Molten Aluminum vs 'Spitballs' - SO COOL!! (water balz)

I'm starting to recognize that the danger in molten metal coming into contact with water is when there's a small amount of water.

That small amount of water can gain enough energy to boil which spits the molten metal into the air.

Dump the same molten metal into enough water that the water can't all boil, however, and some cool stuff can happen.

For the undying 9/11 MORONIC JET FUEL ARGUMENT

It doesn't take a whole lot of fancy learnin' and figurin' on the back of an envelope (like Grandpa used to do) to prove that steel softens long before it melts.

We've highlighted the phase diagram of steel, our iron wire demonstration, and even the downfall of the World Trade Center (as the above video references). All three of these posts discus the phase change that takes place around 910C from body-centered cubic (not very workable) to face-centered cubic (far more workable as shown above at 1:45). In the above video, he does the same but using Fahrenheit references.

Theory is all well and good, but proof this succinct and effective is brilliant.

We're going to have to adopt the 'glowing hot rod' drop instead of a mic drop now.

I will warn you that he uses the word retarded at about 0:39. It's not exactly a vulgar word, but it's one that we should probably avoid in our classroom.

Japanese Scientists Invent "Unbreakable" Glass

The official journal title of this article is "High Elastic Moduli of a 54Al₂O₃-46Ta₂O₅ Glass Fabricated via Containerless Processing"

Yeah, Containerless Processing.

Because that's a thing now apparently.

The IFLScience article summarizing the research does a really nice job explaining previous challenges in production of alumina/tantala (Ta₂O₅) glasses was that the alumina would crystallize out of the mixture against the edges of the container long before any substantially homogeneous mixture could form.

The solution, obviously, was to produce the glass without a container...

Glasses were fabricated using an aerodynamic levitation furnace described elsewhere. High-purity (99.99%) α-Al₂O₃ and Ta₂O₅ powders were mixed stoichiometrically with the chemical composition 54Al₂O₃-46Ta₂O₅, pelletized using a hydrostatic press, and annealed at 1050 °C for 12 h in air. Pieces obtained from the crushed pellets were levitated in an oxygen gas flow and melted using two CO₂ lasers at approximately 2000 °C. The melt was rapidly solidified by shutting off the lasers at a cooling rate of approximately 300 °C/s in order to obtain fully vitrified samples. The obtained spherical glasses (2 mm in diameter) were colorless and transparent.

...because that's just the easiest thing to do.

Corrosion will cost the US economy over $1 trillion in 2015

$276 Billion

That's the number that we quote in our summer ASM teachers camps PowerPoints as being the annual cost of corrosion in the United States.

Of course, that's a number from a 2002 survey by the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE). That's almost a decade and a half old at this point.

So I went hunting for a more current number.

G2MT laboratories - out of Houston and describing themselves as 'not just a lab: the next generation of metallurgy' - posted a fairly comprehensive analysis that says the number in 2015 dollars is more like $1 Trillion in annual corrosion costs in the US. The analysis goes on to explore those direct - and also indirect - costs.

How to Escape from a Car Window (slow motion) - Smarter Every Day 144

I think I've run out of ways to say that Destin is awesome.

It's like he's put together a video to perfectly explain the differences between tempered glass (like in the side windows of a car) and annealed glass (like what's laminated on the windshield of a car).

And he does it all in super slow motion.

I wanna buy his shirt even though I'm a pudgy XL, and his website says his shirts run small. Hence the largest size available - the XL - still worries me.

Is Glass a Liquid?

Glass...pitch...molten magma...all not quite liquid or solid...

The title says it's about glass, but the video actually is more about amorphous solids and viscosity in general. They're concepts well covered here by Dr Derek Muller of Veritasium.

Making SOLID Nitrogen!

Liquid nitrogen, sure. We have that in dewar flasks from time to time.

Gaseous nitrogen, yeah, we have that at all times around us.

Solid nitrogen, though, that we don't get to see very often.

Then along comes Dr Derek Muller of Veritasium with a better dewar and a vacuum pump to produce a gorgeous, spinning disk of solid nitrogen floating like the thinnest, coldest hovercraft in the world.

I've actually seen crystalline nitrogen in my classroom before with a far less impressive set-up that Dr Muller used. I put a 50mL beaker (or maybe a 100mL, I don't remember) in a plastic bell jar attached to a decent but not world-class vacuum pump. As the pressure dropped, the temperature dropped as well, cooling the liquid nitrogen further and eventually hitting the freezing point of nitrogen at low pressure.

The liquid nitrogen froze into a puffy, crystalline network atop the liquid. Then the liquid boiled violently, pushing the crystals out of the way and turning them back to liquid. Liquid to solid to liquid to solid...boiling then calming down again and again.

It was quite a show.

chemed 2013 diy chemistry

Alfredo Mateus is apparently pretty cool - or at least has some pretty cool ideas.

Through the Prezi above first, largely without words...

• The bottle tops - hacksawed off just below the screw top collar - become flexible in hot water and can be turned into keychains. The distorted bottle tops then can show the thermoplasticity when returned to hot water.
• The inflation of the preforms is a bit trickier, and the method hinted at in the Prezi is far tougher to pull off. Check out my other post about a way to successfully inflate the preforms.
• Carving a can with chemistry is a variation on the aluminum can demo using a solution of either sodium hydroxide or copper (II) sulfate to react away the aluminum can. Here Mateus has used this to produce some nice lights.
• The hydrophobic toys need a whole lot more explanation. The carbon compounds in soot are apparently hydrophobic and can make for a very cool 'maze' by letting the droplets roll around rather freely.
• The PET molecules, though, are pretty spectacular, and they're the ones I desperately want to recreate for my classroom. I just need to figure out how to throw around a few pop rivets. And sadly, they're the only ones that are NOT covered in the related pdf of instructions.

Any chance anybody can find better instructions for the 2L bottle molecules?

World's largest gold crystal

Wait, a single crystal of gold?

I'm familiar with single crystals of lots of other materials - silicon, titanium, copper sulfate, lots of stuff. But I've never heard of single crystals of gold.

Now we've got the largest single crystal of 217.78 grams of gold as proven by Los Alomos National Labs. Check their own website for their evidence.

LG's 1mm OLED Wallpaper TV

A friend of mine, another high school teacher told a story that when he was buying a television - maybe about ten years ago now - he met a convincing salesman. The salesman was a former student of his who remembered that the teacher had young children. When he was speaking to my friend, the salesman took his fairly heavy, full keychain and chucked it directly at the screen from about five feet away. The keychain bounced and did no damage at all. The screen - among the first flat screen, narrow depth televisions that we find so ubiquitous now - was covered with a polymer layer that made it fairly impervious to damage.

But even that wasn't a television that you could roll up and hang on the wall like it was a poster.

That's a different beast all together.

The Ship-Breakers

At low tide ship-breakers haul a 10,000-pound cable to a beached ship to winch pieces ashore as they dismantle it. (from article)

Ship-breaking...such a simple term but one that is impossibly complex.

As the National Geographic article with the simple title tells us...

Oceangoing vessels are not meant to be taken apart. They’re designed to withstand extreme forces in some of the planet’s most difficult environments, and they’re often constructed with toxic materials, such as asbestos and lead. When ships are scrapped in the developed world, the process is more strictly regulated and expensive, so the bulk of the world’s shipbreaking is done in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where labor is cheap and oversight is minimal.

The process might be better titled as ship-recycling because that's what's happening with the ships, "Whatever the actual profits, they are realized by doggedly recycling more than 90 percent of each ship. ... Everything is removed and sold to salvage dealers—from enormous engines, batteries, generators, and miles of copper wiring to the crew bunks, portholes, lifeboats, and electronic dials on the bridge."

Steel from ship hulls is harvested in plates. Each can weigh a thousand pounds or more. Using brute strength and improvised rollers, teams of carriers move the plates to trucks, which transport them to mills where they are converted into steel rods for construction.

Only the problem is that the other 10%, the unrecyclable 10% is poisoning the water, the beaches, and the workers along the way to recovering the 90%.

Carriers spend their days slathered in mud contaminated with heavy metals and toxic paint particles that leach from the ships into the tidal flats.

How do we continue with this?

Is the recovery of the 90% worth the cost in environmental damages and lives shortened or lost?

The recycling rate of smartphone metals

We have to recycle more.

The issues inherent in recycling, however, are amazingly complex, most of which - by my understanding - comes to the cost of separation of the materials into individual recycling stream destinations.

It's far, far easier to recycle already separated materials, but it's tedious, dangerous, and costly to pull out every battery, screen, motherboard, chip, and plastic casing. That, apparently is why we send the task to nations where the labor laws are more lax and the labor costs far cheaper.

Thanks, as always, to the outstanding Compound Interest for the great graphic.

"Let's Talk About Stress" by Stress 'n' Tension

(No worries...the video is black and silent for the first 31 seconds...stick with it)

I miss Bill Nye's show.

I'm sure other folks miss Mr. Wizard, but he wasn't my of my era. Yeah, he was on Nickelodeon when I was a kid, but he wasn't 'of the 80's'.

Bill was of the 90's when I was in college and my first couple of years of teaching. I managed to get my library aide at Mount Healthy High School to tape (seriously, video tape) nearly every episode of the show over my four years there, and I showed the episodes that fit my curriculum every year until my students stopped enjoying it...and then a few years beyond that.

Then I hunted down every Bill Nye song parody I could find on YouTube and downloaded them all in mp3 format. And I play them more than I should.

Cancer patient receives 3D printed ribs in world's first surgery

Sure, it's cute enough to print intricate rooks in metal, but it's not like you're exactly saving lives there.

Printing a rib cage for a patient who's about to lose his to bone cancer, though? That's a frickin' miracle.

And that's clearly something that would never be feasible on a large production scale because every rib cage is going to be differently sized, differently shaped, differently damaged.

We live in amazing times, folks...amazing.

Material Uses Insect Technology to Stay Dry Under Water

Let's start with the basics, shall we?

In general water is bad for the long-term durability of most surfaces - especially metal surfaces.

Water molecules hold together pretty well. I've even seen (and highly endorse) magnets that show this.

Water molecules have some volume, especially when they hold to other water molecules.

(Now, the tougher step...)

If you can make bumps...pores...posts...something on the surface of a material that leaves spaces too small for water drops (clumps of water molecules) to go into, the surface of the material will stay dry.

Seriously...like forever dry...not from a coating that will eventually wear off...permanently dry (or at least for four months as the early research shows)...

Left column: (top) Polymer/HFS (NC1) composite coating on aluminum substrate, (bottom) silicon square microposts. Middle column: (top) zinc oxide nanorods on silicon substrate, (bottom) silicon nanowire forest. Right column: (top) silicon microgrooves, (bottom) silicon nanograss.

See those scanning electron micrographs (SEM) above? They're from an article on Nature's website. Each surface was tested to see how long it would resist being wetted when immersed in water (then in water that had been thoroughly degassed - to make sure it wasn't gas bubbles being trapped that resulted in the lack of wetting).

Left: Wetted surface with 25 μm pillar spacing. Middle: Wetted surface with 5 μm pillar spacing. Right: Dry surface with sub-micron pillar spacing. Abbreviations: Frozen water (H₂O), Silicon substrate (Si)

And there you can see their results. Make the pillars wide enough to leave 25 microns of space, get a wet surface...5 microns, still wet...less than one micron, dry...forever dry...perfectly dry.

There's a nice summary of the article on IFLScience's website, but you do, as always, run into the issue of that F in the web address...

Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain - Episode Four: Bob Kramer

Well, yeah, who doesn't turn a meteorite into a chef's knife in their spare time?

Bourdain visits with Bob Kramer, a master chef's knife maker who goes through the smelting, forging, and heat treating of some pretty spectacular knives.

At about 5:38 (explanation starts) then at 6:18 (actual visual) is one of the - if correctly described - most stunning things I've ever seen in material science. Kramer explains that there is a 'shadow' that moves through the steel as it - as I understand - undergoes the phase change from FCC to BCC, squeezing the carbon into the harder, BCC form of iron.

I am currently looking for confirmation from a second source, however, that what we see is actually what Kramer says it's showing.

♡DIY: School Pride Plastic Cuffs {Back To School}

Our students love the shrinky dinks. The success rate is pretty high (not 100% because of the curling and touching that the video maker above mentions), and it's a simple project. There are lots of fun creations that can be made (even entire books about the projects).

I've never tried to twist or bend the shrinky dink when it first comes out of the toaster oven, admittedly. Usually I'm trying to flatten it down as much as possible.

A new type of bandage will draw out bacteria and speed healing

Personally, I like the bacon bandages available from Archie McPhee. I will warn you, however - and this comes from someone who has bought a full box of those bandage tins - that their sterile wrapping isn't as well made as are the name-brand Band Aids. If you leave the bacon bandages for a few years, the wrapping comes apart.

I'm thinking, though, that any bandages made out of the material from this article will be of slightly higher quality than were those bacon bandages.

The basics - including the graphic above from the ACS-published article - are that...

[t]he nanofibre mesh is created using a technique called electrospinning, in which polymer filaments 100 times thinner than a human hair are squeezed out of an electrified nozzle.

The resulting fibre is then coated in compound called allylamine, which Abrigo has found makes a range of different bacteria quickly attach to it.

The bandages have been tested on liquid media and directly onto agar plates but not yet on actual wounds.

From the ACS abstract - and possibly most interesting from a material perspective, "[f]iber diameter was shown to affect the ability of bacteria to proliferate within the fibrous networks, depending on cell size and shape. The highest proliferation rates occurred when fiber diameter was close to the bacterial size. Nanofibers were found to induce conformational changes of rod shaped bacteria, limiting the colonization process and inducing cell death. The data suggest that simply tuning the morphological properties of electrospun fibers may be one strategy used to control biofilm formation within wound dressings."

How cool...

Explorations in Materials Science (discontinued)

About twenty years ago Arthur Ellis, Wisconsin chemistry professor, visited our senior chemistry class at Wabash College. He was a friend either of Richard Dallinger, one of our chemistry professors at Wabash and one of my advisors, or of David Phillips, another chemistry professor and husband of Pru Phillips under whom I did my student teaching.

Dr Ellis presented information about light-emitting diodes, teaching us about p-gaps, n-gaps, and lots of other stuff that I don't really understand anymore but that I need to learn again now that it's in the recently-revised AP chemistry curriculum.

At the time, though, Dr Ellis took some time to speak to me, the lone chemistry teacher in training in the senior class at Wabash. He was particularly excited about the Institute for Chemical Education (ICE) at the University of Wisconsin. They had at that point recently published Teaching General Chemistry: a materials science companion (see the yellow book down and to the right), and Ellis (or maybe Pru, I can't remember) gave me a copy of the book. I filed it away somewhere, kept it in my supplies, and forgot that it existed for ten or fifteen years. Then one of the master teachers in the ASM program mentioned the book, and I bought a copy - with no memory of already having a copy somewhere in my supplies already.

Recently I went looking at ICE's website seeing what was still around there for purchase and use. One item in particular caught my attention, something called the Explorations in Material Science kit (the image up top is of that kit). It looks to be a trio of silicon molds allowing for the creation of nine roughly identical samples for, I assume, subsequent testing. The kit seems to also include a pound of tin shot (at least that's what's available as replacement supplies from their catalog.


The idea of materials samples in identical shapes, sizes, thicknesses, but widely varying compositions (different metals, various polymers, ceramics, glasses, composites) for testing is something I would love to have for my material science classes.

Does anybody out there have one of these Explorations in Material Science kits out there? Is it worth hunting?

The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument

The Washington Monument was capped with aluminum in 1884 because aluminum was among the most valuable metals at the time, and the use of aluminum as an apex for the monument was a way for the United States to demonstrate its material science and industrial primacy in the world.

At least that's the story I tell in my material science class and in my summer workshops.

George Binczewski, however, tells a different story in his article "The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument." In the article, Binczewski recounts the story of how aluminum was chosen, cast, and subsequently refurbished. Apparently aluminum was not the first choice, and material selection had more to do with use as a point to the lightning protection system.

That isn't nearly as exciting a story as the mic drop version of material science. "We have aluminum. You don't. Deal with it, punks. US out."

Sadly, though, it just might be truer. I'm going to have to adjust my patter again.

By the way, you can check out the aluminum apex actually looks - as of the Monument's 2013, post-earthquake check-up, anyway - in this pic (source: Wikipedia).

And here's a look at the most metal version of the apex in its era of having a copper jacket (visible just above at the base of the apex) but without its temporary copper spikes to further its job as a lightning rod. (Source: Phillip C Marshall)

Pic up top is from Red Ice Creations.

Eisenmann Camp 2015 - an inside view

The Eisenmann student material camp takes place each summer at Materials Park, and this summer I was thrilled to send one of my students up for the week-long, zero-cost (other than getting himself there) introductory week of materials education.

Upon his return, Lucas was even willing to - admittedly, at my request - write up a bit about his time under the dome so all of you could see what the student camps are like.

Check it out...

Eisman Material Science Camp

I am a former student of the marvelous Mr. Lonnie Dusch. I love the subject of chemistry, which he just happened to teach, He recommended that I apply for the Eisman Material Science Camp for students because it was chemistry related, and it involved things that he taught me outside of my class. I thought this would be a great experience for me to meet new people and learn more about the subject I love. I applied and was accepted to attend the camp. I went to the camp over the summer and spent one week there. Students were supposed to meet at the hotel that we were all staying at. Once I arrived I noticed just how nice of a hotel it was. It had an arcade, a pool, and its own restaurant.

One of the great parts was that I didn’t have to pay for any of it. It was all free. Getting accepted into the program was considered a scholarship which was used to pay for almost everything during the week. This meant that our meals were free, the hotel was free, the equipment and supplies we used were free. The only thing we did have to pay for was the games in the arcade. After we got to the hotel and met our roommates, we went to ASM material parks. Most of the students, including myself, had seen pictures of it, but never seen it in person. It was an average sized building with a garden full of plants and the ore of almost every metal. All this was sitting under the largest geodesic in the world. It was an enormous aluminum structure and we all stared at during the sunset.

After we arrived we ate dinner and were broken up into groups. Each group was assigned a mentor. After this we went in our groups and took different things apart, mainly by breaking them. Next we went back to our hotel.

The following day we presented what we found the night before from breaking things. After this our mentors presented their groups with projects for the week. All of the projects were determining how and why something broke. Our group’s project was to determine while a weld broke in an odd way during a bend test. We made guesses on the first day but had no evidence to prove it, so throughout the week my group did several different things to prove our theories. The first thing we noticed is that we couldn’t see the fracture surface of our project very well. So what do we do? Break it more of course! We made the metal very brittle by cooling it with liquid nitrogen. After this we took a few pictures with a microscope.

For the rest of the week we continued to do different tests to prove our theories. We had access to an electron microscope which we used to view very small features of the fracture surface. We searched for small craters that would indicate impurities in the metal but we didn’t find any. We also used the electron microscope to determine the type of metals used in the weld through spectroscopy. We used metallography to support what we thought the metal was made of and to look for any weaker points in the metal. We found the different sections of the weld by doing this, but didn’t find many signs of weak spots or any outstanding reasons for breaking. We tried a hardness test to find if different parts of the weld were softer. We found little useable data in our results. Toward the end of the week we still didn't have a solid answer for as to why the weld broke the way it did. Finally we went back to look at our first pictures of the welds. We looked up how a weld was done and how it was prepared for a bend test. We noticed that the answer was simple and didn’t even have much to do with how our sample was welded. The weld was simply prepared improperly for the bend test.

Finally we had our answer and next came an even bigger challenge. We had to share our entire week's worth of research in a five slide presentation. After picking the most important things and lots of rearranging, we finally had a good presentation. We left our work room nervously to go to dinner. We knew we would be presenting after dinner, and not only to the other students, but to all of our parents, all of the mentors, a few ASM board members, and even the president of ASM. After dinner we were even more stressed to present, but when they called our group up we were prepared. After our presentation everyone happily applauded us for having done so much in only a week. I felt so proud to have given a professional presentation to several professional people, and to have them accept what we found.

Although our main project took up most of our time it wasn't all we worked on. We also had many different activities throughout the week. We did metal castings with pewter, and later sand castings with aluminum. We used liquid nitrogen to make ice cream and blow up bottles. We even got to try blacksmithing. We had a pool party one evening, and a few people played pool each night.

My favorite part of the week was getting to meet all the people there. In school I’m used to being in groups and being the only one who did any work, but it was the opposite here. Everyone in my group put in a great deal of effort and worked hard. People also came from all over the U.S. and even from another country. My roommate was from california and another student was all the way from Germany. The mentors were from several different places too too. Everyone there was extremely friendly and helpful. Everyone got along well and helped each other. I made many new friends who I know I will never forget.

The Eisman Material Science Camp was an amazing experience and I’m extremely happy to have been a part of it. I’m thankful that Mr. Dusch recommended me to apply to it. I learned a great deal while I was at the camp, and now have experience working in a real laboratory. I may even try to return as a mentor in the future.

Big thanks to Lucas (for the story and for the kind words). Check out some photos of Lucas (no, I won't tell you which one he is, sorry) and the rest of the campers thanks to ASM's Facebook page over at the album I gathered and posted.

ESG Secure glass video

What does that guy have against that panel of glass?

Doesn't he understand that he can just slide the aluminum frame out of the way and get to the bricks underneath?

Heck, he could probably just undo the C-clamps, slip the 2x4 blocks, and shift the glass panel off to the side.

ESG glass has all sorts of product options including their Secure line, shown up above. They describe themselves as "the UK's premiere glass processor, toughener, and laminator for the professional trade."

I see all sorts of cool material science happening in that sentence.

3D printing materials: plastics, metals, ceramic, and more - Shapeways

 
3d printing allows for some pretty amazing, intricate products, things that could never be made from casting or forging or just about any other method than via 3d printing.

Only I'm not an expert 3d printer.

But Shapeways is a company of expert 3d printers ready to print up whatever you can dream up in just about any material you can dream up. And they have a page listing all sixteen materials they can print in with good comparisons of their various strengths and weaknesses.


They have a lot of pretty amazing products available, and you can have a whole lot of them printed to order in a whole lot of different materials.

Want a very cool ruler in plastic? A deathly hallows pendant in sixteen different metals? A heart/apple sculpture in what they call sandstone? A $61,662 platinum mosaic egg? Or about ten thousand other things all 3d printed to order...

Slicing ice with your fingers (and a bit of graphene)

The 'knife' can't possibly be a single layer of carbon atoms, right? I can see the 'knife', so it clearly must be more than one atom thick (as the video says at 0:55, it's a quarter of an inch thick.)

How is it, then, graphene? Is graphene truly graphene is it's multiple layers thick?

Graphene is one layer thick, but if you stack those multiple layers, don't you get good ol' graphite?

Is graphene really that awesome a conductor of heat? Apparently, yeah.

Bulletproof glass | Outrageous Acts of Science

I do believe it goes without saying, "don't try this at home."

At 1:40 the host of Outrageous Acts of Science goes through the idea of bulletproof glass, alternating layers of glass and polycarbonate.

Then, at 1:55 we get the money quote, "composites are used when you want the properties of two different materials, and you want to put them together for different purposes."

3D Printing In Glass

Holy crap is that awesome or what?

I've seen 3d printing with polymers, chocolate, cement, metals, sugar, even poop (don't ask), but glass clearly is off limits because of the required high temperatures.

Right?

Nope...

The above video goes through watching an object from computer-aided design through glass melt to printing and annealing, resulting in gorgeous works of art.

The video below explains the process a little more than does the wordless video above.

Making silica aerogel at home

I've mentioned my lack of success with owning aerogel before. I can't even imagine what it would take to make some of my own - nor how awesome it would be to do so.

Yeah, this video goes through the process step by step, but it also uses a bunch of chemicals and equipment that I very much don't have.

Cool to see, though, just how aerogel is made.

'Smart implants' dissolve after healing - Science Nation

I don't get what's so impressive. I implant ice cream directly into my body with some frequency, and my body takes care of that all the time.

Too much ice cream, actually...

I'm hoping that they take any magnesium implants out of the bodies before they get cremated... sheesh.

That would be pretty cool, though, if medical implants could be absorbed into the body after the structural support is necessary.

Clean Cut Metal Works

That's certainly one way to make a rainbow permanent.

This series of photographs of gorgeous welds (rainbows caused by layers of oxidation) was attributed to the same metal artist who makes sculptures are Clean Cut Metal Works.

I'm skeptical because none of the work on CCMW looks anything like the photos above (gorgeous thought they may be in their own rights. Admittedly, I have zero experience trying to weld anything together (though I've done some very basic soldering).

If anything, those above look more like the ones on TheFabricator website.

Never let a [material scientist] read your romance novel

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

DIY Fashion ♥ Toothbrush Bracelets

How cute are those?

It took me a while to get the different between thermoplastic and thermoset polymers down. Then I realized it's nothing but word origins.

• thermoplastic...thermo = heat...plastic = change shape...so thermoplastics are things that, when heated, change shape...
• thermoset...thermo = heat...set = not changing shape...so thermosets are things that, when heated, don't change shape...

Clearly, whatever cheap, pretty, translucent polymer these toothbrushes are made of are thermoplastic.

Now I just need to find the absolute cheapest way to buy a few hundred of these for my classes.

Thanks, by the way, to Jen Donaldson for sending in today's project video.

The power of the mini arc furnace

There is a level of do-it-yourself project that is within my grasp.

Tighten up the hardware on the kitchen cabinets? Sure

Cut down the bushes out front? Got it

Even making the King of Random's mini metal foundry? Probably

But I'm the first to admit that I very quickly reach projects that are our of my depths, like making and then using the King of Random's mini arc furnace.

This one scares the mess out of me, and I'm going to strongly recommend that you only step into these depths if you know what you're doing.

But if you do know what you're doing, the one looks pretty awesome, using a homemade arc reactor to power an arc furnace, producing molten aluminum or copper for casting.

Be careful out there, folks...

Shift Happens 2014

Be careful when enunciating the title of today's video.

I used to show Shift Happens when I taught the ASM teacher camps. It's a nice, tidy, five minute educational bomb, and it spurs a decent amount of conversation about how we need to teach our students, something that isn't the overt purpose of our camps but that is certainly subtly embedded in the course of the week.

But the statistics in that original is nearly ten years old now, and the statistics we becoming dated when I started using it in 2010.

Here's an updated version from 2014. No citations are provided, of course, so take any facts with a grain of salt.

Edisto Island, South Carolina and Alexander Bache's

My wife and I took a trip to Edisto Island, South Carolina this June, camping a couple of miles from the beach in a rented, teardrop camper. The campsite adjoined Botany Bay, a plantation-cum-nature-preserve with gorgeous beach access.

In hiking Botany Bay's grounds, just past the Bleak Hall Ice House, we followed a sign for the Bache monument, neither of us having any idea what the Bache monument was - or how to pronounce Bache. After a fair number of twists, turns, spider webs, and uncertain left and right turns, we came upon a two and a half foot tall, four-sided, low-slope peaked granite monument inscribed with the name Bache and a few other things that meant nothing to us.

Heck, we didn't even take a photo, the monument was so uninteresting and unassuming.

Until we hiked through Edisto Beach State Park the next day, finding ourselves at the education center in the far, western edge of the park. There we found a second Bache monument, thankfully along with educational placards explaining just why that unassuming granite tower was remarkably important and interesting.

I'll start with the informational placards then follow up with my explanation and interpretation.

EPA says it released 3 million tons of contaminated water into river

That's not how the Animas River should look.

No, this is how the Animas River should look.

But then, as the post title says, the EPA released 3 million tons of contaminated water in the Animas River...accidentally, at least.

Another article, this by the Washington Post, does a nice job explaining just what was happening when the accident happened...

When underground water runs through a mine, it picks up traces of the minerals that are buried there, explains Colorado Public Radio station KUNC. When it mixes with mineral pyrite, it reacts with air to form sulfuric acid and dissolved iron. It also picks up other heavy metals, like copper and lead, as well as any of the chemicals that miners have been using to extract the resources. By the time it trickles out of the mountain and into nearby waterways, it’s an acidic, often-toxic brew.

...

The Animas River Stakeholders Group that was set up to deal with the issue after the mines were closed, which includes Sunnyside Gold Corp., didn’t have the estimated $12 million to $15 million it would take to treat the contaminated runoff. And for years, Silverton residents resisted EPA involvement out of fear that the “Superfund” label given to the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites would jeopardize the tourism industry — the only source of income that could replace the vanished mines. A few even hoped that the mines would reopen one day.

Meanwhile supporters of EPA intervention accused Sunnyside of stonewalling the cleanup attempt to avoid liability.

The two sides reached an agreement of sorts this year. The mines would not be designated a Superfund site, and the EPA would provide $1.5 billion to plug the problematic Red and Bonita mine, where polluted water drained at a rate of 500 gallons per minute, according to the Durango Herald.
But water has a habit of finding its way downhill, and plugging one mine often means it simply leaks from others, so the agency had to excavate and stabilize the Gold King mine upstream.
That’s what they were up to on Aug. 5, when the loose material holding the mine together finally gave way. The water that had accumulated in the mine’s long-abandoned tunnels went tumbling into Cement Creek.

“It was known that there was a pool of water back in the mine, and EPA had a plan to remove that water and treat it, you know, slowly,” Peter Butler, who serves as a co-coordinator of the stakeholders group, told KUNC. “But things didn’t go quite the way they planned and there was a lot more water in there than they thought, and it just kind of burst out of the mine.”

And there you go..."it just kind of burst out of the mine."

I've written about the remnants of mining before and was lucky enough to see how it's dealt with at Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, particularly in the Silver Bow Creek area.

In the long run the scars left by our mining sites are going to take a very long time to heal, but it's tough to ever look at not mining because we need what's in those hills.

That being said, often times it's even tougher to look at the consequences of our mining.

If We Want to Keep the Gadgets Coming, Let's Mine Greenland

We need heavy metals. Without the continued influx of Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Kiss, and others like them, our supply of disaffected, midwestern teenage boys may dry up at any time.

(I'm sorry, but I swear that I'm contractually obligated to tell a corny joke at the beginning of every post. Them's the rules.)

This Wired article from February, 2015 opens by explaining the usefulness of many of the rare earth metals (or lanthanides as they point out) and then to point out that current Chinese supplies look to run out soon, America's supply isn't profitable right now, Australia's deposits need to find a refiner, but Greeland's deposit, the second largest in the world, is sitting right there under 1.3 miles of ice.

The article also points out that Denmark's environmental stewardship record would give us hope that the mining would be done in as environmentally friendly way as possible.

I doubt the last paragraph's assertion, however, that, "There are no native populations to displace, no salmon runs to despoil." The macrofauna under the ice may be minimal to nonexistant, but I would venture to wager that the microfauna is pretty well balanced there under the ice sheet.

Until then, I'll go for the fist of rock with lead.

Strong, machinable aerogel now available

I had a piece of areogel. It was identical to the piece of 'classic silica aerogel' that the video shows at 0:20 in the video above.

The Becky Heckman got ahold of it.

Then I had a whole bunch of pieces of aerogel. That stuff is incredibly fragile.

 Must be Italian.

I want Rebecca to buy me a piece of airloy to make up for her lack of delicacy.

Will you sign my petition to get Rebecca Heckman to buy me a piece of airloy? If so, please click the link.

Head Room: The Department of Chemistry Glassblowing Shop

I warn you in advance, these videos contain glassblowing that is slightly more difficult and glassblowers that are slightly more skilled than what we see in our summer workshops.

But they also contain pretty awesome career options for students with a material and an artistic bent.

Face-Centered Cubic (fcc) Unit Cell Earrings for Material Scientists

Yeah, it might be worth buying these $16, face centered cubic unit cell earrings (made of nylon impregnated with aluminum - an fcc metal, itself - particles), but really only if you had a friend who wore them at the same time so you could put your heads together to show how they repeat to form the face centered cube.

Or you could take 'em off and put them right up next to each other, but who wants to go through the effort of taking earrings on and off to teach? Isn't that why we have unions so we don't have to do that anymore?

Oh, and I don't understand how this person doesn't also have at least body centered cubic, simple cubic, and hexagonal close packed earrings.

Or tongue studs.

Maybe stick pins for eyebrow piercings.

I'd buy a couple of those.

2015's summer ASM teacher camps

Last summer when I made the map of summer camps, I had to pay $10 a month for get access so I could add in enough layers to get each week's camps to be a different color...because that's how I wanted the map to look.

This summer, though, it appears that Google has shifted to a free service with - if not unlimited layers - at least enough free layers for my needs.

Check out the full map if the above embed doesn't work for you.

And, now that you've checked out the above map, head over to the ASM Educational Foundation website and sign the heck up.

Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development

Teaching the teachers: how a unique summer program is helping Tennessee teachers tackle science instruction.
Posted by Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development on Wednesday, July 29, 2015

It's always nice to hear good things about our summer teacher camps, especially from folks who aren't part of the program...like when the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Congrats to Lisa and Ogiemwonyi and Mort Schaffer who took our show on the road to Spring Hill, TN to not a high school or exactly a university but rather the Northfield Workforce Development and Conference Center.

10 mind-blowing man-made materials

Admit it, you're every bit as susceptible to list videos (and internet posts) as I am.

We all must be, otherwise we'd probably lose a third of the internet and be left with just cat videos and pictures of pretty people.

This video is severely lacking in detail for each of the "ten mind-blowing man-made materials", but it would be a great starting point to get your class thinking about the Materials Choice Award.

Drought taking toll on SF's aging sewage system

I am going to eschew any jokes here.

No jokes about this situation stinking...no gags about gagging...no chuckles about rotting eggs...

Honestly, though, the idea that decreased water usage in our flushing habits could be bad for the cement in the sewers (less water with the same volume of 'organic matter' means more hydrogen sulfide produced in the pipes) is stunning to me.

Check out all of the filthy details on KPIX's website.

Shimmery sea sapphire disappears in a flash

An invisible car, I don't get.

An invisible animal, I get. That would be the best camouflage ever, just turn slightly to the side and go all Kate Moss on your predators.

The color is due entirely to the distance between crystals in the sea sapphire's back, causing it to look blue when seen directly on but to shift its 'color' appearance into the ultraviolet range when it tilts slightly and shortens that wavelength.

The full science is summarized in an article in New Scientist and originally in Journal of American Chemical Society.

How to make the mini metal foundry

There's pretty much nothing better than melting metal in the backyard (or maybe on the patio, wouldn't want to set the dry grass on fire out there, folks). And aluminum isn't a bad choice since it has a relatively low melting point for a metal.

Plus, lots of us have ready supplies of aluminum just sitting around in the recycling bin (because we wouldn't ever throw an aluminum can away, would we?)

In this trilogy of videos, the King of Random shows us how to make a backyard foundry, melt and purify aluminum, and then cast something via lost foamboard casting.

Looks like a blast.

Using bacteria to make self-healing conrete

Poop has been useful for a long, long time. As a long ago resident of Terre Haute, I know that.

Heck, it's even been a building material before, but the use of bacteria that produce a waste product of limestone to 'heal' concrete is brilliant. Once the bacteria - encased in the cement - is rehydrated, it releases calcite which seals up the crack, sending the bacteria back into hibernation.

Thanks to Andrew Fishback, one of our Cincinnati campers, for sending this my way.

Fountains of Chain: Science Take: The New York Times

I've never tried to demonstrate the bead chain demonstration (available from Educational Innovation for about $20, though I'll admit that I'm looking for longer, cheaper beaded chains) from more than a couple of feet off the ground. That height gives a jump out of the beaker of about five inches or so. Supposedly, though, a longer drop (from a balcony, a second or third story, even) will provide an even higher jump out of the container.

Why, however, does it provide that jump above the lip of the container? That's a little more complicated.

The video above says it explains that jump, but I got a heck of a lot more out of the video below.

Today's material science quote...

Today's material science quote from master teacher, Rebecca Heckman  (shown above moments after the quote)...

I'm betting that in the future, we'll still be using stuff made of things. 

Carbon-fiber epoxy honeycombs mimic the material performance of balsa wood

Balsa wood?

Seriously, the blades of modern windmills are filled with frickin' balsa wood?

That's the fancy level of modern technology that we're working with to replace coal and natural gas and hydroelectric power?

It's not really a surprise that materials engineers are looking to replace balsa wood with something a little more reliable.

Check out all the details in the article or see the research group's video above.

Memory alloy that bounces back into shape 10 million times

Admittedly, I'm a bit far from testing any of my samples of NiTiNOL ten million times, so I can't guarantee that my metal samples don't survive ten million cycles.

Professor Manfred Wuttig, however, seems able to make an actual claim that his new memory alloy (NiTiNOL doped with some copper), can survive ten million cycles.

And that's certainly something. In fact, it's the kind of something that makes a memory alloy far more useful. See, most memory alloys return to their shape above their transition temperature, but every transition sees the sample adding dislocations to the original shape during the transition leading to eventual functional fatigue and a change in the transition temperatures. After only a few transitions, the sample is less and less back to its original shape. A sample that can return to its original shape for ten million cycles, though, is a significant breakthrough.

Check out one of the these articles covering the original research...

• Popular Mechanics
• BBC
• Born2Invest

Where to buy a kiln

At the ASM teachers camps, we use kilns from Seattle Pottery Supply.

We like the front loading kilns and lean toward the 120 volt versions with the digital controllers because they're programmable - allowing for particularly ramp rates, hold lengths, and delay starts. If you ever get stumped, the digital controller looks like this, and its manual can be found online here.

The 120 volt kilns do require breakers with at least 20 amp capacities. You'll know if your circuit has that if it looks like this.

There are other kiln sellers, of course, but make sure to check that your electrical circuits have the right capacity for what you're ordering, that you're getting a front loader (that's the side-swinging door, not the up-and-down guillotine option), and that you're getting a programmable, digital controller. All of that should add up to a good raku experience.

Oh, and while you're at it, throw a piece of Fiberfrax paper on the bottom to protect your kiln from any dripping glaze.

Modern marvels with Ainissa Ramirez: Space Shuttle Ceramics

I think Anisa might be over-simplifying things at 0:44 when she says the thing that keeps the Shuttle from heating up is as simple as sand, particularly not sand as dirty as she shows right after that.

And, at 2:00 when she pours water onto the tile, it looks more like she really pours the water onto the metal ring above the tile. Yeah, the water sizzles there, but I can't really tell how much of the water hits the tile itself.

Engineering the Strongest Foam in the World

I'm not sure I would want the metal of my boat to look like the Swiss-cheese-ish piece of metal in the video still above. It just wouldn't instill confidence from me and - I would imagine - my fellow passengers.

Still, the decrease of weight without subsequent decrease in metal strength is a fairly perfect pursuit for research, particularly as it's being undertaken by Nikhil Gupta at NYU Polytechnic.

Check out either of the two articles that cover the same content as the above video and start getting ready not to worry about the 'holes' in your boat.

• A metal composite that will (literally) float your boat
• One of the strongest, lightest metals ever made is less dense than water

Compound Bars

The bimetallic strip is a tried and true demonstration of thermal expansion. It's available from all sorts of sellers (Flinn, Arbor Sci, bunches of other places). Invariably, though, the bimetallic strip (also known as a compound bar) is exactly the same from every seller. Yeah, the handle changes, but the metal strip is exactly the same - brassy on one side, silvery on the other, curving toward the brassy side.

This summer, though, I went searching to see if there were other bimetallic strips available, other combinations of metals to demonstrate.

It turns out that there are...sort of...

The four bars above are available from Arbor Scientific, but they come with a bit of a warning.

Of the three customer reviews on the Arbor Scientific page, one is pretty solidly and simply negative, "These pieces are just poorly made, and do not work at all. They are riveted together and tend to buckle instead of bend."

Yup, you can see clearly that those four compound bars are riveted together not smoothly joined as the more common bimetallic strip is. Clearly there's some reason why the cheap and omnipresent bimetallic strip is so omnipresent. It works. The two metals are - assumedly - easily and permanently joined.

Has anybody bought or used the four-bar set? If so, what are your experiences?

If anybody wants to see a couple of nice videos explaining the compound bar, check these...

Mizuno Grain Flow Forging: Factory Tour

Chris Voshall walks around during most of the video. It wasn't until I watched the video for a third time that I saw his title, "Golf Club Engineer."

Not that there's anything wrong with faking being a golfer or anything. Heck, I've been doing it for years. (ba da bum - rimshot!)

Seriously, though this video does a brilliant job explaining the forging process from billet to primary forging through trimming (and repeating the process) and in explaining why forging works (see the wood splinter/metal crystal grain analogy at about 0:40).

(By the way, that whole "I've been doing it for years" is a lie. It was just too easy a joke to make, though. Really, I'm pretty much just into frisbee and miniature golfing. In total, I think I've played 27 holes of real golf. Thanks, Brian and Brian for taking me out for those two rounds.)

The Difference Between Casting and Forging

That's a simple enough title for a webpage - the difference between casting and forging - but it's a terrifically important topic, so I greatly appreciate that ATC group (which provides both cast and forged parts, so would seem to be willing to provide neutral and positive spins on both processes) has put together a great summary on the two topics.

I'll give just a taste of the simplicity by showing their casting information...

We use castings for a wide range of wearparts and components that are too large, complicated, intricate or otherwise unsuitable for the forging process. We can forge parts up to 50kgs but the sheer energy required to forge larger items make casting a much more viable alternative.

We currently cast mining and earthmoving components to 580 kg. We can cast up to 3000 kg if required. Manganese work hardening screens are one of our specialities. We have found that by carefully choosing alloys and applying proven methods of heat treatment, we can produce castings of high quality, strength and wearability. The casting process better lends itself to making parts where internal cavities are required.
The advantages of casting include:

• No real upper size limit in casting weight
• Large range of alloy choices
• As forgings remain solid, custom alloys are far more difficult to get into production whereas with casting, alloys including Chrome, Nickel and Moly can be added at the molten stage.
• Tooling is often less expensive than forge dies
• Smaller production “runs” required
• Complicated/complex parts are no problem

For general GET as well as large and complex components - casting is a fantastic method of manufacture.

You'll have to visit the webpage to see why you should forge parts.