AMP Recycling Robots

I desperately want recycling to work.

The more I read about recycling in the US, the more I just want to cry. 

Whether it's NPR's report on how little plastic gets recycled and how the plastics industry developed recycling codes to make us feel better about using their products, a video on the un-recyclableness of black plastics, or the last twenty years dashing my hopes from turning "Anything Into Oil", I find myself hopeless and lost whenever I think of the magnitude of our plastics problem, and I fear that recycling - at least as it is right now - isn't the solution.

And then along comes the AMP sorting robot (an article about them), and they pull me right back in.

Mystery blue & white beads

The blue and white bead bottle up there might look familiar to a lot of science teachers, especially the ones who have taken our ASM summer camps. The bottle can be bought from Educational Innovations or from Flinn Scientific (though Flinn's version is green and white).

The bottle is a spectacular demonstration of density and of solubility, both of which are explained by Steve Mould in the above video.

We do a similar activity in a lab in our material science course at Princeton (one we certainly didn't develop but have tweeked to our needs) using preforms and polymer pellets. An extension we particularly like is related to the food coloring demo that Mould mentions in passing near the end. I especially recommend green food coloring. The effects are far more dramatic than the red that Mould shows.

Another extension involves shining ultraviolet light at the bottle. It turns out that - as one of our Utah campers pointed out to me after I'd had the bottle for a decade or so - that the white beads are actually the UV beads that Ed Inn sells. Apparently having a classroom with no windows blocked me from seeing that happen until she pointed it out to me.

I did also find a video showing how you can make one of your own - without the UV beads, however. The YouTuber's full instructions with quantities can be found in the video description.

I'll copy the video description, however, in case the video experiences link rot...

"Sorry for the spelling mistake in one sentence!

Water and Isopropyl alcohol are SOLUBLE with each other. (solvable is wrong word)

Poly Density Bottle

Take any size bottle, divide number of ounces of the bottle into half. Half number of ounces distilled water and half number of ounces 91% Isopropyl alcohol.

I used 50oz bottle.

So I added 23oz water and 23oz Isopropyl alcohol.

Salt 1tsp for 1oz of water.

So I mixed 23tsps of Salt in water.

Not filling the bottle completely and leaving some space for air at the top is a good idea.

Easy to shake and mix liquids.

Beads 260 of each kind.

You can add or minus number of beads according to the size of the bottle."

This mushroom brick could replace concrete

Cement sucks.

It's pretty bad for the environment on the front end as its production releases a whole bunch of carbon dioxide into the air, and it's not great on the back end because large swaths of pavement deny water's opportunities to get back into the ground, increasing runoff that is frequently polluted.

I've posted about mycelium materials before, but I particularly like this video's combination of a bit of pro-forest coverage and the fact that the reporter made her own 'mushroom' brick.

That might have to be a project for next year.

Three-point bend test fixture - with plans

3 Point Bend Test Report by phschemguy on Scribd

In the spring of 2015, Bob Hanlin, one of the ASM master teachers and a professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, came to our spring training with a project that some of his students had developed. It was a three-point beam tester made on the cheap and designed to be cheaply made by high school teachers to more accurately and repeatedly test the cement composite beams that we make as part of the material science curriculum.

Bob had tasked his students with the following requirements, as found on page three of their final report - embedded above...

• Repeatable testing
• The new fixture and method of breaking the cement has to be able to be repeatable and provide similar results.
• Portable
• The fixture has to be compact and easy to transport since high school teachers will have to take the fixture to school and carry it around.
• Accurate
• The testing mechanism hast o prove similar test results when in use.
• Easy to make
• The new fixture design has to be simple and easy to make since high school teacher[s] will be building it to teach the students the importance of material science.
• Inexpensive
• The fixture has to be as low-cost as reasonably achievable since high school teachers have to function on a meager budget and sometimes [are] forced to spend their own money out-of-pocket.

Man, that's a set of requirements that screams understanding of the high school science/engineering teacher world. Cheap, easy to make, portable (storable, too), accurate, and repeatable...that's pretty spot on perfect for our world.

Bob showed off his students' creation at the training, and we were all amazed at the results. No, it's not a commercial beam tester, and the accuracy doesn't approach that level of precision and repeatability, but for $30, it's a brilliant bit of engineering.

I finally got permission from Bob (who actually had to get permission from the university) to publish the tester's plans here on my blog. The one stipulation was that credit had to be given to the students - Gabriella Baptistella, Zach Kellogg, Vincent Nolan, and Lee Seela - and to the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I'm happy to credit all of those folks because their product is just brilliant.

The students explored two fixtures and two methods of testing for each fixture. In the end, the best choice is the one they labeled fixture 2 - method 3. The exact plans for 2-3 can be found in the embedded document above in appendix B (p17). The fish scale that Bob used when he showed us was - I think - this one from Amazon. Everything else would be a Home Depot/Lowe's/local hardware store purchase.

Here are pics of the final product - along with Bob in the dark blue plaid.

 

By the way, in explaining how he'd gotten students to help design the tester, Bob mentioned that the funds for the design project came from the tuition that our ASM summer camp teachers have been paying for grad hours related to the teacher summer camps over the past few years. So it you - like I - have taken the grad hours, thank you for your contribution to this project.

So, go, make yourself some beams and get to testing them.

Oh, and if you want to see our old method for testing the beams, here's a pic from the UMKC website showing our pre-these-plans method from their ASM teacher summer camp.

Source - UMKC website

ASM Student camps

Edit: This post was originally written a long while ago, back in the spring of 2020. I certainly was under the assumption that summer 2021 would be back to some sort of pre-Covid normal. As of today (1/18/21) the student camp schedule for 2021 has not been posted yet. It looks like the 2021 teacher camp schedule is planned to be fully virtual for 2021 (as it was in 2020), but I have no knowledge beyond what those webpages show.

It's that time of year when many students (and teachers) are starting to plan out the summer.

For teachers, I'll heartily recommend the ASM teacher materials camps. I've posted about them before.

I've also posted about the ASM student materials camps, too, but I've posted much less frequently about them - both because there are fewer of them and because I haven't ever been personally involved in those camps.

I thought I'd take a post today to rectify that and give you a whole bunch of student camp resources.

There's a video about what went on at the Eisenman camp in 2012. The Eisenman is the only ASM student camp that takes place at the ASM headquarters near Cleveland, OH, but there are about twenty other locations (appropriately, as of the summer of 2020) around the country.



This video goes through - as the title suggests - some of the legacy of the first ASM materials camp for students, the Eisenman at the ASM headquarters. They talk to some of the mentors, some former attendees who are now mentors, and ASM trustees about the history of, goals of, and - well - legacy of the Eisenman camp.



The ASM folks also interviewed some of the student attendees at the Eisenman camp one summer (including Lucas, who your friendly, neighborhood blogger was lucky enough to have taught at Princeton HS.). They, in the long run, offer probably the greatest testimonials as they lived the camp. The playlist (embedded above, click next video) also ends with a trio of videos showing some of the activities from the camp (metal casting, blacksmithing, and using a scanning electron microscope).


So, just what are materials camps? This video answers that both about the student and the teacher camps, focusing more on the student camps, though.

The camps are free. What do you have to lose?

Take a look at the student camp schedule for this summer - or the teacher camp schedule if that's more your speed.

The Future Of Energy Storage Beyond Lithium Ion

I've watched enough videos about renewable energy to know that one of the biggest issues with increasing our use of renewables isn't necessarily the actual energy production but rather the storage of the energy from times when it's produced to times when it's needed.

There's lithium ion storage batteries...3:15-4:05...

...flow batteries...4:10-7:50...

...pumped hydroelectric...8:15-8:40...

...energy vault (the most entertaining storage method if you ask me)...8:40-10:15...

...thermal storage...10:20-11:40...

...compressed air...11:50-12:00...

...cryogenic storage...12:00-12:15

Oh, and I absolutely love the joke at 1:28...energy storage methods all have 'serious potential'...

See, because stored energy is potential...it's funny.

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.