The Chemarts Cookbook

From the ChemArts webpage, "[t]he CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives."

ChemArts is a program at Aalto University in Finland pairing chemical engineering and art and design students to explore innovative uses for Finnish plant life (their words, from the video just below).



The program has published a 'cookbook' of sorts in which they provide recipes for 'cellulosic material exploration'. In other words, they have a bunch of recipes using cellulose derivatives from minimally processed materials like wood pulp to more processed ingredients like nanofibrillar cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose along with fairly non-toxic materials like baking soda, calcium carbonate, glycerol, and starch.

The 'cookbook' is broken down with some basic science and ingredient background, methods and safety discussion, then the recipes themselves. The recipes are further classified as hard, soft, transparent, flexible, (3d) printed materials, colouring and dyeing, long fibres from nature, papermaking, and growing materials. The book then ends with some 'inspiration' projects that their students have made from the recipes in the book.

Some of the materials are going to require a bit of sourcing to manage, but the fact that they've published a recipe book for material science exploring sustainable, tree-based raw materials is spectacular.

The cookbook itself is available for €30.00 or as a free download pdf. You can check out some of the images from inside the 'cookbook' on this article (or they're all in the pdf.)

And, in case they make the free download disappear, I've uploaded the pdf to my Google Drive.

BORAX: What it is, how to use it, and how to cook it down PROPERLY

Wait for it...wait for it...

I promise you there's a punchline coming in this one, but it takes about 4:50 of set-up to get to the punchline.

What Trent (as previously featured) shows us here is the results of heating borax as a flux in blacksmithing of steel. He shows, initially, what happens when you pour borax straight onto heated steel. The borax bubbles up and doesn't necessarily stick right when it's been poured. Because of that, according to Trent anyway, some blacksmiths will 'cook down' their borax resulting in glassy beads (as previously featured) that can then be pulverized and used as a non-bubbling flux.

I get the feeling that Trent might not exactly see this as a necessary step.

The science of what's happening seems to be pretty straight forward

First off, borax is actually sodium borate (or maybe sodium tetraborate) decahydrate (Na₂B₄O₇·10 H₂O) (source).

Initially, the puffing seems to be from a simple loss of the water of hydration (the ·10 H₂O part of the formula).

Then the borax seems to decompose into sodium metaborate and boric anhydride through this reaction (source & source).

Na₂B₄O₇ ⟶ 2 NaBO₂ + B₂O₃ 

This appears to be the same reaction that causes the creation of the borax glass beads.

When the beads pick up colors, one source says that the color comes from the formation of metallic borate compounds such as Co(BO₂)₂. That's not relevant to this video, though.

Here we just get to have fun seeing Trent rant again.

HOW ROCKETS ARE MADE (Rocket Factory Tour - United Launch Alliance) - Smarter Every Day 231

So much to cover here.

The quick version is that Destin (of Smarter Every Day) shows us his tour of United Launch Alliance (ULA with their CEO, Tory Bruno. The ULA factory has some pretty highly-regulated manufacturing going on.

I'll go with a bullet point list of things I found interesting and possibly useful for a material science class. Admittedly, the full video - fifty-four minutes long - is probably more than any class could watch in total, but it's got some awesome clips.

• 5:15 - The video cuts to avoid filming "that" to Destin's left and right, items that Tory narrates but that he says flatly can't be filmed and shown.
• 7:15 - Quick discussion of the supply chain for the aluminum sheets that the rocket fuel tanks are made of
• 8:30 - We see the finished product of a machined isogrid panel as well as why that design - not the ideal design - was chosen because of the limitations of FEA analysis calculations in the 1990s.
• 9:50 - Discussion of the safety margins in space flight (1.1 - 1.25 times designed load) as compared to those of land-based transportation (7-12 times designed load)
• 12:15 - Amazingly, we get a mixture of, as Bruno says, "the pinnacle of technology...high-tech, robotic operations but mixed in [with] craftsmanship with people who are very skilled and have great attention to detail." That's amazing that something this precise is partially done by hand. This will come back in a bit.
• 13:30 - Machining, subtractive manufacturing is mentioned...as well as their recovery system for recapturing the aluminum chips for eventual recycling.
• 17:00 - 19:20 - Advertisement for Audible, skip it
• 19:30 - Replacing the isogrid with an orthogrid, saving time and weight, along with a quick discussion of strain and work hardening that happens by hand after the machining. We get a nice close-up of the orthogrid at 21:10.
• 22:00 - Destin uses the term strongback to describe the construction of the press used to curve the machined panels. That's a term I had to look up.
• 22:45 - Destin questions whether the aluminum is annealed, and Tory says they allow the aluminum to artificially age at room temperature after they are slightly work hardened from the curving process.
• 24:15 - Back to manual manufacturing to a precision level that - according to Tory - can't be achieved by automation. "You will always get better results by doing it by hand," he says.
• 27:30 - We see the anodizing facility to create a thick oxide layer for hardness and corrosion resistance. I knew that bare aluminum automatically formed an oxide layer, but I hadn't heard - as Tory says around 28:10 - that the natural layer is very thing and porous, leading to poor corrosion resistance.
• 31:30 - I wonder what the various acid concentrations are.
• 32:10 - We head toward the friction stir welding area, and Tory explains why friction stir welding is the better choice for strength of their final tank.
• 34:05 - Destin 'peaks over there' at a highly pixelated area. Cute
• 36:00 - Quick explanation of why it's better to order one large pizza than to order two medium pizzas
• 37:40 - Another pixelated section with the specialized head of the friction stir welder
• 40:15 - We switch over to stainless steel - half the thickness of a dime - instead of aluminum as we switch from boosters to upper stages. 
• 43:00 - We get a finished view of the 5m composite payload faring and a discussion of ULA having brought the manufacturing of that from Switzerland to north Alabama via business partnership.
• 44:00 - Bruno discusses ULA's record of flying both payload and actual people successfully with 135+ consecutive, successful launches. 
• 45:20 - Discussion of mass fraction (without explanation)...I had to look that up, too.
• 46:30 - Changes coming from hand arc welding to automated welding in the next version of Centaur (the upper stage) to save time (and assumedly cost).
• 47:40 - We get a quick glance of the team of people who are walking around behind the scenes with Destin and Tory. Admittedly, it looks like Tory is taking Destin around solo, but there are clearly people supervising even the CEO the whole time.

In general, I'm incredibly impressed with Bruno's knowledge of the entire process. It's amazing to see that from a CEO. Maybe that's the way that all CEOs are, but I doubt it.

And, if you want even more, there's a second video - on Destin's second channel - where the guys get into some discussion about the rocket engines themselves and ULA's position within the industry. It's less materials-focused, but it's worth watching.

CERAMIC COATING - How It Works | SCIENCE GARAGE

First off, thanks to Eric Moorman who sent me this video. Mad love for Eric.

Let's go through the material science awesomeness in this video about how to get the most durable, prettiest finish on your car.

• The first four minutes or so are all about the causes of the tiny scratches on car surfaces and how to clean the car before applying a finish coating of either wax or ceramic.
• At 4:10 we get a discussion of wax, and the host even uses the word hydrophobic, explaining how the water beads up because of the hydrophobic nature of the wax.
• At 5:10, we finally get to the ceramics, "a non-metallic solid material making up an inorganic compound of metal and nonmetal (or metalloid) atoms primarily held in ionic and covalent (?) bonds." The host explains that those atoms can be crystalline (in various ways) or even vitrified.
• There's an explanation of the Moh's hardness scale, and a mention that there are other ways to measure hardness like via measuring scratch resistance.
• Heck, he even shows a very simplified version of covalent bonding with shared pairs of electrons.
• We get into using nanotextures to increase the hydrophobic character of a surface, increasing the contact angle between a drop and the surface - with a nice diagram, too - explaining super hydrophobic coatings.

Admittedly, I had no idea such coatings existed for cars.