Casting Metal: the Basics

Casting The Future seems to be a British, casting education outreach program from a bunch of trade groups. The group includes Cast Metals Federation, Institute of Cast Metals Engineers, and ten companies contributing to the efforts.

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

At Princeton we do some simple surface casting, but taking things to this next level would be brilliant. I'm going to look into seeing if we can order one of these kits and get it shipped across the pond to us.

They have also put together the following video explaining why casting is important to the UK manufacturing economy.

Casting vs Forging

Recently I was looking for some videos to compare the virtues of cast versus forged metal parts. Here are the ones I ended up using in class.

That video says it's 9:46, but it's really more like 4:50. The video segment plays twice in the upload for some reason. In this one Richard Hammons shows the virtues of cast versus forged parts, casts a hammer, breaks a cast sword, forges (or lets another guy forge for him) a sword, and shows how much tougher the forged sword is.

There are three more videos after the jump...

Amazing Molybdenum

I appreciate the playfulness of the Manchester chemists playing around in their videos. They show great curiosity and seem honestly fascinating by the results. The above video shows them running electricity through wires of various metals - copper, aluminum, magnesium, brass, tungsten, gold, molybdenum - in open atmosphere.

Even more impressive to me is their tenacity in trying to explain something once they get unexpected or at least curious results. In the video below, they explore the phenomenon of molybdenum wires producing what they refer to as unduloids - regularly spaced molybdenum blobs - on the surface of the heated wire. 

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

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

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

Sacrificial Anode Cathodic Protection Allied Corrosion

This video - without narration - would be a great, short (2.5 minutes total) introduction to how sacrificial anodes work to protect metals. In particular, there's a brilliant animation showing how electrons flow from a buried anode to protect a pipe from corrosion.

I don't have much else to say. 

The video is simple, and I'll let my post be the same.