Casting Metal: the Basics

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.

Their main outreach seems to be the Casting The Future foundry kit which is demonstrated in the video above.

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.

Casting vs Forging

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.

There are three more videos after the jump...

Amazing Molybdenum

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. 

How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork

I've shared a bunch of TED talks over the past few months, so I thought I would tell you how to make your own TED Talk in case you were interested.

Warning: There is legitimately no material science content in this week's post. I'll be posting an actual material science video later today.

Sacrificial Anode Cathodic Protection Allied Corrosion

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.

NSFW: Plastics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I know, I know.

I've promised that I would only post videos and articles that are safe for work.

This one definitively breaks that self-imposed rule. This one should NOT be shown to students at school unless you have a really good relationship with your Board of Education and some pretty mature students.

The video mentions - as comedic asides - sex toys, numerous f-bombs, loads of s-bombs ('shot' but with a different vowel), and cheapshots at the blobfish.

But there's a whole lot of actual content about the environmental horrors of our plastic obsession, our lack of recycling in the face of more and more claims of recycling, the advertising push from the plastics industry to convince us all that the lack of recycling is our individual faults (including the famous crying Italian-American commercial, the route that plastics take into our stomach and body, the US's refusal to sign onto plastic waste reduction treaties, the movement to pass extended producer responsibility bills.

The video is well worth watching. There's good content in there. And I'll admit to enjoying the crass humor.

Bike tires that last a lifetime without any puncture or degradation are inspired by NASA's rover technology

 

I've posted about the NASA rover's memory metal ties on the blog before, and we certainly know that technology developed for the space program often makes its way into our everyday life. So it's not a total shock that those tires would be finding their way into use here on the Earth.

But I wouldn't have bet that the first Earthly use for this tire technology would be on bicycles.

Who knew?

As this article writes, "The airless METL bike tires are crafted out of the Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology (SMART) – made from strong (like titanium), lightweight yet ultra-elastic material (like rubber) known as NiTinol+."

The METL tires come from The Smart Tire Technology Company and aren't available just yet, though they are taking names for the waitlist. I'm really curious how much those tires would cost and whether they would adaptable from one bike to the next one that a cyclist would purchase. Otherwise, it might not necessarily be a great investment.