12-28 - The dawn of the age of critical materials: Alex King at TEDxDesMoines

"Do you ever lie awake at night and worry that we'll run out of all the stuff that we need to make things?"

Well, I didn't used to, Alex, but your video kind of freaked me out.

If we had a little more neodymium, we could get more wind turbines running and turning...but we can't find enough neodymium.

If we could find more rhenium, we could get jet engines manufactured more easily...but we can't find enough rhenium.

If we just managed a bit more terbium and europium, we'd have better, more efficient fluorescent lights (admittedly, a likely dated fact in today's LED-lit world)...but we can't find enough terbium or europium.

If we just had a little more of a whole lot of elements, we'd be better able to make more smart phones...but we can't get enough of all sorts elements.

I feel like we've been on the 'rare earth elements are rare' train before, but it looks like we're going going to be on the hunt for a fair while.

...and the final story about the change from the bronze age is chilling - though the ending is a painfully abrupt.

The Mystery Flaw of Solar Panels

I find myself digging the shift that has taken place on the Real Engineering channel.

Brian McManus - the host of Real Engineering - has been putting in a ton of work to step up the video's quality and the content's depth. I find myself learning a whole bunch of new stuff in every video that he's posting.

In this one, McManus details the reasons that the solar energy striking most photovoltaic solar cells is only turned into electricity at a lab-tested 20% efficiency - and even lower 18% real-world efficiency.

This is due to light being reflected, the threshold energy necessary for silicon to release electrons, heat build up, adding metal contacts which block light hitting the cell itself, oxygen defects in the silicon wafers itself.

...and there's some awesome explanation (along with animation) of how p-type and n-type semiconductors are used to produce voltages in solar cells.

The Real Engineering videos do tend toward higher level concepts nowadays, but they're brilliantly cited and clearly explained.

They're good stuff, man.

The Bizarre Market for Old Battleship Steel

Oddly, I had heard that old battleship steel - from before the development of atomic/nuclear weapons - was highly valuable for non-radioactive shielding material.

This video does a great job explaining how the Trinity explosion - and subsequent open-air, atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons - polluted any steel made after those tests via the Bessemer process for producing steel from pig iron and using atmospheric air.

I did not know, however, that the battleships scuttled at Scapa Flow had subsequently been salvaged and some of the steel used in this way. (As an aside, your friendly, neighborhood blogger has visited Scapa Flow. It's gorgeous.)

And I also didn't know that the demand for this low-background steel has mostly been superseded because of the switch from Bessemer to basic oxygen steel production.

Materials For The Future - The Plant Age | Oded Shoseyov | TEDxGateway

"The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."

"The oil age will end long before we run out of oil."

Man, I hope that second statement is true.

In this TEDx talk, we hear about materials - collagen, humira (a drug), resilin (which I had to look up) - being produced in plant cells at scales large enough to be industrially practical.

The speaker discusses the final steps in harvesting the collagen to be 'like making pesto', but if I remember my pesto recipes from the past, the steps leading up to grinding the leaves didn't involve gene editing.

Though I could be wrong.

Aluminum =/= aluminium

When I was a college student at the University of Aberdeen (I spent my junior year from Wabash overseas in Scotland, doncha know) I was admonished by one of my professors for misspelling the element aluminum. 

See, he didn't know I was an American, and I didn't know - at the time - that the Brits spelled aluminum with an extra i - aluminium.

So, just why do we spell that element differently than they do?

For a few years now I've been telling a story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) changing the name because it sounded better in their advertising back in the 1880's.

The story that Michael Quinion tells in his book Port Out, Starboard Home about the etymology of words and phrases in the English language is somewhat similar to that but isn't quite the same.

Check out the story in his book - or on Google Books here.

The surprising strengths of materials in the nanoworld | Julia Greer | TEDxCERN

And back to the TEDx talks...

I almost got distracted by the idea of vacuum balloons - filled with nothing instead of helium. That's a brilliant idea.

Then there's the Ashby chart for strength vs density which kind of looks like the Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

More importantly here is the chase for a material that is lightweight (low density) and strong, leaving the main area of the aforementioned Ashby chart.

I think I have most of the concepts down until - for about thirty seconds at 9:35 - the speaker talks about two-photon lithography and how the ceramic matrix is produced. There are words like boxel (a 3d pixel) and rastering lasers through space. I get the bit about depositing the material - whatever it is - onto the polymer matrix, but how the heck that polymer architecture is laid down is a total mystery to me.

All in all this looks like fascinating steps forward toward...something...in the future.

Waste Land - NPR article

Source - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

I will admit that I am 100% confused by recycling at this point.

I think I can recycle paper, cardboard, glass, and aluminum pretty well. 

I take my aluminum cans to the local animal shelter where they supposedly make some cash from them.

I put my glass, paper, and cardboard (after tearing out the plastic windows in envelopes and tearing off as much sticker waste from the cardboard as I can) into my curbside bin.

But the plastics mystify me.

My local waste collector - Rumpke - says they can take, "Plastic Bottles (empty, crush, reattach lid): Bottles and jugs that have a small mouth and wider base, such as milk jugs, soda bottles, laundry detergent bottles, water bottles, shampoo bottles and contact solution bottles".

When I called them a couple of years ago and asked what they could take, the customer service person - clearly reading from a manual because she couldn't answer follow-up questions - told me they could take "#1-7 except butter tubs." 

#1-7 is pretty much everything, and I know flatly that they can't take styrofoam (foamed polystyrene - #6).

And now I see that Planet Money has posted a twenty-four minute story (audio and transcript - there's also a 4-minute summary from NPR) relating the history of the Resin Identification Codes (RICs) and the plastics industry's efforts in the 1970's to advertise their way out of plastic's imaging problem. Instead of finding ways to recycle plastics, they convinced us to feel better about plastics by letting us think they were making recyclable products.

Which was apparently crap.

But now they've promised that they're really going to recycle plastics going forward.

SULLIVAN: These days, Larry [Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry] spends a lot of time biking past the ocean. He's become deeply worried about its future, what it will look like in another 20 or 50 years, long after he's gone. And he thinks back to those years he spent at fancy hotels and conference rooms with oil and plastic executives. And he says what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should've been obvious all along. He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, as much virgin oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition. 

THOMAS: They were not interested and still aren't interested, as far as I'm concerned, in putting any real money or effort in the recycling because they want to sell virgin material. Nobody is producing a virgin product and wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material - that's their business. Every year, they want to say they produced X number of million more pounds because that meant their business was growing. 

SULLIVAN: And it is growing. We're making more plastic, buying more plastic, using more plastic. That's not going to go away anytime soon. But as the industry dusts off their new ads and makes their new promises, there is one difference. The difference this time is whether or not the public will still believe them.