A little while back, I typed in "material science TED" into the YouTube search bar to see what I could learn. It turns out that there's quite a bit I can learn from that search as there are a WHOLE LOT of material science TED talks.
This is the first result of that search, but the material science TED talks will be posting every other week (I'm interrupting them with non-TED talks on the alternating weeks so as not to get too monotonous around the blog) through sometime in March.
This first talk starts with a natural smart material, the pine cone. The material, as Anna related, is hygroscopic, changing its shape as the humidity around them changes, opening as the conditions are right to disperse seeds and closing as the conditions aren't so right.
Her definition of a smart material is "an object that has a property - like its color, its shape, or maybe its magnetism - and this property changes in response to an external stimulus - which might be light levels or moisture levels...temperature, pressure, that sort of thing."
She then gets into some more 'futuristic' materials than the pine cone: self-healing cement in Egyptian pyramids, quartz (piezo electricity - with a bit of crystal basic including why quartz's unit cell yields piezo electricity), photochromic sunglasses, battery gauges on Duracell batteries, color-changing mugs, mood rings (the last four of which she describes as 'quite naff'), DaVinci's flying machine, shape memory alloys (for changing airplane wing shapes), shape memory polymers (to cover that changing wing shape), quantum tunneling composites (???),
She then covers a few problems with smart materials - slow to react, too delicate, diminishing performance over time, toxicity, cost, issues with upscaling manufacturing - and just handwaves this concerns away saying that you engineers will solve these problems.
My general impression from this is that I want a lot more detail about the 'really cool' smart materials that she mentions instead of so much time spent on the only one she really does explain: piezo electric crystals. The talk is too short for the breadth of materials that she just mentions. It feels very much like a brief survey that might've been better served to condense the intro and spend more time on one or two more cutting edge materials.
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