(Hi Speed Long Edit) RX Chipbreaker

I don't know what to say about this video. There isn't necessarily a massive amount of science being shown or explained here. There's pretty much just awesomely cool, slow-motion video of steel being shaved off of a rotating cylinder and shooting straight at the camera.

Yes, there's a ton of science involved in ensuring that the bit is harder than the steel, that the bit is replaceable, that the bit stay cool enough not to melt from the friction.

But none of that is shown in this video.

The Elements Unearthed - material science workshop

Edit: Sadly, David Black's website is no longer active as of 3/16/24.

The Elements Unearthed tells the tales of a science teacher, David V Black, at the Walden School of Liberal Arts in Provo, Utah. Black's vitae is an impressive list of projects that he and his students have taken on through the years.

Perhaps most impressively, though, Black took our ASM summer, teacher workshop in Ogden, Utah two summers ago (in 2013) and put together an outstandingly thorough report on his time there and the labs and demonstrations during the week.

If you're considering the camps, check out Mr Black's report of the camps. You can get a good idea - with some pictures - of what you'll be getting yourself into.

(DIS)Advantages of Water Soluble (PVA) for Packaging Cleaning Products, Laundry Detergent

Yeah, the message at 0:14 says, "[PVA] dissolves without leaving any harmless residue." That seems like a double negative - without leaving...harmless. It's a little confusing there, admittedly, but I'm going to chalk that up to Infhidro Soluciones en Film Hidrosoluble isn't a native English-speaking company.

PVA packaging can be pretty outstanding stuff. Just bundle up anything you need to later dissolve into water. Make the package exactly the right amount to be measured out and dosed.

Just don't make it something edible because the PVA isn't exactly something you'd want to ingest.

And maybe don't make the stuff inside the PVA package pretty enough that kids will want to pop the PVA packages like candy when they will then explode like little poisonous bombs in the mouth...sort of like a Detergent Gusher. See, Consumer Reports recently posted that The New York Times reported that in 2012 and 2013, over 17,000 children were poisoned (thankfully some in minor ways) by PVA detergent pods.

It cost 1.7 cents to make a penny this year, and 8 cents to make a nickel

During every mention of new versus old pennies, the cost of coin production comes up. Invariably, I say something vague about the cos of production of a penny having risen over the years until the production cost out-stripped the value of a penny - meaning that the government was losing money on every penny it produced.

I've never actually done the research on those details, however. I just keep telling students that they can look it up. I don't think any of my students ever took me up on that offer, though, because none of them came back with evidence asking for extra credit - as I'm sure they would.

Thankfully The Washington Post recently published an article on our government continuing to lose money every time it mints a penny - or a nickel, even.

I did not know that the production cost of a nickel was higher than the five cents for which the government can then 'sell' the nickel.

Just in case The Post chooses to put the article behind a paywall or into an archive at some point, I've grabbed it into Word then published it via Scribd.

Why a dead alkaline battery bounces!

The simplicity of science - observations, hypotheses, repeatable tests - rears its gorgeous head in this video.

In today's episode of science, an observation is taken that fresh, charged batteries don't bounce. In fancier language, they have a very low coefficient of restitution. Old, discharged batteries, on the other hand, bounce just fine. They have a much higher coefficient of restitution - not like a full one or anything, just higher. Hence our first step: observation.

So the narrator of today's video makes a couple of hypotheses: gas build up (increasing pressure) or gel build up (damping the bounce).

Then we get to the repeatable tests. He builds a nice, little set-up to drop the batteries consistently ensuring that the observations are real and consistent. The set-up gets modified a bit to instead drop a piece of brass onto the different batteries. One hypothesis (the gas build up) finds itself on shaky ground. A further test - drilling into the batteries to allow any pressure to be relieved - fairly well dispells the hypothesis entirely.

So, the narrator cuts the batteries in half (I hope he wore goggles) and sees the change in the discharged batteries. I particularly like the analogy to the dead blow hammer as it relates to the gel-filled, new, un-discharged battery.

What is Plastimake?

I will readily admit to having a weak spot for things that change and can change back. I buy pretty much every color-changing, plastic cup that I find and have them all lined up in the window of my classroom. So the sight of this thermoplastic changing from rigid and opaque to pliable and translucent and back again is just too much for me.

I'm sending my money to the Land Down Under to get me some Plastimake.

Does anybody know the conversion from US dollars into whatever the Australians use as money? Barbie shrimp, I think?

Update: turns out that these things are available from Educational Innovations, too. They've been in the goodie boxes that we give away each of the past few years. Sign up for a workshop, and you might win this stuff.

The Glass Age (parts 1 & 2)

Yeah, it's a shill for Corning, but I'm okay with that because corning makes some pretty frickin' cool materials, and the Mythbusters guys - Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman - are pretty solidly entertaining.

We get some history of glass developments, a look at modern developments in Corning glass (optical fiber, willow glass - check 7:00 for the phenomenally flexible willow glass), and then...well, an end.

Luckily there is also The Glass Age (part 2) from the same folks. Here we get a few destructive tests with older cell phones, an explanation of Prince Rupert's drops, and a windshield glass explanation.

Superfast clotting agent could save many lives

I have to admit that I found this story from the not-school-appropriately-named I F*&(ing Love Science website. It's honestly way more entertaining and informative than I want it to be because I can't ever share these links on my class Facebook page - which I hate.

That's I hate not being able to share the links.

Not that I hate my class Facebook page. I don't. I actually like it a fair bit.

The video shows an in-development product designed to clot blood nearly instantly. It's apparently a polymer made of plant-derived polymers extracted from plant cell walls - like Lego blocks according to the company's co-founder and CEO.

Casting in the forge at UC

First, a mention of thanks to Abby Friend, Princeton High School graduate in the class of 2011, and a current student at the University of Cincinnati in their DAAP (Design, Art, Architecture, Planning) school. An additional mention of thanks to Farron Allen, professor in the DAAP school who allowed me to hang out in 'his' forge for an evening class.

The students had previously made their investments out of ludo, plaster, and silica sand, burying wax sculptures and - in some cases - tiny, plastic doll limbs in their investments and ensuring that their hidden treasures had enough sprues attached for the bronze to find their way to every inch of the creations-to-be. I don't have any photos of that investment process, though you can see the final products in the large, white molds into which the bronze you see below is being poured.

Abby explained that much of the investment is reused - mixed with new plaster and sand to be used for the next set of investments.

On to the casting...

Those are the investments to the right. They just came out of the really large kiln. The bricks were on top of the holes to keep any dust out of there. The green flames to the back were coming out of the methane-fired kiln in which a whole bunch of bronze was melting in a ceramic crucible.

Blogging the Periodic Table: Aluminum - it used to be more precious than gold

Slate has put together a series called Blogging the Periodic Table written by Sam Kean (of the awesome The Disappearing Spoon). They're up to thirty-three articles so far. The last was published in June, 2011, so I'm assuming that thirty-three is where the series is going to end.

Aluminum, as the article relates, is the most common element in the Earth's crust was absolutely useless to us for centuries because it is so reactive. As the article writes...

From a world production total of perhaps a few ounces per month in the decades before, by 1888, the largest U.S. aluminum company (the one that became Alcoa) could produce almost 50 pounds of aluminum each day. Within 20 years, it had to ship out 88,000 pounds per day to meet demand. As production soared, prices plummeted. In the mid-1800s, the first aluminum ingots on the market went for $550 per pound. Fifty years later, not even adjusting for inflation, it cost 25 cents for the same amount.

Check the article out. If you enjoy it, check out Kean's Disappearing Spoon, an absolute masterpiece of chemistry, material science, and story telling.

My Lab Rats: Quick and EZ Defrost Tray Review

I have a MiracleThaw (or a knock-off that Tom picked up for me from a thrift store) that I demonstrate in class. It makes for a cool demonstration to show that the aluminum does a spectacular job of transferring heat to the ice and melting the ice far more quickly than students would expect - especially after they touch the MiracleThaw first and find that it feels absolutely cold in spite of it being firmly at room temperature. I also have a pair of Flinn Scientific's ice melting blocks which make for a nice comparison

Check out another couple of articles about the MiracleThaw that come in pretty digestible, bite-sized servings for you and your students...

• "Not Too Hot to Handle" from That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles by Joe Schwarcz
• Miracle Thaw - the Bogus Miracle from SkepticFriendsNetwork (and a follow-up letter)
• How does the Miracle Thaw work? and Utensil to thaw meat

UCLA's water main break

So, California is in an historic drought. The water situation there is awful...AWFUL.

Check out this map of the state as of October 28, 2014 (sourced here)...

I mention this only because it makes the following video, of a ruptured, 30-inch water main break on UCLA's campus this past July particularly tragic and ironic.





According to an NPR story, the water main took 30 hours to shut off and lost 20 million gallons of water in the process.

For Gorilla Glass testers, every day is a grind (and scratch and drop...)

Glass isn't supposed to do that, the bending thing that the Gorilla Glass in the photo there is doing.

See, glass shatters.

It's inflexible and rigid.

Yeah, it's tough, but it's not gonna bend like that without a catastrophic failure.

Unless it's Gorilla Glass being bent in Corning Lab's testing lab as chronicled in a cnet article recently. In the article (and included video, check below for the embed) we get to hear why sapphire might not be the material destined to replace Gorilla Glass on all of our smartphone fronts anytime soon.

I particularly enjoy this quote...

We put on safety glasses, walked into a restricted corridor and soon entered one of the main labs, which -- despite all the secretiveness -- looks a lot like shop class. 

I can't tell whether I'm entertained more by the thought that anything that's 'just' a shop class can't do any real science or whether I expect the quote to be followed up with photos of guys with three and a half fingers.

As Infrastructure crumbles, trillions of gallons of water lost

My material science students read (and listened to) this NPR story this week, the day after I heard it on the radio. In her written response to the article, one of the students wrote that she was surprised that two water mains that far apart (I'd also shown video of a water main breaking on UCLA's campus this summer) could coincidentally break at the same time. I explained to her that water mains broke every day all around the country. I typed water main break into Google News and came up with hundreds of hits within the last couple of days.

Water mains break all the time. It's a cost of using metal pipes, that they will eventually corrode and crack and turn into pretty spectacular sinkholes and floods.

My students asked why we didn't just use something that wouldn't corrode, like glass.

Apparently I have some work to do when we get to the ceramics chapter.

Coffee Joulies - cool coffee faster

I know what my wife's Christmas gifts are going to be this year. She, admittedly, likes her coffee pretty hot, so I don't know whether that will be the prefect temperature for her, but the science is outstanding.

And that's what matters, right? Whether I find her gift interesting, right?

The Coffee Joulies are filled with a phase changing material that has a transition temperature at whatever appropriately hot coffee is supposed to be. Hopefully it's right.

Amazing chemical reaction between North Korean coin and US quarter

What kind of demonry is this? Our faceless, voiceless, assumedly-hand-modeling demonstrator is able to press one coin through the other without a whole lot of effort.

Luckily their webpage - where the coins are sort of on sale for €35.50 for three coin pairs - says the following about the 'trick':

These coins are made of gallium and indium bearing alloys that when in contact, spontaneously form a non-toxic eutectic (well defined melting point) alloy that is liquid at room temperature!

The above trick, though, seems much quicker and smoother than does the one I've seen before.

They sure don't make pyrex like they used to

We've been hearing for a few years that Pyrex isn't what it used to be, that the quality control from the overseas manufacturing might be a little less strict than that in typical American manufacturing.

And now we know all about it thanks to Theodore Gray's Gray Matter column, which he largely has turned into his two, thoroughly entertaining Mad Science books. I even really like the legal disclaimers from the books (which I sadly can't find online for the linking). Lots of good reading there - along with some pretty spectacular photos of chemical reactions.

What's in your iPhone?

Nothing is in my iPhone. I'm an Android guy, myself.

Hah! These are the jokes, folks.

I love the American Chemical Society's series of videos about the chemistry of a whole lot of different topics: candy, iPhones, fireworks, life hacks, and lots more. Here they go through the numerous different elements used in making a smart phone. I particularly find the molten potassium bath for the screen fascinating.

Aluminum Thermal Explosion

And that, my friends, is why you always need to keep your mold totally, absolutely, perfectly dry when you're pouring molten metal. Steam explosions suck.

This is not something to laugh about...unless you're Russian, I guess.

Looking into an electric arc furnace with the power on

How the heck? Why are they that close?

And if the camera is shaking like that, is it being held by hand?

Oh...my...lord...

Back up, dude.

Admittedly, though, seeing the molten iron bubble and spit and boil like that is stunning to see, and I am thrilled that some nutcase - make that sentinel76 - stood close enough to let me see that.

Here's what I would assume the process would look like from much further away. Skip to about 1:38 to see the electrode fire up and the above process begin.

Charging the furnace

I was lucky enough to get to tour the Nucor steel plant in Tuscaloosa, AL a couple of years back for one of our summer ASM Teachers Camps. At that plant they use an electric arc furnace to melt their scrap iron which they then mix to the desired composition of steel. I remember seeing them charge the furnace with recycled scrap iron and thinking it was just about the scariest, brightest, most awesome thing I had ever seen.

I don't know where Christopher Birkbeck - the poster of the above video - was touring when he filmed this video, but I imagine it's a pretty similar set-up to what I saw in Tuscaloosa.

My understanding of what's happening is that the scrap iron has some organic compounds on it - oil, paint, um...paint and oil - which immediately vaporizes and burns off on contact with the already molten iron still in the furnace. This is further fed by the release of oxygen from any rust that is on the scrap iron.

The flare really is outstanding to watch.

Honestly, the best tours we take in the summer are almost always the dirtiest tours.

Thankfully, the two charges we got to see on our tour didn't look anything like this one...



Ours looked a lot more like this...



Really, I could watch these videos all day long...

Tensile test

Computer modeling is so cool.

Like in this tensile test, you can see that the force concentrates as the cross sectional area of the sample decreases, leading to more and more drastic necking.

I can't see that when I look at a real sample being tested, but with the rainbow coloration for the different amounts of force, I can kind of show that to my students.

Water Balz Jumbo Polymer Balls

Such cute, bouncy little music from a video about fun, deadly little toys.

Ok, deadly might be an overstatement, but the jumbo growing spheres available from various companies have been recalled because, as written on the US Consumer Product Safety Commission's website...

The soft and colorful product can be easily mistaken by a child for candy. When the marble-sized toy is ingested, it can expand inside a child’s body and cause intestinal obstructions, resulting in severe discomfort, vomiting, dehydration and could be life threatening. The toys do not show up on an x-ray and require surgery to be removed from the body.

That's a bit of a bummer as the gel spheres are great in class for demonstrating index of refraction, lensing in an eyeball, crosslinked polymers, and osmosis & diffusion and as a medium for watching seed germination. Some companies - including Education Innovations, a favorite of the ASM teachers camp program - are still selling the spheres in smaller sizes, but it appears that the giant spheres are no longer available because they can sort of stop of the intestines.

Which is bad...

...but isn't as bad as ingesting Aqua Dots would be.

Yeah, the egg survived and all, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to crack it one handed and scramble up an omelet with it afterwards.

Though it could make dying Easter eggs a lot quicker. Line those suckers up and spray like fifty of them at once.

Plus you could probably reuse the same eggs every year for like a decade.

Line-X was mentioned by one of my students in class this week, and he asked if I could explain how it worked. I'd never heard of the stuff, but I went home and watched the video...videos, honestly, as the company has posted nearly eighty videos of their product in a huge range of varied uses. The next day we watched the video in class, and I gave my very brief explanation of what I understood about the coating. It's a polymer that provides a lot more wear resistance and durability for the watermelon, egg, plastic cups, and cement block shown in the video.

It's actually fascinating to see the uses - military protection, flooring applications, truck beds (the primary application from what I can tell), wall coatings, storage tanks, protection of underground reservoirs, and lots more - that can come from slight modifications of the basic product.

Corrosion found inside the 520 Bridge pontoons

"Local news station finds corrosion in" random piece of infrastructure isn't exactly the hardest news story to go about finding. It involves checking any bridge, overpass, train tunnel, subway car, or...well...anything made of metal at all, pretty much.

It's just the natural order of things. Metals are just ceramic wannabes.


This article is interesting in that it's a floating bridge in Seattle, WA, and its supports...

from Wikimedia

...that get churning water and weather like this...

from wsdot - check out the waves just on the South side of the bridge

microstructure grain growth simulation

In high school I won tickets to an Allman Brothers Band concert from a local radio station. At the concert they had an old-school, bubbles-of-oil-and-colored-water on an overhead projector light show.

For some reason this video reminds me of that light show every time I see it. Yeah, it's a simulation of crystal growth showing 'grains' growing together, but I can imagine that it would be a bit more fascinating with some music and recreational drug use (not that we - ASM, Master Teachers, the DAR, the LDS, or Jeff Bridges - would ever endorse that.

We do, however, fully endorse using this video in our summer teacher workshop powerpoints.

Google Science Fair: Meet Elif Bilgin

I had a student last year figure out how to make a bow and arrow out of a paper clip and a rubber band from his braces.

That's practically as awesome as make a bioplastic from banana peals, right?

World Cup Chemistry: The Science Behind the Brazuca Ball - Reactions

The American Chemical Society worked with Compound Interest to produce this video on the chemistry of the polymers involved in producing the World Cup soccer futbol ball, the brazuca.

Oh, and am I too late to root for Australia in this year's World Cup?

What happened to this car?

I can answer that question: something bad happened to that car.

See? Genius.

Check out this nicely animated video explaining the process of liquifaction which turns quicksand into a liquid, allowing things like cars, people, small pirate villages to sink into them.

It's sort of the opposite of what oobleck does.

Misconceptions about heat

In today's video Dr Derek Muller of Veritasium takes a few minutes to again tell people that they're wrong. He seems to do that a lot. I'm not saying, but I'm just saying...

The informality of the testing that he does is one of Muller's great advantages since it leaves the viewer fairly well able to reproduce many of the experiments that he does. Yeah, he uses an infrared thermometer here, but that's not radically out of the realm of expenses for most folks.

The testing today is looking at whether a book - apparently an Asimov tome - is warmer or cooler than an aluminum-cased hard drive. The trick is that they're both at room temperature...the same temperature. It's just that the two materials transfer heat very differently.

There's a similar video with slightly higher production value also by Dr Muller over on the Catalyst, an ABC Australia program, website. The video there is downloadable but not embeddable, and it does have a nice transcript of the prettier video. They also have a larger version of the downloadable video, but it's not viewable in the US. It does, however, come with some teacher material.

Aluminum or gold? Which is more valuable? It depends.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has an interactive, multimedia site called Dynamic Earth that explores some of the science involved in four areas: minerals and gems, plate tectonics and volcanoes, the solar system, and rocks and mining. The most interesting content for the material science subject is a mock assignment that a girl is given to explore which is more valuable, aluminum or gold. The link heads to a summary of the website contents around the topic and to a transcript of the video.

To get to the video involved today via the multimedia site, skip the intro, click to rocks and mining then mining, then minerals matter, and finally on Aluminum or Gold. Embedded there is a tiny (in size, not in length or content) video. I tried to find the same video over on YouTube or via Google but with no success.

I am linking to the non-multimedia version, because the multimedia version has only a single external link.

The world's largest gold coin

That's a heck of an expensive advertisement...go Canada!

Of course, we all know that "the Royal Canadian Mint sees a challenge and meets the challenge...the Royal Canadian Mint sees the standard and surpasses the standard...the Royal Canadian Mint raises the bar on excellence and is the artistic mastermind behind the world's most magnificant gold bullion coins."

I'm just trying to get a handle on the size of the coin, though. A hundred kilos is like, what, eight pounds in imperial units?

How It's Made Aluminum

And so goes the glory of Napoleon's really fancy knives and forks...

This video, from the How It's Made series, shows the process necessary to purify bauxite ore into useful, 'finished' aluminum.

Sadly, though, it is bereft of the corny joke that usually comes at the beginning of the How It's Made videos. I kind of miss the joke. Does that mean I've got Stockholm syndrome at this point?

ALCOA - Production Video

Aluminum is a miracle. Its reactivity is so high that our ability to purify it from its ore just stuns me, seriously stuns me every time that I think about it.

I warn you that this video is narrated by a British voice, so it does refer to aluminum as aluminium. Just thought you should know...

The video follows aluminum through the processing to take the ore into a somewhat finished form...

• refining of bauxite ore (grinding, mixing with caustic soda - NaOH, and heating) into alumina
• smelting the alumina in a bath of molten cryolite
• passing electrical current through the mixture
• processing of the ingots (at an ALCOA factory, of course) into plates
• casting
• homogenizing
• scalping (sawing & milling)
• heating & rolling 
• shearing & cropping
• horizontal solution treating (5:15 - which seems to use water, not a solution)
• stretching 
• precipitating/aging
• conductivity testing & ultrasonic inspection (both non-destructive testing methods)

Tapping a furnace

I have no idea what direct, curricular material science connection this would have, but it's worth sharing.

I have so many questions that aren't answered by the video's concise description: "A tapper opening a taphole in the side of an iron furnace. Using an oxygen lance."

• Why wasn't there already a hole?
• How much did that dude have to get paid to do this?
• Is this a regular occurrence, or did something go wrong to require this action?
• What sort of safety equipment would have to be involved - because it doesn't look like nearly enough?
• Is this a field trip we can take from one of the summer teachers camps?
• Are either of those 'sentences' in the description really sentences at all? (Don't worry, I already know they aren't.)

Sep 11 - "Why the Towers Fell" - Nova PBS

It is human nature to look back with one eye to the future. If we can just figure out why that happened, we can make sure it doesn't happen again. That is, at its core, what failure analysis is all about.

NOVA, the PBS series, produced the documentary "Why the Towers Fell" looking at the conclusions of the engineers and scientists on the government's exploration panel attempting to answer the titular question. In their findings there are a number of material science connections...

• tradoffs among cost, weight, and strength - particularly at 11:30
• design constraints - 12:45 (designed for impact of a Boeing 707, the largest at the time of design)
• mechanical testing methods (sheer, tension, vertical load) - 33:30
• heat softening of the steel - 37:45, 44:35 (and throughout in small mentions typically as "the heat would have softened the steel")
• failure analysis - all throughout, particularly at 45:00

NOVA also posted a website of information related to this episode, much of which is still online. Some links are starting to fail, however. The best of these are a very readable summary of the findings, the engineering history of the Towers, and a java interactive showing what metal atoms do as heat is applied.

This one's tough for me to post and was even tough for me to watch. I didn't have a direct connection to the tragedy of the Twin Towers, but I had at least one student who did, who knew someone on one of the planes. If it isn't already obvious, be aware that some of our students - or coworkers - may have closer connections and may still struggle with memories of the incident, of loved ones who were closer to the Towers, or even - like me - have memories of being in the Towers and being two or three relationship steps away from the tragedy.

Administrators go to camp at WSU for STEM refresher course

Administrators?

The summer camps are about a lot more than administrators. Administrators are, of course, welcome and have attended in the past. We'll just have to change a few of our jokes.

This article from the Ogden Standard-Examineris titled as though the camp attendees are all administrators, but the article itself doesn't mention a single administrator. The article describes a lab in the teachers camp - heat treating of steel; gets a few quotes from the two master teachers and a couple of attendees; and offers up a few reasons why the camp is important.

From Adam Johnston, Weber State University physics professor:

The purpose of this camp and science education in general is to promote enthusiasm for the sciences,” he said. “We would like to see a lot of different people working in the sciences. There are a lot of great employment opportunities, and STEM knowledge is great for future jobs and for the economy. And we believe that scientifically literate people are able to make better decisions for themselves, for their communities and for voting. Understanding science helps people understand the issues at hand and make better decisions.”

Butte, America (part 2 - Montana Resources)

When last we left our intrepid explorers, they had seen the eventual outcome of the strip mining of copper, a toxic-water-filled pit.

Today our scene opens on the pit to the east of Berkeley Pit in the creatively named East Pit (or the Continental Pit according to Wikipedia) where copper and molybdenum ore is still being mined, ground, and purified by Montana Resources who were nice enough to host our teacher camp participants for a field trip. Big, big, big thanks to Tad Dale and the folks at Montana Resources. They were great hosts.

Check out their video of the processes at the pit.


Montana Resources module SD from Washington Corporations on Vimeo.

We started toward the end of the process, in the grinding and flotation plant.

Mike McGivern, in yellow, was our tour guide. Here we started our tour outside the flotation plant. Big thanks to Courtney Young (in white), our Montana Tech host.

Be warned, lots of photos after the jump...

Railcar filled with styrene begins to polymerize in Cincinnati - 8/28/05

The end of August of 2005 saw news in Cincinnati covering a story of a railcar spontaneously polymerizing styrene. The railcar was venting styrene and getting hotter thanks to the exothermic polymerization process.

You can catch a glimpse of the railcar being doused with water from 0:30-0:38 in this video...


The report from isitech's website says this...

The escape of gaseous styrene was observed from a safety valve on a stationary railway tank vehicle on the 28th August 2005 at approx. 5 pm, near Cincinnati at the regional airport Lunken in the state of Ohio. According to media reports, the tank vehicle contained approx. 24'000 gallons, that is about 90'000 liters of styrene. The tank vehicle belongs to a company that has been admitted to official quotation on the stock exchange with an ISO 9000 certification and a safety award "OSHA star site".

...

Because the opening of a safety valve requires an increase in internal pressure, one can assume that an exothermic (heat generating) reaction had taken place inside the tank. In the case of styrene, a well known reaction is the polymerization of styrene to polystyrene.
A stabiliser like 4-tertiary-butyl-catechol (TBC), which prevents polymerization, is usually added to styrene for transport and storage. In order for TBC to be effective, it is necessary that a certain concentration of oxygen is dissolved in the styrene solution besides TBC. Should no stabiliser be present or it has been used up, styrene can polymerize with oxygen to form a styrene-oxygen copolymer, benzaldehyde or formaldehyde.

Between 10-15 ppm TBC is added to styrene. Under ideal conditions, 10-15 ppm TBC stabilises styrene for approximately 3 months. The TBC can be used up faster according to oxygen concentration, temperature, humidity, rust or other impurities in the tank. In addition, a minimal oxygen concentration of 10 ppm. and preferentially of 15-20 ppm. is necessary.

The higher the temperature is, the faster the TBC concentration falls.

...

According to media reports, the tank wagon had been stationary at the site of the accident for 9 months. Due to this lengthy stationary period, the polymerisation would be likely to account for the rise in pressure.

Aristatek's website uses the incident as an example of a training document...

What caused the rail car to vent styrene monomer? The venting occurred because of an increase in pressure inside the tank. The website listed above explained that the increase in pressure was due to heat generated within the tank due to polymerization of the styrene monomer within the tank. Normally, a chemical inhibitor such as 15 parts per million of 4-tertiary-butyl-catechol (TBC) is added to the tank during transport to prevent polymerization. This inhibitor scavenges rust and other impurities within the tank that can act to initiate polymerization. Oxygen (about 10 ppm) is also required to be dissolved in the styrene monomer for the TBC to do its job. The TBC concentration decreases with time as it scavenges impurities; 15 ppm concentration would probably be mostly used up in possibly 3 months (even less time if ambient temperatures are warmer). The website mentioned that the rail car had been sitting there for 9 months. Without the inhibitor, the styrene monomer can polymerize with oxygen to form a styrene-oxygen copolymer or benzaldehyde and/or formaldehyde and polymerize with the release of heat. The heat further accelerates the polymerization releasing more heat. Fortunately, no explosion occurred, the chemical was not released all at once, and people were evacuated to safe distances. The safety valve did t he job it was designed to do, to release excessive pressure buildup slowly avoiding a catastrophic explosion. The error was that the rail car was allowed to sit there for nine months, during which time the inhibitor became depleted.

The Cincinnati Enquirer's website provides a day-by-day recounting of the entire event...

Westlake Chemical Company, the responsible party, did remove the railcar once the polymerization was complete and set up a claims process for local residents. One nearby resident died a few weeks later, and his death was attributed to inhalation of the styrene gas. Settlements ended up topping over $2 million (plus $400,000 for the city of Cincinnati, itself.)

This might've been bigger national news if it weren't for a little storm that hit New Orleans at about the same time...

These people love to collect radioactive glass. Are they nuts?

Far be it from me to claim that someone is nuts because of what they collect.

I have full three display cases of Lego minifigures hanging on my wall. If you happen to want to hang out with radioactive glass in your display cases, who am I to judge?

I've hard of vaseline glass and knew it was also known as uranium glass because of the uranium oxide in the glass. I hadn't heard of it being called canary glass, though, and I was never quite sure of the radiation dosage that any collectors would be receiving.

Luckily, this article, from Collectors Weekly clears that right up.

MaterialsScience2000

I love seeing the crystal grains develop as the acid etches the metal surface. It's just gorgeous.

The eight-and-a-half-minute video above shows the preparation of a few different samples, some of which show crystals large enough to be seen by the human eye as well as a few samples that have been etched through natural processes over time.

MaterialsScience2000 has ten total videos posted, and many of them are worth a watch, including a thorough explanation of the tests being preformed. Check out these, too...

A36 Steel Tensile Test

At about eight seconds in, I can start to see the necking which causes the force to concentrate on that area which causes further necking which causes force concentration...back and forth until catastrophic failure nearly at the end of the video.

Not much else to say here but that it's a nice video of a tensile test being performed. I just wish we could get a concurrent graph of the stress/strain curve being generated.

Here's another tensile test from a bit further away...

Playing with Polymers: make slime at home

Maki Naro is a webcomic artist with a blog on Popular Science's website. On the blog recently, Maki posted these instructions and explanations for making 'slime' from Elmer's glue, borax, water, and food coloring. (They're available in higher resolution over there.)

The instructions aren't anything revolutionary, nor is the explanation, but I look at this like Greg Louganis who always included an incredibly simple dive in his competition routine. Yes, the degree of difficulty was low, but he executed it perfectly.

Nice job, Maki.

Where are the ASM camps in 2014?

The 2014 ASM Teachers Camps schedule is now up and viewable online.

So, of course, I made a map...because I'm a visual learner, doncha know...

Updates: Montgomery Co added 1/23/14...Howard University, Meridian High School, Millersville University dates updates 2/16/14...Weber State and Utah University confirmed 4/8/14...Mississippi State date updated 4/26/14

Exocharmic Reactions

Thanks to Bassam Shakhashiri for the pic and for including the Ramette article in his outstanding series of demo books.

"The joy of chemical experimentation has been well recognized, at least from the early days of alchemy, and our appreciation of chemical charm probably dates back to the prehistoric discovery of ways to make and control fire. Therefore, it seems useful to coin the term exocharmic reaction (from the Greek exo-, turning out) and, particularly in our role as chemistry teachers, to seek and share techniques for liberating as much charm as possible from the chemical changes our students in the laboratory and classroom demonstrations." ~ Richard W. Ramette

The above few sentences come from Richard W. Ramette's article in the January, 1980 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. You can get the full test on the ACS website (for a fee) or - as I found the article - in the front of Bassam Shakhashiri's of Chemical Demonstrations: a handbook for teachers of chemistry, vol 1 (the full article of which Google has posted for free).

The gist of the article - which really should be read in its four-page entirety - is that the most exocharmic reactions must be presented with content connections, enough prior knowledge (but not too much), safe methods, and the proper attitude and showmanship from the demonstrator.

There's a lot more to it, but I'll let you read the full text for yourself.

There's also a nice, follow-up article from George M Bodner from a 2001 volume of University Chemistry Education from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

STEEL: From Start to Finish

The music moves the story along nicely, but the images of massive, molten pours of iron sluicing through a steel mill doesn't really need much jazzing up.

This video provides an overview from the mining of iron ore, the smelting of ore into pure iron, the addition of non-iron ingredients into the steel melt, casting the steel, forging and de-scaling the steel sheets, heat- and cold-treating the steel, and coating some of the steel for various applications.

Honestly, it's a great overview of the processes involved.

Extraction of Iron (Blast Furnace)

Any chance somebody out there would want to add in a little Ennio Morricone music overtop of this video to make things a bit more exciting?

The process in reality (as shown below) is just a bit more exciting, but the chemistry explained above is fairly spot on (if a bit simplified) as to what's happening in the furnace itself.

Bridge to Classroom

My bridge didn't survive the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault. I'm not surprised about that, though, since Warren Zevon has been telling me to for years that California is going to slide into the ocean. I apparently helped a digital version to speed up that slide a bit thanks to Bridge to Classroom, an engineering simulation in which you (or your students) can test various bridge designs (beam girder, steel arch, cantilever-truss, suspension, and cable-stay) with a mixture of safety features (bearings, ductile materials, shock absorbers, and shear links) against earthquakes of eight different magnitudes after learning a little bit about the challenges presented in the San Francisco Bay.

Here's to hoping they built the real one better than my beam-girder/suspension/bean-girder model did.

Track Features - Flora, MS Derailment from Thermal Expansion Sun Kink

Sadly the video is all animation, but that's understandable considering the derailment mess that would have been created (see the video below).

If ever students ask why thermal expansion matters, here's a very clear example.

ASM Materials Camp 2006

"I heard that...we're going to be breaking some stuff and seeing what's inside of it. That's what I do at home, anyway, and this way my mom doesn't yell at me."

Great summary there, Dan, of what we do in the teachers camps, too.

I really want to get up to Einseman some summer to see what the students are doing at their summer camp, particularly the Eisenman at the ASM headquarters because it pulls from students all around the country.

Blacksmith demo at Eisenman Materials Camp 2012

Yeah, most of the time when we have high school students forging something, we aren't happy.

Here, though, we're thrilled to see the students at the Eisenman student material science camp doing a bit of forging.

I need to get up to one of the summer student camps sometime to see just how cool they are.

...or how hot in this case...

ASM Materials Camp at Lehigh University

"We just shown them there are all the cool things people can do."

I've never been to one of the student summer camps, but I have tried to get a couple of our Princeton material science students to attend (sadly with no success yet).

They look like fun, though, particularly breaking windshields with baseballs.

ASM San Antonio Materials Camp

Great intro there -"a free, week-long camp dedicated to showing them how to turn ordinary pocket change into golden teaching tool[s]."

Yeah, it's hoaky, but that's a fair statement for what Debbie and Gissel were doing in the San Antonio camp in 2013. It's some nice coverage from the local news station.

Materials camp for teachers recap

Well, of course the teachers loved the camp. The camps are awesome.

I've never been to our Princeton summer camp, but I have worked with Brian Wright (seen at 0:26 and a few other times) who I know has lead the Princeton camp a number of times. Admittedly, I don't know Michael Ireland (shown at 1:26), but I'm sure he's awesome, too.

All-in-all, it's a nice summary of and advertisement for the summer camps.

Fun Science Demos

Dr George Mehler (and ASM Foundation Board member) has worked with Jared Hottenstein and other Central Bucks science teachers have put together a series of science demonstration videos. The videos are geared mostly toward middle school science concepts, but a number of the concepts are ones that I know first hand that some high school students struggle with.

Most of them, admittedly, aren't material science concepts, but they are certainly basic science concepts that material science students would need to know. I'll post a couple of videos that are directly material-science-related (heat conduction and thermal expansion), but there a whole bunch more videos on their YouTube channel, FunScienceDemos. Check 'em out...

And a big thanks to George who came to our Montana camp to record some feedback from our campers for another project that he is working on, promoting the summer teacher camps.

Ceramic Disc Golf Contest

I'm a big frisbee golf guy. When time, weather, and schedule allow, I try to play a couple of times a week, and I've even had a trio of holes in one (holes 4 & 7 at Gardener Park and 17 at Winton Woods).

Admittedly, though, I have never tried to play frisbee golf with a ceramic disc. I'm more of a Roc guy, myself.

Keramos, the American Ceramics Society, is sponsoring a contest to build a ceramic disc golf disc for the fall MS&T conference in Pittsburgh in October. The goal is to build a disc that will hold together and hit the basket from the furthest distance away (three tires from each distance - kind of like pole vault), so there's a bit of disc golf skill involved, too.

Check out the rules online or above.

Scientists Develop Bioplastics from Food Scraps

I prefer my fruit rollups in colors other than red, personally.

I know that's not a fruit rollup there in the picture, but it looks a heck of a lot like a fruit rollup.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying...

One of the things that we point out in our summer material science workshops is that polymers might be the perfect material because they have good long-term stability, not corroding (though there are some UV issues involved, admittedly).

And then we immediately point out that polymers might not be the perfect material for exactly those same reasons. See, the polymers are going to be around far longer than we want them to be in many cases, sometimes even building up in the oceanic doldrums into gyres of debatable density.

But bioplastics, most of which are biodegradeable, tend to have the drawback that they require repurposing the production yield of agricultural land currently being used for - you know - feeding people. It would be far better if we could maybe take food waste that we already have, that we're just going to chuck into a landfill somewhere or - if we're lucky - maybe compost it.

That's just what a team of researchers from Italy have been working to do, producing plastics from spinach, rice, parsley, and cocoa pod husks...and apparently it works.

Check out the details over at IFLscience.com, iit.it, Science Alert, New Scientist, and the original ACS publication.


http://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/scientists-develop-bioplastic-food-scraps

How to Change a Water Heater Anode Rod

I love me some Rich Trethewey.

Here Rich gives us a quick lesson in the anatomy of a hot water heater and - more importantly for materials science - the anode. He does a wonderful job explaining what an anode is (the sacrificial part of the heater) and describes it as being made of the 'least noble metal that we can put in [the heater]".

He also does a great job actually showing us how to replace an anode rod. He doesn't, however, address the question asked of where to buy a new anode.

Optimal Can Dimensions

DataGenetics took a quick look at why cans (metal cans, like tin cans, but we know they're mostly all steel nowadays) are the shapes that they are.

There's some math involved - calculus, natch - to find the optimum point at which the least surface area is needed to maximize the volume within a cylinder, and the answer that they (he? she? it?) reached is that a can should have the same diameter as height (or a height twice its radius as shown above) to maximize the volume per surface area.

Why then are the cans in their pantry so differently proportioned?

They cover that, too, listing a number of other factors that might come into play with can design.

It's a nice read and very much along the lines of reminding students that material properties aren't ever the only determining factor for production. Cost and customer comfort come into play, too.

Butte, America (part 1 - Berkley Pit)

I just got back from Butte, Montana for our first ASM Teachers Camp under the Big Sky.

While there, we got to tour a couple of places that might be worth sharing.

On Monday night we took a trolley tour of Butte from a Butte High School history teacher, Chris Fisk. Yes, the Chris Fisk of 'saving a pig from Berkeley Pit' fame. (The tour was phenomenal, by the way. If ever you're in town, check the tours out. It was seriously outstanding.)

This post is going to focus on the portion of the field trip that visited the Berkeley Pit, an abandoned, open-pit mine that was operational from 1955 until 1979. For three years then, pumps kept water out of the Pit, water that would otherwise have filled the Pit and filled the various shaft mines loosely connected to the Pit, an interconnected honeycomb of mines that laced the ground underneath all of Butte.

The Pit as we saw it on 7/21/14 on a nearly windless day.

Then, in 1982 the pumps were turned off, and the Pit began to fill...and fill...and fill with water. The water continues to rise at a rate of eight to ten inches a month, headed for a water treatment plant that has already been built at an elevation of 5410' above sea level, the critical height at which water will start to flow out of the Pit, contaminating the aquifer that is the source of Butte's drinking water. At that point, the water treatment plant will come online and maintain the water at a level just below that critical level...forever. As I write this, the water level in the Pit is 5318.01' (check current level here).

So, to our trip...(I warn you, there are lot and LOTS of photos after the jump.)

Rich Earth and ASM Historical Landmarks

I check a number of blogs with some regularity, and most never get a mention here because they tend to head far more toward the realm of internet curios than they do toward the world of material science.

Occasionally, however, serendipity helps me out, and one of those blogs provides something for me to post here. Today was one of those serendipitous days as the Futility Closet blog has a short post on the historical origins of ytterbium, yttrium, terbium, erbium, holmium, gadolinium, and thulium, all discovered from the same mine near Ytterby, Sweden.

That's cute and all, but what really caught my eye was the included image (sourced from Wikimedia Commons) of the ASM Historical Landmark plaque - assumedly from somewhere near the mine.

I had no idea that ASM had a serious of historical landmarks, but now that I do, I think I may have a few field trips in my future as five of them are within less than an hour's drive of my home near Cincinnati, OH.

warhol: Oxidations and Abstractions

From http://arrestedmotion.com/2010/06/art-basel-switzerland-2010-part-1/img_0730-2-2/

I don't even know what to write about this one. I feel like if I make any of my typical jokes and chucklesome comments that I'm going to get myself into trouble, and because I'm sort of casually representing ASM in this capacity, that trouble might trickle down to them.

So I'm going to avoid making any jokes today. I'm going to hold them in as long as I can, because you know once you break the seal...

And the next thing you know, you're in trouble.

All I'm going to do is point out that Andy Warhol produced a series of paintings using metallic paints whose subsequent oxidation was catalyzed by the targeted, shall we say, application of human urine.

Seriously...

Check out a lesson plan about the paintings...a posting from Art For Breakfast...an article from Georgetown University...a lengthier post from WarholStars. There's even a full art book on the series of paintings.

image from http://joshuaabelow.blogspot.com/2012/07/oxidation-painting-1978-andy-warhol.html

image from http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/andy_warhol/oxidation.php

image from http://www.danielblau.com/publications/2013/andy-warhol-5/

Adjustable Density Expanding Foam

This may or may not be exactly the same expanding foam that we use in our ASM teacher summer camps, but that graphic up there (something I found in casually searching for 'expanding foam' images - as you do donchaknow) shows something that we've noticed and only casually researched. Adding more food coloring (which comes in water, natch) isn't always productive toward what you want to achieve. In fact, adding way too much food coloring can cause the unexpected effect of less expansion as the bubbles get too big to support the structure and weight of the foam.

Check out Public Missles Ltd's article detailing this effect on their foam. It's the second page of the pdf that describes the effect of adding more water to their foam and why you might want the different densities that result.

What is graphene? Here's what you need to know about a material that could be the next silicon?

Sure, 'the next silicon.'

We've heard that before, and I'm guessing we'll hear that again.

First there was Bruce Springsteen. He was going to be the next silicon. Never panned out.

Then there was Kobe Bryant. He was going to be the next silicon. Never panned out.

Graphene might be the next silicon with a little more research, but until it is the next silicon, let's hold back that phrase a little bit, can we, please?

Until it either does or doesn't pan out, let's see if we can learn a little bit about graphene just in case.

(Here's another nice introduction to graphene, this from CNN.)

PS: Bruce Springsteen was going to the next Bob Dylan. Kobe Bryant was supposed to be the next Michael Jordan.

HHI Forging videos

I have absolutely no idea what is happening in that video.

I mean, obviously, it's Hatebur Hot Forging and all, but that's not a word that I know well.

That doesn't matter, though, because I would watch the heck out of that process for hours. There's glowing hot steel (I assume steel) being bashed with water steaming away from it all the time.

Heat it...beat it...forging!

Oh, and HHI's playlist has ninety-two videos, none of which are more than about thirty-five seconds long, so you might as well watch 'em all. Thanks, by the way, to our guest in Indianapolis last week who stopped up from the HHI plant in Columbus, IN.

Underwater Concrete Pouring

I don't think I want to go diving on those pylons, but I love that they're using the activity series right up front there to protect the steel cables in the columns. See, they make a weak battery, a weak battery, a weak battery where the zinc corrodes and prevents the steel from corroding.

That's got to be a whole lot of zinc being replaced on a pretty regular basis. I wonder how much zinc costs.

Thanks to Ryan Cox for sharing the video. As always, if you find any great videos, send 'em my way.

Dissolve My Nobel Prize! Fast! (a true story)

One of the most fascinating stories of the activity series (because there are so many, donchaknow) is that of the dissolving of two Nobel prizes (the gold medallions themselves) in a desperate rush as the Nazis marched into Copenhagen an 1940. The story involved aqua regia - a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids - and the heroic efforts of George de Hevesy.

The most heart-warming part of the story, then, is that de Hevesy was able to return in 1950 and recover the gold, which he then had reminted by the Nobel Prize committee for eventual presentation back to the original award winners in 1952.

The story is published by NPR who quote Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon.

Chemical resistance of platinum

How the heck expensive is a platinum ounce?

About $1500 per ounce at the price I found online (as of 7/14/14).

Holy crap...and he oxidized it?

I know it's just a tiny layer of oxidation, but that's an expensive demonstration.

It's not as expensive as the one below, though, in which he dissolves the platinum bar in aqua regia.

Gold doesn't dissolve in acid...then it does...then it comes back...

The most potentially expensive demonstration that I've ever done was to take my gold wedding ring (not pure gold, 14K, I think) and placing it in concentrated hydrochloric acid. The activity series says that nothing should have happened, and - thankfully because I certainly hadn't cleared the demo with my wife first - nothing did. That's because I used only hydrochloric acid.

Using hydrochloric acid and nitric acid, though. Agua regia (royal water) will dissolve gold, producing - as the video above shows - chloroauric acid.

To see that gold really is non-reactive in each of the acids (and in molten NaOH, even) alone, check out the video after the jump.

I've also added a video showing how the gold can be recovered from the chloroauric acid.