How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords

This isn't a replacement for the Nova episode "Secrets of the Samurai Sword". 

...but the Nova episode tends to appear and disappear from YouTube and DailyMotion with fair frequency, so you might need another video that goes through the ancient art of creating samurai swords from the initial collecting and smelting of iron-rich sand through to the slicing of tatami mats to demonstrate the sword's quality and the sword wielder's technique.

This video's contents...

• 2:00 - why bronze was used for sword and was eventually replaced
• 3:00 - cyanobacteria creating oxygen that precipitated iron from ancient oceans
• 6:30 - carbon + iron = steel, initial interstitial positions shown...why alloys are harder than pure metals
• 10:30 - slag formation and removal from the 'ancient' forge
• 13:30 - forging the steel by master swordsmiths
• 14:30 - folding the steel - how and why
• 16:15 - how carbon atoms migrate to different positions and form ferrite, cementite, perlite, and martensite
• 18:30 - differential cooling rates via clay thickness creating different steel types and the distinct blade shape

Another great video from Veritasium and one that shows that he's got a team of folks making videos with/for him at this point...and it's short enough at about half an hour - to get through in a single class period, unlike the Nova episode.

Making an atomic trampoline

I've said it before, but an atomic trampoline demonstration set-up would make for a spectacular gift for your favorite neighborhood blogger.

NileRed took a different route than I've taken - which is mostly just wishing that I would stumble across an atomic trampoline and not really doing anything at all to make that happen - and decided to make a disk of amorphous metal on his own.

Admittedly, one of our ASM Master Teachers has a lead on getting sets of amorphous metal disks for us to have in our classrooms. It involves the material scientists at Apple's headquarters in California and turned out to be much more complicated than expected because - as NileRed finds out - the adhesive used to affix the amorphous metal to the steel base is highly relevant in maintaining the ridiculously bouncy nature of amorphous metals in this application.

Here's to hoping that my strategy of doing nothing and just hoping things will work out will...um...work out.

I'll include the Grand Illusions videos that inspired Steve Mould's video that in turn inspired NileRed's above video...

Steel Metallurgy - Principles of Metallurgy

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.

Understanding Metals

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...

• BCC/FCC/HCP
• crystalline v amorphous
• slip planes
• defects - point, line, and screw
• grains and grain boundaries
• cold working / work hardening
• alloying - both substitutional and interstitial
• heat treating
• two-phase alloys & precipitation hardening
• the iron/carbon eutectic diagram with ferrite and austenite

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.

Weird metal that's also glass is insanely bouncy

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.

• MRSEC at UWisconsin - amorphous metal page
• LiquidMetal - the trade name under which the amorphous metal is available
• A white paper about the Atomic Trampoline from UWisconsin & Arthur Ellis
• LiquidMetal's wikipedia article
• "The Case for Bulk Metallic Glass" paper from Science Direct
• A white paper from Taylor Edge electronics about metallic glasses and the atomic trampoline demonstrator
• Information about vitreloy, a different commercial name under which metallic glass has been available

The Insane Engineering of the Parker Solar Probe

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.

Only A Few Families Know The Secret To Making This Perfect Mirror | Still Standing

Every time I watch any of the Business Insider videos (and I know I've been posting a lot of them of late - blame the YouTube algorithm for recommending them and BI for making them fascinating), I'm tempted to buy one of the item. It's not that I need an aranmula kannadi in any way. It's just that I find the process fascinating and want to reward the craftspeople who still make things by hand.

There's not a ton of material science here, but it does show a far less industrial version of casting an alloy. 

Interestingly they don't seem to mix the alloy components (mainly tin and copper but a trade secret as to the proportions and actual ingredients) other than in turning the molten metal upside down into the mold. I would be very curious to see if the mirror had a homogeneous composition throughout. 

It's also fascinating to me to think of this process being developed bit by bit over centuries. Small steps like the cooling of the mold with mud, the covering of the mold in carbon to fill in microscopic pores, and onward must have been done at some point by trial and error and kept in the process when they worked - assumedly discarded from the process when they didn't work - and I wonder how much of the process is like cooking a turkey.

Colored golds

Yeah, I don't really understand that graph/diagram/visualization.

I was looking around on the web about the various alloys of gold that can produce different colors and happened upon that diagram up there.

So, here's my question, how do I read the graph?

Like, let's say I wanted to make a gold that would be as yellow as the Y in the word yellowish on that diagram.

My reading of that alloy is that it would be about 55% silver,  50% copper, and about 50% gold.

That math doesn't seem to add up.

Can anybody tell me how to read this graph?

Sure, there's a bunch of info on the Colored Gold wikipedia page, but nothing there is terribly helpful either.

Aluminum recycling - How it works by Norsk Hydro

We have to recycle more.

There are many countries that are far, far better at recycling than is the US, but we (the US) have to get better.

I hadn't thought about the challenge of not just sorting the majority metals (steel from aluminum from copper from etc) but rather sorting the various similar metal alloys out from each other. The use of x-ray spectroscopy to do that is an application that I would never have considered, and the puff of air used to fire away the unacceptable aluminum alloy chips is amazingly fast.

It's amazing to me how technologically advanced the recycling industry is becoming.

Watch NASA Plane Fold Its Wings Mid-Flight

We've been hearing for a few years that plane designers are trying to use NiTiNOL to change the angle of the wings or of the fins (my terms, probably not the term of the designers) behind the jet engines.

Now, it looks like NASA might've been successful in adjusting the wing angle using a memory alloy.

And, if you were curious about the size of the plan we see above, here's a longer video with a little more context and without the voice-over.

Aluminum - the material that changed the world

Trigger warning - the narrator here has an Irish accent (I think) which could lead some folks to being distracted because it's that cool.

Oh, and they misspell and mispronounce the element being discussed.

Of course, the aluminum being discussed is a stunning material, lightweight, self-protective, and - if heat treated correctly (as described at 1:40) incredibly strong.

Then, at 2:30 or so, the video gets into age hardening of aluminum, and the video becomes way better.

We get images of FCC at 3:00...slip planes at 3:25...alloys at 3:45 (with great imaging of the atoms)...

This is an outstanding video here.

Thanks to Debbie (and her Philly campers) for sending this my way.

'A Snowball’s Chance in Hell' - Unimpossible Missions - GE

Admittedly, dunking a snowball in molten metal does seem a little stupid, but if's striking when that snowball doesn't appear to have melted even a little bit after its dip.

Sadly there's no info as to what the ultra-alloy is (other than that it's 'nickel-based'). On the IFLScience article about the video, we learn that the metal can is "just over 3 millimeters (0.11 inches) thick, then lined with 5 centimeters (2 inches) of fibrous alumina-silicate insulation."

There's some more information on GE's website where they highlight this and other parts of their Unimpossible Missions program.

'Smart implants' dissolve after healing - Science Nation

I don't get what's so impressive. I implant ice cream directly into my body with some frequency, and my body takes care of that all the time.

Too much ice cream, actually...

I'm hoping that they take any magnesium implants out of the bodies before they get cremated... sheesh.

That would be pretty cool, though, if medical implants could be absorbed into the body after the structural support is necessary.

The Elemental Composition of Metal Alloys

Green gold...white gold...red gold...chartreuse gold...yellow gold...royal blue with a hint of pink gold...

Are there any colors that can't be used to describe gold?

Compound Interest just posted a great graphic showing the metals in a number of common alloys - along with ranges for each metal's percentage composition within that alloy. Plus the page also has some explanations of just what alloys - particularly substitutional and interstitial alloys - are.

Great info...

Apple Watch (various materials)

That is a straight up gorgeous piece of film making and advertising.

The sights of the aluminum being forged, poured, machined, anodized, and finished are absolutely stunning. Go watch it again before you start looking at the science of what's happening.

We get the full gamut of processing (forging, machining) and materials (metals, alloys, ceramic - zirconia - beads for the finish).

Beautiful...

And that doesn't even being to touch on the gold and steel videos that I'm putting after the jump.

All of these are available on Apple's watch craftsmanship webpage along with text and photos of the zirconia chosen for the crystal covers, the ion-x glass for the Sport face (potassium ion soaked to increase strength), or the sapphire facing for the Watch and Watch Edition editions (that sounds incredibly stupid to read).

There is also a webpage from Atomic Delights (a blog with sadly only three posts in two years - better quality than quantity, I guess) that does a far better job breaking down the three videos and speculating on some of the science therein than I ever could.

The Metals in UK Coins

I had no idea that the University of Kentucky had its own mint - or that it used the pound instead of the dollar. Interesting.

In all seriousness, though, the metal composition of United Kingdom coins - something that is surprisingly in flux - is a lot more varied than is the metallic composition of United States coins.

And do remember that the US mint is losing money on every penny it produces. Check out just how much money over on coinflation.com.

Compound Interest is a British blog through which Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher with a flair for graphic design, posts outstanding chemistry-themed infographics.

Nitinol Teaspoon That Bends!

Someone fetch me the Great Randi...or at least Uri Geller.

C'mon, those references aren't that old, are they?

Whatever...some people just don't appreciate culture. Everyone, though, can appreciate this wonderful demonstration of a fun application of nitinol, a shape memory alloy of NIckel-TItanium (from the Naval Ordinance Lab).

For a scant $50 or so, I'd actually be pretty tempted to order one myself if they weren't currently out of stock.

Material Marvels with Ainissa Ramirez - Shape Memory Alloys

Those Lego figures stuck to the boards are ones I'm trying to collect. I have the wolfman, but I need all the rest. Wonder is Ainissa would send them my way.
Ainissa actually does a great job explaining why the memory alloy switches back and forth as temperature is raised - at least at a low level of explanation - at 2:20, explaining that the material switches from monoclinic to cubic crystal structures.

Salzgitter Mannesmann Stainless Tubes - Boiler Tubes

"Energy is life...life is responsibility...responsibility for the future..."

That does seem a little dramatic, but how else are we going to know that Salzgitter Mannesmann's stainless tube manufacturing is the best?

This video is a great show of how boiler tubes are produced. I'm not entirely sure what a boiler tube is (other than the obvious 'a metal tube', smart alleck), but the mixture of animations and live footage to show the process makes things far easier to understand.

The alloying and coating that shows up around 5:00 into the video is some serious steel chemistry.

Jet engine testing (superalloys)

I know a couple of our master teachers who should NOT watch this video because of their little fear of flying thing.

I, on the other hand, have no fear of flying at all. I don't fly very often - about twice in a typical year - and am totally relaxed when I am flying because I know that airplanes are overengineered to the point of ridiculous safety. I hope...

This video shows Rolls Royce testing one of their jet engines in the case of engine turbine blade during an event of catastrophic failure. The super slow-mo footage of the turbine going off balance and recovering is actually terrifically reassuring to me as a passenger.