheer-thickening fluids from my previous post didn't seem to provide any advantages, which is a little disappointing.
Glass masters
byu/Anita_Cole inBeAmazed
Nothing much other than making a fluted glass bowl by hand, folks.
No narration, no story, no info about annealing the glass once it's solidified on the mold.
Just craftsmen at work doing magic with the coolest material you can watch.
We make oobleck in our material science class at Princeton, and I show the liquid body armor video that we show in our summer camp.
It's neat and all, but invariably students ask if the oobleck - the cornstarch and water mixture - could actually stop a bullet. Admittedly, this video doesn't answer that specific question, but it does try to make a non-Newtonian fluid that would work to stop bullets as part of a larger project of trying to make a real-life John Wick bullet-proof, black suit.
In this video they try using opal nanoparticles in polyethylene glycol (PEG) as the non-Newtonian fluid soaked into the layers of kevlar. Wait, opals are just silica nanoparticles. So, I think this is the same silica particles in PEG as the liquid body armor video.
Circles, man, everything comes full circle.
The YouTube channel that posted this highly informative and nicely animated video is Matallurgy Data (yes, mAtallurgy, that's not my typo). I'm not sure what's up with that, but I'll check around.
The video - in a bit of a TedEx animated style with narration that sounds sort of like Kurzgesagt - explains the concepts of four testing methods: Charpie impact, tensile, hardness, and - almost in passing without much detail - indentation plastometry.
The animation is great and shows each testing method simply, and the narration flows nicely along, explaining what's happening in the animation. Good stuff here.
Arrggggh!!!
Why can't the world be simpler?
We have dumped a bunch of plastic into the ocean. Bad!
Some people are trying to clean up that plastic from the ocean. Good?
Maybe...but it's more complicated than just "Good!" because there are tiny neuston (from wikipedia: "organisms that live at the surface of a body of water, such as an ocean, estuary, lake, river, or pond") that use those floating plastics to help stay afloat and on which they lay eggs, and removing all the plastic would remove a significant portion of their habitat...which might be bad for the environment as a whole.
So removing that plastic from the ocean might be Bad!
Arrrrrgggghhh!!!
Following the digital experiments, the scientists made real world, physical experiments with non-magnetic spheres set to vibrate at a constant rate of 120 times per second and found that spheres of 2.4mm diameter and 1.2mm diameter (I think 1.2mm - the article says "the other half that size" in reference to the 2.4mm diameter spheres) and found that the mixture of spheres didn't form a crystal but rather formed what they refer to as a quasicrystal - which sounds to me like a heterogeneous mixture of different crystalline regions.
The article also mentions that this has been found IRL in, "an alloy of aluminum and manganese revealed the undeniable hallmarks of an ordered material that lacked the infinite periodic patterns of a crystal." I'm going to have to read more about this because while it's interesting, I'm not entirely sure I understand the quasicrystals just yet.
 |
| Source - link |
I usually add the fact that most of those videos, however, are now a decade old, and I haven't seen the product being used. Thankfully one of my campers last summer took that as a challenge and went hunting for an update.
Here's what he and I have been able to find...
I've found myself watching a bunch of cooking/science videos lately. Dunno why, but I partially blame the YouTube algorithm for steering me via what they present to me.
That being said, I love that there is a good overlap between science and food videos. In the above one, Ann Reardon, an Aussie YouTuber who does a bunch of debunking videos for recipes that seem too easy to be real, looks at the differences between Pyrex and pyrex including whether that simple capital letter logo trick really works to distinguish the borosilicate from the tempered soda lime glass.
She says it's not quite that easy, though I've heard it is that easy.
Either way, be careful with your kitchen pyrex and drastic temperature changes, folks.
Making aluminum pots
by u/DukeOfBagels in Damnthatsinteresting
There are a million things I could probably say about safety regulations, but let's just focus on the remarkable malleability of aluminum and enjoy the processing.
I can vouch for that Harold McGee book referenced toward the beginning. I have it on the shelf in my living room - though I'll admit that I've barely read more than a third of it. There's a LOT of science happening in there, and it's a dense read.
Adam explains the basics of heat conductivity, reactivity (leaching ions to make whipping egg whites easier), reactivity again (to pull sulfur out of the vapor distillate in alcohol distillation), malleability (peening the copper bowl), ductility (making copper whisks), reactivity another time (such as the health hazards of drinking acidic cocktails like mules from copper cups), and conductivity again (useful for making jams and candy).
And then he throws down the possibility of testing a pure silver pan...I want him to buy one, but I'm not going to support him to make that easier for him to do.
I appreciate that even though they won't give away their exact, secret recipe for their lead crystal that they do at least give us the basics of glass batching. It's the least that the French could do for us.
The video's mostly about the coolness of Saint-Louis glass blowers and carvers, but it's really cool to watch the glass being worked - especially the millefiori paperweights. Again, if you're looking for something to get your friendly, neighborhood blogger for Christmas...
It looks like the nearest Saint-Louis store to me is in Chicago...one more reason to get back to the Windy City.
I ranted last week about the lack of 5-10 minute YouTube videos, so I won't rehash that grumble pile this week.
Instead I'll mention that there's an urban myth (frequently disproven) that construction workers on the Hoover Dam either fell into an couldn't get out of or were purposefully dumped into the un-set concrete used to create the dam itself.
"No, they weren't," is the short answer. The long answer has to do with the inhumanity of such a practice, the long set time of concrete, and - as this video above shows - the high density of wet concrete.
Today's video sees Dr Derek in a wetsuit trying to fill a sphere with himself and a batch of wet concrete while cutting back and forth to various explanations as to the science of concrete, the most widely used material we have and the underlying backbone of our modern world.
And at about 9:30 we get the clear explanation as to why bodies were never sunken in concrete: bodies float in concrete.
Yes, the rest of the video is well done, explaining the history of concrete - primarily around the Roman discovery, the science of concrete setting, slump testing, ingredients in different concrete batches, clunkers, the environmental effects of concrete production, cement v concrete, and much more.
It's a great, great video.
There's a whole lot to be said for YouTube videos that are five to ten minutes long. I can show an entire five to ten minutes in class without committing a full bell. The video likely has enough information to be useful but not so much as to be rambling around and further on a topic than I need to it.
But YouTube's algorithm seems to be killing those five- to ten-minute videos in favor of either long videos (between thirty and forty-five minutes from what I can tell of the posting patterns of my favorite YouTubers) and shorts that are less than a minute and a half.
I'm not happy about that.
...but I am thrilled about the video that I'm posting today and that is clearly too long to be shown in class on a whim. Today's nearly thirty-minute long video is a brilliant exploration of phase transitions of glass.
It starts with Destin recapping what Prince Rupert's drops (PRD) are, something he's covered in way more depth, then goes on to let Cal from Orbix hot glass - also from that earlier PRD video - try to capture a shattering PRD inside a class prison - rather than the epoxy prison that Destin tried to use previously.
Then at about 7:00 the stress-strain curve shows up, and we start to see that glass isn't quite as simple as we'd been lead to believe previously.
And a graph of viscosity versus temperature blows it all away around 8:00 where we hear that glass is a second order (more info here and here) transition material.
...and I was hooked. Destin continues to produce some of the best science content on YouTube.
So many words there...
That's 48 pounds of tungsten in a post office mailing box right there that people are trying to pick up.
Apparently it's really tough to pick up 48 pounds of tungsten - which makes sense because tungsten is really dense...but not as dense as osmium.
Apparently filling the same box with osmium would give you 61.5 pounds (source) - thankfully still below the post office's maximum weight limit of 70 pounds. To quote...
Osmium’s density is 22.6 grams per cubic centimeter. OP measured the inside dimensions of the small flat rate box and multiplied them to get the volume, 75.3 cubic inches. This is equal to 1,234.5 cubic centimeters. So all we have to do is multiply 22.6 x 1234.5. This gives us 27,899.7 grams, which is 61.5 pounds.
So, unless you go hunting neutron star matter or dark matter or something exotic like that, you're good to put just about anything inside one of those post office mailers.
Seaweed, eh?
Maybe this one will pay off. I'll admit to being a bit skeptical because I've heard of a number of bio-based polymers that were going to replace plastics with far more environmentally-friendly polymers, and the next one that really works to replace plastics will be - as far as I know - the first one.
Maybe I'll be seeing their ooho packaging replacing ketchup packets and water bottles sometime soon...maybe...
Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.
I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.
And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.
If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...
I think I've made my opinion abundantly clear around here before: we have to stop using plastics.
Manmade polymers are bad for us and for our environment in almost every case.
I say all this from no moral high ground as I'm typing this on a laptop with a plastic case, plastic keys, and assuredly plastic components glued and soldered in ways that make it relatively impossible to recycle.
Today's article - from phys.org - states what seems like a pretty clear and undebatable conclusion: people are confused as to what biodegradable, bioplastic, and compostable mean, and that confusion might lead to even more plastic trash around our world.
Preaching to the choir there...Experts on all sides of the biodegradable battleground agree that beyond reducing use, governments need to set up better disposal infrastructure to ensure biodegradable plastics don't end up in oceans and on forest floors.
I wasn't initially excited to tour a research lab when I was helping out with our second year ASM teacher camp at Rowan University, but the research lab where they were working on different formulations of roadbed asphalt was surprisingly fascinating.
They went over the ingredients in modern asphalt and how they were adjusting the ingredients of the mixture to vary the performance in different climate conditions. It was a really interesting lab tour, easily the best of the three labs that we got to tour on that field trip.
Clearly there's a lot to learn about pavement, especially when I hear - from the above video - that asphalt roads can be recycled pretty much indefinitely with only minor additions along the way.
Every time I see things like this I am reminded of how fortunate a life I am living.
I don't think it's too radical an idea that we might need to cover some sustainability in our materials science courses. When the limestone from this quarry is being used to make cement and paper and tiles and much more, we might want to rethink whether we actually need to use that much limestone - and if we do, how we might want to pay a little more so that the people who are manning those quarries can actually survive the process.
For those of us of a certain generation think back pretty fondly to Mr Wizard's World on Nickelodeon in the 1980's. Actually, quite a few generations think back fondly to Mr Wizard as Don Herbert started as Mr Wizard in 1951. He's even still being parodied on SNL.
This clip hits two things that we cover in matsci class at Princeton: thermal expansion (like the iron wire sagging) and the bimetallic strip.
In fact, the two wooden splints used to demonstrate the bimetallic strip at 2:00 is just about as brilliant a demonstration of that phenomenon as I've seen. Nicely done, Don.
One of the things that I always try to convey to my chemistry students is that there are more jobs in - or just adjacent to - chemistry other than chemist or chemical engineer, and most of them need a good grounding in chemistry to be able to do the job well.
Whether you're the chemistry lab manager, the salesperson at a chemical company, the quality control technician at a steel mill, or a glassblower for a chemistry department, you need to know something about the chemicals that you're working with or the chemistry labs for which your product will be used.
Today we'll look at a few scientific glassblowers. I picked some of the best ones I could find on YouTube, but there are dozens and dozens more profiles of the scientific glassblowers at various universities around the world.
I stumbled upon the above video in searching for totally different ceramic stuff on YouTube, but I was immediately taken by the magnetic stalactites that the artist is creating in the video still.
He mentions in the video that he creates them by using a magnetic clay of his own devising between two super-strong magnets.
Then the video goes through him using his ceramic as an electrode - which inherently doesn't make sense to me since ceramics are naturally non-conductive - in what appears to be a copper (II) sulfate solution and using a current to grow copper crystals on the ceramics.
Then the gold, pocked inner surface of other ceramic bowls showed up, and I was blown away with the beauty.
So I went searching the guy out to see just how much one of his pieces would cost me - assuming fully that I wasn't going to be able to afford it.
My first hit was for a reporter on NPR's MarketPlace with the same name, who clearly couldn't be the same guy. Then my second Google hint was the same guy's Twitter feed where he describes himself as "MarketPlace reporter, ceramicist". I then found his ceramics-focused Instagram account and knew I had the right guy.
 |
| Source - NPR article |
We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.
I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.
Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you had some students who would be helped by reading along - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine.
The above video is a very quick, fairly vague explanation of the difference between tempered and untempered chocolate.
Dan Souza, the editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine, illustrates tempered chocolate as a rigid, highly structured stacking of kitchen chairs as compared to an 'untempered', random arrangement of the same chairs.
I would appreciate a little more detail, maybe a micrograph or two, but what you see above is all Dan's giving us this time. Dan has, however, given a little more detail about chocolate in the video after the jump which includes a recipe for millionaire shortbread that requires tempering of the chocolate topping, something Dan shows how to do using a microwave.
Slow it down, Hank
I worked with a type of hydrogel in my one summer of actual benchtop research at Miami University twenty-some years ago, and I certainly never would have imagined them to have the properties described in today's video. I was just looking at the ability of the get to absorb and subsequently release transition metal ions, so I wasn't exploring their mechanical properties, admittedly.
SPNs, in case you were wondering, are supramolecular polymer networks, networks of polymer chains held together by - according to this video - non-covalent bonds like intermolecular forces like hydrogen bonds.
Halfway through the video, Hank makes a turn to a possible application of a particular SPN that was used to help paralyzed rats to regrow nerve cells and allow them to 'walk' again. That's a long way from human trials, but the initial study sounds amazingly promising.
Warning: NSFW words (mostly starting with f's) at 0:45...and at 3:43...and at 4:39...and at 4:57...and at 5:33...and at 7:26 and 7:31...and at 7:44...and at 8:42...and at 9:10...and at 10:45...and at a14:10
Ok, so maybe this shouldn't be shown in class.
I've long wondered how single crystal turbine blades are grown to be single crystals. We mimic this is far less complicated ways with our copper (II) sulfate crystal growth lab in our matsci class at Princeton (and in many other ASM-born matsci classes).
...but I knew that simplistic method clearly wasn't going to work for the cast metal structures for metallic crystals.
Thankfully this video's foul-mouthed Yorkie host explains how we go from molten metal to single crystal, grain-boundary-less macrostructures. It's not a very thrilling video as it's just a knowledgeable guy explaining things in his garage with a white board to show what he's talking about. I respect the knowledge and appreciate his explanation about something I've wanted to know for a while now.
Maybe just watch it and explain things to your students rather than showing the video itself.
...because the video itself is absolutely fandabidozi.
You might've seen my previous post about Relativity Space in May 2022. If not, here's the very short version: they're using 3d printing to make rocket bodies and engines.
Admittedly, the fact that their first launch wasn't fully successful isn't anything to look at as a failure in my eyes. The fact that the first launch failed is sort of the benefit of the 3d printing process. One of their supposed benefits is the fact that the engineering cycle will be sped up, allowing iterations to happen in far more rapid succession than was previously possible.
So, good on ya, Relativity. I look forward to seeing your 3d-printed metal rockets in space someday soon...just not yesterday.
I've been looking for an amorphous metal demonstrator off and on for a few years but with no success.
There are some samples of amorphous metals available on ebay, but I really don't have any idea of what those metals actually are, whether they're really the zirconium-beryllium-titanium-copper-nickel alloy that Steve describes at 7:10 in this above video.
This video sees Steve explore how to optimize the bounces - which material should the ball bearing be made from, how big should the ball bearing be, how can you measure the number of bounces most easily - which is cute, but the big payoff in the video comes after around 10:00 when Steve explains how materials plastically deform and why amorphous metals don't easily deform plastically.
That's absolutely fascinating, and I even more desperately want one of these atomic trampoline demonstrators.
Feel free to hunt one down and buy me one for Christmas. I'll happily give you my address if you do get ahold of one.
Now I'm curious how an amorphous metal would respond to a hardness test. Would it be much tougher to create a traditional 'dent' from a hardness tester?
(In hunting down more info on amorphous metals, I might've found a preliminary answer to that one on the LiquidMetal website, scroll down partway to find hardness data.)
Here's more info about amorphous metals and a video from Grand Illusions, from whom Steve borrowed his atomic trampoline demonstrator.
I'm not teaching material science this year (2022-23), but my neighboring chemistry teacher is.
He taught the class a decade or so ago when it was just a semester, and he's never taught it as a year-long course before.
As such, he's been coming to me quite often for help in understanding the concepts, explaining them, and practicing the labs and demonstrations. It's been kind of rewarding to help him understand things better - and in a few cases it's forced me to understand the material science concepts better so I can explain them to him, something I'm used to in teaching students but that isn't as familiar to me in teaching my fellow teachers in a longer form than our week-long summer camps.
Recently, my neighbor came to me asking about slip planes, so I went looking for a video that would directly and clearly label the slip planes in face-centered cubic (FCC), body-centered cubic (BCC), and hexagonal close packed (HCP) crystal structures. I wanted a shortish video that would use computer animation to highlight the slip planes and give me a concise, clear marking of where the slip planes are in each type of crystal.
Much to my chagrin, such a video doesn't seem to exist - at least not that I could find with a few days of searching on YouTube.
What I did find, however, was a much deeper understanding of what slip planes and - possibly more appropriately - slip systems are.
In this first video, I found a very helpful quote as written in the notes...
"Slip plane will be most densely packed highest planar density"
So the slip plane is the plane with the highest packing. For FCC that's the diagonal labeled as (1,1,1) because it connects the vertices of the crystal structure and is the 'triangular' plane that we show with our tennis balls in class. For HCP it's any of the 'horizontal' layers that we show with our tennis balls. For BCC, it's the diagonal from edge to edge in the crystal - but it's not very closely packed, making it a crappy slip plane.
"Slip direction is the one most closely packed with atoms (linear density)"
That means FCC structures have three slip directions for every one of their four slip planes. That give them twelve (4x3) slip systems.
But HCP crystals have only three slip systems - one slip plane times three slip directions.
This is also covered in this video...
...and somewhat in this wikipedia article about slips which includes this illuminating quote...
...however, unlike fcc, there are no truly close-packed planes in the bcc crystal structure. Thus, a slip system in bcc requires heat to activate.
I still want a nice, succinct video that shows all that, but I'll take this combination that has helped me understand slip planes way better than I did before my neighbor asked me to explain them to him.
I don't have a ton to say about this because watching forging videos is reward enough in and of itself.
I'm impressed by the forgers here. Those folks have an incredible set of skills.
The first 7:53 of this video is all about orbital mechanics - which is interesting, I'll grantcha, but isn't the focus of this blog.
If orbital mechanics is your jam, go play some Kerbel and get back when you reach an expolanet.
We're here to learn about material science, and that's where the video takes a big turn at about 7:55, first exploring the carbon foam composite of the solar shield, itself, and the ceramic, reflective paint on its sun-side.
Then - at 9:15 - we get into the solar probe cup and its measurements of the solar wind. The big issue there is that the cup can't hide behind that carbon-carbon composite shield. It has to survive nakedly in the solar wind at 1400 degrees C which sort of limits the acceptable materials. The conductive mesh is made of acid-etched tungsten, and the wires leading to and from the mesh are a niobium alloy called niobium C-103 (89% Nb, 10% Hf, and 1% Ti) with sapphire bead insulation...you know, as is tradition.
Space is frickin' wild, man.
And that doesn't even get into how we tested those materials - a whole other journey that's covered after 13:55 in the video.
Every ASM teachers summer camp (schedule and curriculum here) includes a field trip to some local materials science place. It might be a heavy industry tour like the one I got to take of a Nucor steel mill in Alabama; a lighter industry tour like the one at REC Silicon refining in Montana; a testing lab like Element here in the Cincinnati, OH area; or an artsy tour like the one I was thrilled to take to the Indianapolis Art Museum a few years back.
The campers got to tour their conservation lab and got a great, materials-focused tour from Gregory Smith. You can hear from Gregory in a video way down after the jump.
I was initially skeptical of the Indianapolis Art Museum tour, wondering just how much science we were going to get from even their conservation lab, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much chemistry, materials science, and even biology there was at work in the lab and at how great Gregory was in explaining it all to us.
When I see videos like this I get at least a little hope for the concept of recycling.
In today's video we follow post-consumer HDPE jugs - like a translucent milk jug - through sorting, cleaning, melting, injection molding, and eventual assembly into a park bench.
I was lucky enough to teach one of our summer teacher ASM camps in Butte, Montana - at Montana Tech - the first time that city held such a camp. My time in Butte was great, and I am thrilled to have been able to visit Berkley Pit, a major feature in today's video.
This video is slightly about the history of Butte's mining industry but much more about the revitalization of the city's environment and the reclaiming of the environment around such a huge mining operation.
There's a huge amount of clean-up to be done, but they've come a long, long way from a city surrounded by barren hillsides with the US's tallest free-standing masonry structure, one designed to spread the 75 tons of arsenic-laden dust produced daily a little further from the smelter.
Cold welding is frickin' weird.
Richard Feynman wrote (or said in a lecture - I'm not sure which), "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin layers of contaminants in between, the atoms 'know' when they are not on the same part."
But two metallic pieces that don't have those thin layers between them - primarily because they've been in space and rubbing against each other - can spontaneously weld together to become a single piece of metal.
It's possible to get that to happen on Earth, but it's not easy because of all the pesky oxygen we have around us all the time.
Metals are way weirder at the quantum level than we think they are, man.
My wife just passed along that there's a facility near my school that has begun to accept post-consumer Styrofoam for recycling. Apparently they just got a densification machine that allows them to accept Styrofoam and compress it to 1/60th of its original volume so that the polystyrene can then be used to make something new - as they say in their facebook post - like 'insulation, park benches, and more'.
That makes me happy because I'm trying to be good with my plastic waste, and it's really hard to find a styrofoam recycling facility.
Today's video shows that densification process, using heat and pressure to turn the expanded polystyrene into what look like nurdles to me. Those nurdles can then be turned into just about anything that polystyrene can be used for - primarily picture frames in today's video.
Please reduce your plastic use.
If you can't do that, please reuse the plastic.
If you absolutely can't do that, please recycle - not wishcycle - it.
 |
| Source - bbc article |
Today's article describes an attempt to solve the sand shortage - at least partially - as well as to use some of the seemingly endless supply of plastic trash that we continue to produce in our world by replacing some of that sand with ground up plastic pieces.
There isn't much detail, and I would want to know a few things before considering plastic as a sand alternative...
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Glass is a generally a fairly environmentally-friendly material, being made primarily of sand, so the idea of reusing glass bottles to build homes after they were used for their initial, beer-transporting purpose is brilliant.
I wish it would have worked out...and I also kind of wish I had one of the WOBO bottles, but with only 100,000 of them having been made, I'm guessing the sell for a pretty penny.
 |
| Source: https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20211003 |
 |
| Source - https://glass.com.ng/glass-fact-history-glass/ |
Smithsonian magazine has a great article tracing both the history of glass and the modern scientific techniques used to reveal that history - everything from traditional archeology to radioisotope tracers to mass spectrometry.
Could be a really useful crossover between a chemistry and a materials science course, or just an introduction to a glass unit.
As opposed to last week's less-then-professional-sounding narrator, this week's video host sounds like he belongs on local television reading the news or interviewing a woman who lost her cat.
He does, however, tell an interesting story of people climbing St Louis's Gateway Arch - one of my favorite places in the world, honestly - to figure out what was causing some staining on the underside of the Arch. One concern was the possibility of damage or corrosion on the surface of the arch.
Luckily, the exploration found that the stains are superficial...and they decided not to clean the Arch - as of the time of this video in 2016.
