One of our regular activities in the corrosion chapter of our material science course is to read and listen to this NPR story about our corroding water mains and the costs that would be involved in repairing or replacing the parts of the network in need. I start the lesson by watching video of one of the more spectacular water main breaks that I've seen, the 2014 break on the UCLA campus.
This year the students asked what it took to repair a water main break like that.
In searching, I couldn't find the repair work for that specific water main, but I did find a few other videos - including one from Skoakie, IL, the same city as the NPR story linked above.
It goes without saying, but there are so many things that we've lost in the pandemic.
One of those things that we've lost - or at least that we didn't get for a couple of summers - is the in-person, summer, ASM teacher workshops.
The summer workshops are easily the most valuable professional development experiences I've ever been a part of, and I get a lot out of them both when I've taken them and when I've helped lead them.
The above video is the end of the week feedback from the teacher campers from the 2014 camp at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana. I'm happy to say that this was one of the camps that I helped lead with Andy Nydam, one of our lead master teachers. All of the campers were asked to give a little summary of their week to camera as recorded by Glenn Daehn - who's been on the blog before. It's the kind of feedback we ask for from all of our campers at each camp, but this week we were lucky enough to get it recorded.
This camp was one of our residential camps, and lots of the campers came from hours and hours away, stayed in the dorms of Montana Tech, ate at the university's cafeteria, and spent their evenings together touring the city of Butte. We were able to see Berkeley Pit, tour a silicon purification plant, go down into Montana Tech's teaching mine, and take an historic tour of Butte as lead by a local history teacher.
For the past two summers we've run the camps as virtual experiences, and I've been impressed with how well ASM has managed to translate the camp experience into an online world...
..but the online experience isn't the in-person experience, as we're all well aware.
When we get through this mess, come and take a camp with us if you haven't before.
And if you have taken one before, come back and take another one. We'd love to see you again, and I promise that at least some of the content will be different. We've had a couple of years of playing around in our classrooms to find new things to do.
Oh, and Dr Daehn did record slightly longer sessions with some of the campers at that Montana Tech camp. You can check out that full playlist at this link.
Casting The Future seems to be a British, casting education outreach program from a bunch of trade groups. The group includes Cast Metals Federation, Institute of Cast Metals Engineers, and ten companies contributing to the efforts.
At Princeton we do some simple surface casting, but taking things to this next level would be brilliant. I'm going to look into seeing if we can order one of these kits and get it shipped across the pond to us.
They have also put together the following video explaining why casting is important to the UK manufacturing economy.
Recently I was looking for some videos to compare the virtues of cast versus forged metal parts. Here are the ones I ended up using in class.
That video says it's 9:46, but it's really more like 4:50. The video segment plays twice in the upload for some reason. In this one Richard Hammons shows the virtues of cast versus forged parts, casts a hammer, breaks a cast sword, forges (or lets another guy forge for him) a sword, and shows how much tougher the forged sword is.
I appreciate the playfulness of the Manchester chemists playing around in their videos. They show great curiosity and seem honestly fascinating by the results. The above video shows them running electricity through wires of various metals - copper, aluminum, magnesium, brass, tungsten, gold, molybdenum - in open atmosphere.
Even more impressive to me is their tenacity in trying to explain something once they get unexpected or at least curious results. In the video below, they explore the phenomenon of molybdenum wires producing what they refer to as unduloids - regularly spaced molybdenum blobs - on the surface of the heated wire.
This video - without narration - would be a great, short (2.5 minutes total) introduction to how sacrificial anodes work to protect metals. In particular, there's a brilliant animation showing how electrons flow from a buried anode to protect a pipe from corrosion.
I don't have much else to say.
The video is simple, and I'll let my post be the same.
