Where were the ASM Teacher Camps in the summer of 2013?

View ASM Teachers Camps 2013 in a larger map

In case anybody was curious about the geographic spread of the ASM teacher camps as of summer 2013...

Next summer I'm pulling for the Chaminade University...or Portland State...or Northern Arizona University...maybe the University of San Francisco...

Coincidentally, those are places that I really want to visit.

Strength - Toughness

Strength and toughness are two properties that, as the terms are used in the non-scientific world.

Something that is strong must also be tough. They mean the same, right?

To a materials scientist, they most certainly do not. As the linked website defines, 'strength measures the resistance of a material to failure, given the applied stress (or load per unit area)' and 'toughness measures the energy required to crack a material; it is important for things which suffer impact.'

The interactive diagram (called Ashby diagrams) on the linked website graphs the strength vs toughness for a number of materials and finds them grouped with like materials (wood near wood, polymers near polymers, etc). The graph also has some java-based interactivity allowing each group to be further explored.

The site has a number of links at the bottom to similar pages exploring other materials relationships: young's modulus vs cost, strength vs cost, and a dozen more.

PS - Thanks to Todd for finding this site and to Caryn for passing it along.

Mini Materials Camp

Each time there is an MS&T conference, the ASM folks try to be there to run a mini-materials camp. The ASM folks invite local teachers to bring their classes (sometimes even paying for transportation) and see some of the glory that is materials science.

This series of videos shows the process of casting tin using a microwave oven. The process of sand casting is fascinating to watch and still an important industrial process.

The process is broken up into five parts - the remaining four of which are after the jump.

Today's post finishes with another demonstration from the mini-materials camp: the phase change of iron wire.

The mini camps aren't nearly a replacement for the week-long summer camps, but they're great ways to expose your students to materials science if you happen to be lucky enough to be in the area of an MS&T conference - like the Indianapolis folks are this fall (September 2013).

How It's Made Giant Tires

Where's the corny joke at the beginning?

I'm glad to see that some recycled tire rubber is used in this production. It's interesting to hear the mixture ingredients that go into the rubber - sulfur, carbon black, rubber, antioxidants, and apparently the bags that the carbon black and sulfur come in.

All of the by-hand working in the making of the tire makes me understand why it's so expensive. This one's a pretty impressive process. I think I counted about three thousand layers of rubber in the tire.

Sheesh...

And the transformation in the end - via steam-filled bladder - is just stunning.

Oh, there's the corny joke...at the end this time.

World's Roundest Object!

Be careful when discussing this video with your students. This is about the world's roundest sphere...sphere. It's not a ball. It's a sphere.

Just saying.

'Cause I know I've said ball in front of my high school students, and it took me a while to get the boys' attention back.

(In a related aside, my wife is listening in as this video plays. She lost control at 6:22 when the narrator said "Newtons, Joules". To quote her: "heh, heh...Newton's jewels...heh, heh".)

This 'world's roundest object' is more about the basis of our metric (now the systemé international d'unités or SI) than it is about materials science. There are, however, some serious challenges involved in making a material that won't decompose, that won't get dirty, that won't wear away, that won't change over time.

Here they have created - according to the scientist at 7:25 - a single crystal of silicon with 'no voids or dislocations' and containing only one isotope of silicon, making the material just slightly less valuable than absolutely, perfectly, priceless.

Science Lowers Shattering Risk at Home Plate

Image source

From the New York Times...

Welington Castillo smashed a double for the Chicago Cubs late in a game in the 2010 season, his bat exploding on impact with the ball. A long shard of wood flew at a teammate, Tyler Colvin, sprinting home from third base, impaling him a few inches from his heart. Though Colvin scored, his season was over.

That's not Welington Castillo or Tyler Colvin there to the right. That's Hanley Ramirez breaking his bat in a game June 19, 2013. The video of the Tyler Colvin incident can be found on YouTube, though.

I grew up just a few miles from the Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Slugger factory in Jeffersonville, Indiana, so I can vouch that we've been using wooden baseball bats since at least April, 1975 (and probably longer than that). It would seem like there wouldn't be much room for improvement in wooden bat technology. Sure there are composite bats and aluminum bats and carbon fiber bats, but those aren't for the big leagues. The big leaguers use wooden bats, and wood is wood. It grows, we cut it, we shape it.



In the early 2000's, however, traditional ash bats began to give way to maple bats, favored most famously by Barry Bonds. The maple bats felt harder, stronger, more powerful - perhaps truthfully, perhaps in an example of placebo effect. The important aspect for this article is that maple bats didn't just shatter; they exploded.

Hence the room for materials science, finding a way to make a better maple bat.

Magnetic Mysteries of Earth's Core

Admittedly the BBC article "Magnetic mysteries of Earth's core" might not, at first blush, seem like a materials article. We can't see, touch, or directly interact with the core. We can't make anything out of the core.

But we can test the core and can - as has Professor Kei Hirose of the article - test the core indirectly. Here Hirosa has recreated the temperature and pressure conditions thought to exist in the inner core, using a diamond-tipped vice to exert 3,000,000 atmospheres of pressure on a nickel-iron alloy being simultaneously heated to 4500 C.

At these conditions crystals within the alloy changed and apparently increased to drastic sizes, leading Hirose to propose that the core may include crystals up to 10km in size.