Four videos about one really bad event that could have been much worse

We'll start with the video debrief of the driver with the armored vehicle manufacturer after the fact so we're all aware that things worked out fine for the people you'll see in the next two videos which are the original footage - first one inside the vehicle, second one a dashcam pointed out of the video.

We've had impressive videos of bulletproof, composite glass before, but this is a really impressive application of that material in its designed use. And, of course, the host sits in the car at the very end while one of his coworkers fires another two shots at him. Nuts, man...

And the final video is from an American morning show providing some context on the interior video that was making its rounds on social media at the time.

Heck of a first day on the job for the guy in the passenger seat.

Case Western pothole patch - some updates

Source - link

We've been showing videos about the Case Western Reserve students who invented a better pothole patch for years in our summer camps and in our material science courses at Princeton.

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...

• Feb 2017 - Cleveland.com - "It has been more than five years since Okoye and three other students created the product, which received entrepreneurship recognition in 2012. Okoye said the idea never died, but attending college and finding a job while refining the product and seeking funding, took time." 
• U-Patch Canada (YouTube) - 20 short, non-narrated test videos of the Thumper Pad in potholes, all from January 2018
• Yeu Patch (Facebook) - No new posts since Feb 2019
• KMBC.com - "KC uses thump pads as temporary fix to potholes" 
• KMBC.com - The same story as above but as video.

There are a bunch of other, similar stories from those time periods, but the websites that the company website that I found - http://yeupatchtechnologies.com/ - doesn't seem to be registered anymore.

Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?

Source - https://usgreentechnology.com/recycling-reusing-electric-car-batteries/

A few years back I remember reading an article comparing the initial energy deficit that a rechargeable made for a hybrid car like a Prius compared to a Hummer (a stereotypically environmentally unfriendly vehicle). 

I haven't been able to find that article which - from my admittedly distant memory - stated that a Prius would have to be driven for a year and a half before it made up the initial energy deficit from the purification of elements in its rechargeable battery allowed it to catch up to a Hummer which took less energy to source its components.

I have, however, found a couple of articles that address similar concerns around the battery problem with electric vehicles. Creating batteries - particularly modern, high performance batteries - requires sourcing easily oxidized elements such as lithium, purification that requires massive amounts of energy output. Those batteries, sadly, aren't eternal and eventually have to be replaced and recycled. 

And there's the rub. What to do with those batteries once they're spent?

• From Science.org "A Dead Battery Dilemma: with millions of electric vehicles set to hit the road, scientists are seeking better battery recycling methods"
• From Wired.com "Cars Are Going Electric. What Happens to the Used Batteries?"

CERAMIC COATING - How It Works | SCIENCE GARAGE

First off, thanks to Eric Moorman who sent me this video. Mad love for Eric.

Let's go through the material science awesomeness in this video about how to get the most durable, prettiest finish on your car.

• The first four minutes or so are all about the causes of the tiny scratches on car surfaces and how to clean the car before applying a finish coating of either wax or ceramic.
• At 4:10 we get a discussion of wax, and the host even uses the word hydrophobic, explaining how the water beads up because of the hydrophobic nature of the wax.
• At 5:10, we finally get to the ceramics, "a non-metallic solid material making up an inorganic compound of metal and nonmetal (or metalloid) atoms primarily held in ionic and covalent (?) bonds." The host explains that those atoms can be crystalline (in various ways) or even vitrified.
• There's an explanation of the Moh's hardness scale, and a mention that there are other ways to measure hardness like via measuring scratch resistance.
• Heck, he even shows a very simplified version of covalent bonding with shared pairs of electrons.
• We get into using nanotextures to increase the hydrophobic character of a surface, increasing the contact angle between a drop and the surface - with a nice diagram, too - explaining super hydrophobic coatings.

Admittedly, I had no idea such coatings existed for cars.

Inside the 23-Dimensional World of Your Car's Paint Job

We're continuing this week with a little more on the art theme. It's a very different kind of art from last week's memory metal flower, but there are still pedals involved. (groan)

Wired magazine has a brilliant article detailing the incredible process of color matching the paint on a repaired part of a car to the paint on the rest of the car. At first blush, the process seems awfully simple - pick up a can of the paint used to paint the car originally. Things are a little more complicated than that, however, as no repair shop is going to stock 50,000-60,000 different paints (the number of car colors on the road according to the article), no car in need of repair looks exactly like it did when it first rolled off the production line. and because the original paint job on most cars involves twenty three different dimensions to the color - sparkles, coarseness, red, blue, green, angle, diffuse coarseness, and so on.

The knowledge and skills involved in color matching are absolutely mind-boggling. There's an art to it all.

What Captain America Can Teach Us About Science

It was my understanding that Cap's shield was made entirely of vibranium, but I guess it's a vibranium/steel alloy.

I appreciate that Dr Mathaudhu doesn't go into the fictional element vibranium's history and existence. Instead he just mentions that a 'mystery element' falls into the experiment and solidifies into what would later become Cap's shield.

Mathaudhu then goes into the connection that he "seeks to design materials that can live in these extremes" - just like Cap's shield. He mentions the switch from a steel to an aluminum alloy in the F150 frame.

He also explains that if a material scientist creates an awesome material but can't reproduce it - like the creator of Cap's shield did - then that wouldn't be a very successful material scientist.

The shield, by the way, is not quite unbreakable in the Marvel universes, but it's certainly a scientific marvel.

Why Things Fail: from tires to helicopter blades, everything breaks

I'm really digging on Wired magazine's materials science coverage of late. I don't know if they're intentionally adding more reportage of materials or if it's a coincidence. I'm happy either way.

This month's issue has an article on Ford's Building 4 testing complex in which they test automotive parts - gas pedal hinges, engines, even entire vehicles - to failure and try to develop a failure analysis curve to show how long they can expect to have a part survive under typical circumstances. The article also covers Vextec - a failure analysis company - and their efforts to computerize the failure testing process, developing a way to model materials on the computer, create thousands of virtual versions of the material, and test each of them to failure without making and destroying thousands of prototypes, something that aligns wonderfully with the Materials Genome Initiative.

Good stuff here, plus it's about cars...always cool.