I've seen the reverse spherification technique of using sodium alginate and calcium chloride solutions to produce edible, gelled products (Kool Aid worms, gelled drink spheres, cocktail pods). Sometimes the calcium chloride is swapped out for calcium lactate because it's really the calcium ions that are necessary for the process.
But using that process to make gelled glass which can be shaped in ways that glass normally couldn't be shaped is pretty amazing. All respect to Karen Lise Krabbe for developing this technique. If you want to learn more, you can check out her ebook on the technique.
You might've seen the factory tour videos of Kokomo Opalescent Glass that I've posted before
If so, you might also have seen my comments that the lack of PPE used when the glass ingredients are being measured out. I comment on that every year with my students because I make them wear N95 masks when they measure out the silica and other glass batching ingredients. They're doing it once, and I insist on PPE. The Kokomo folks are assumedly doing that every day and - at least as of the time of the videos being filmed - they aren't using any breathing protection at all.
Today's video works as a contrast to that with Kokomo representing an old-school, 'that's how we've always done things' look at manufacturing, and the Bullseye Factory Tour shown above shows how more modern manufacturing should look.
I went looking for more Bullseye factory tour videos to check for PPE again. The above one was posted in 2017, and it shows PPE. The below one was posted in 2016, and it shows PPE. There's another that's dated 1979 that doesn't show the same PPE, but it also doesn't show the ingredients being measured out, and that's where I'm most concerned about the use of PPE masks. It does, however, show smoking on the floor of the glass factory which feels incredibly dated.
The second video below, the one from The Oregonian specificially mentions some of the environmental concerns involved in the production of glass. It's more about the use of heavy metals, but it's a valid concern.
This video definitely doesn't make me sad, though I would understand why you might end up a bit blue after learning about the manufacturing process of lapis lazuli-based paints.
The Cennini method described here is understandably expensive - because it's insanely labor-intensive.
Understandably, Mohammed has a less labor-intensive method that he developed, but he's not sharing that with us in the video.
From about 6:40 onward, the video shifts from following the production method to looking into the mining of lapis lazuli in Afghanistan, a more political discussion than the initial portion of the video. Then they come back to Mohammed as he explains why natural, lapis-based paints are 'better' than its synthetic replacements.
Barnaby Dixon is an impressive puppeteer that I first heard about probably ten years ago. If you haven't checked out some of his work, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes there first.
In this instructional video, Barnaby explains how he uses a thermoplastic polymer - a polymer that becomes flexible when it's heated above some temperature but is rigid below that same temperature. It's a great example of the polymer's glass transition phase change. Because polymers are mixtures, they don't necessarily have definite melting temperatures as pure substances like elements or compounds do. Instead they have ranges of temperatures during which they aren't quite solid or liquid but are flexible and moldable - think of hot glass being shapeable but not liquid.
I have some of this at school. It used to be available from Educational Innovations. That's where I bought it, but they sadly don't carry it anymore. Of course, just about anything is available at Amazon if you search for pcl moldeable plastic.
I've never been to the Pacific Northwest - not further north than the Redwoods National and State Parks in Northern California, anyway.
Might have to get to the Tacoma/Seattle area to check out the Museum of Glass.
This video is an un-narrated walking tour of that museum with occasional annotations in the top corner of the video. Not a ton of information - certainly no science - just glances at pretty glass.
Most hand manufacturing processes are stunning to watch, and in this case it apparently produces a product that is superior to mass manufactured competitors. It has to be way more expensive and time-consuming, though.
Park Gruell in Barcelona is one of the most magnificent mosaic collections that I've ever seen, and I'm a sucker for pretty much any mosaic construction. This video does make me a little sad, however, as I wasn't aware that the glass industry had largely left Venice, one of its historic homes.
Those are absolutely gorgeous tiles. When my wife and I were redoing our shower, I went with a rakutile for the small accent shelf that we added, but if I'd known about these cement tiles before hand, I might've been tempted by them.
Remember, of course, that these are cement tiles, not concrete tiles...ceramic not composite...though the layering might make them a laminar composite anyway...hmmm...
As I mentioned last week, I toured the Indianapolis Art Museum's conservation lab as part of our summer ASM materials camp a decade or so ago. It was a great tour given by Dr Gregory Smith, star of this series of videos through which he explains the process of verifying the age and pedigree of an Uzbek Coat of Many Colors.
The rest of the four-part series is after the jump.
It was the pandemic. People were trapped in their houses. They were doing their best to create content that was interesting and that could be enjoyed remotely.
No, a video of two people talking remotely to each other while narrating a slide show isn't necessarily the most exciting of presentations, but I can vouch for Dr Smith being an entertaining guy. He gave me and our summer ASM campers a tour of the Indianapolis Museum of Art's conservation lab about ten years ago, and it is one of the more unexpectedly great tours that I've been on through those summer workshops.
Take some time and see what Dr Smith has to teach us about art conservation and forgery detection today.
There are certain properties of glass that make this a single-use GLASS FLIPBOOK, namely it's brittleness.
At room temperature, glass is inherently not flexible or workable.
Even the willow glass that our intrepid YouTuber uses in today's video is fragile when bent - less so than normal sodium lime glass would be, but still pretty fragile.
I'll admit that I do wish today's video would do a little better job of telling what porcelain is rather than just telling why it's so labor intensive to make.
So I went looking around the intertubes to find some definitions of what porcelain is.
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including kaolinite, in a kiln to temperatures between 1,200 and 1,400 °C (2,200 and 2,600 °F). The greater strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arise mainly from vitrification and the formation of the mineral mullite within the body at these high temperatures.
Porcelain, vitrified pottery with a white, fine-grained body that is usually translucent, as distinguished from earthenware, which is porous, opaque, and coarser. The distinction between porcelain and stoneware, the other class of vitrified pottery material, is less clear. In China, porcelain is defined as pottery that is resonant when struck. In the West, it is a material that is translucent when held to the light.
a hard, fine-grained, sonorous, nonporous, and usually translucent and white ceramic ware that consists essentially of kaolin, quartz, and a feldspathic rock and is fired at a high temperature
Ceramic is a broad term for various materials that are made by firing clay or other mixtures at extremely high temperatures. Generally, it includes products such as pottery, tiles, and cookware. The surfaces of ceramic can be painted or glazed to create different finishes and styles.
Ceramics are usually broken down into three categories: porcelain, stoneware, and earthenware.
Porcelain is denser than stoneware and earthenware, which makes it the strongest type of ceramic. In addition to its strength and durability, porcelain also has an extremely smooth surface that lends itself well to decorative treatments such as hand painting or airbrushing. Porcelain is also the least porous type of ceramic material, which makes it ideal for use in bathrooms or kitchens where watertightness is important.
Earthenware is the softest type of ceramic material and can be very delicate in nature. It also has a tendency to absorb moisture easily.
Earthenware pieces tend to be thicker than their porcelain counterparts due to their lack of strength and durability. As a result, they are often produced in simpler shapes with fewer decorative details since any intricate detail may be too delicate to survive regular use or exposure over time.
Stoneware falls somewhere between porcelain and earthenware in terms of strength and durability making it a popular choice for everyday items like plates or mugs since it can withstand some wear-and-tear but isn’t overly fragile like earthenware pieces tend to be. Stoneware has been used throughout history for many types of items including storage jars, jugs, figurines and table services sets due its versatility in design options depending on the levels at which it’s fired during production processes.
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Porcelain is a fine-grain ceramic material made from kaolin, a white clay mined in various parts of the world. It is used for tableware, tiles, and other applications where strength, hardness and stain resistance are desired.
Porcelain has an extremely low porosity—it is nearly waterproof—and it is considered to be thermal shock resistant. It can withstand temperatures up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and it does not react with chemicals in the same way as other ceramics. Porcelain can accept a wide variety of decorative glazes and finishes, which makes it ideal for many applications.
When comparing porcelain to its relative ceramic, there are some key differences to consider:
Porcelain has a finer grain than ceramic and its ingredients go through more processing before they can be used as a material choice.
Due to its high degree of density, porcelain is more durable than ceramics but it also costs more because of the processing involved in producing the material.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's always good to see somebody turning toxic waste into something useful and doing some good for the environment in the process, but it's pretty clear that unless they scale this up to massive size, they're never going to be making more than a drop in the acid mine drainage (AMD) coming out of even this one mine in southeastern Ohio.
I'm kind of tempted to buy their paints even though I don't paint. I guess I'd give it to one of my art teachers and let them use it with their students. I just want to help out the cause in a little way even. I guess I could donate, but I can't figure out how to do that from John Sabraw's webpage. He says you can donate to it, but I can't find the choice he says to make in the drop down.
