The World Wide Wasteseries from Business Insider is rich with material science content. You'll be seeing most of their videos on the blog eventually, but I certainly recommend watching them before that.
This video explores a project to jointly clean waterways prone to algal blooms and produce plastics which can then be used to produce whatever plastic products would normally be made from many plastics.
Anything that replaces some of our oil-based polymers - even if it's not replacing 100% of the polymer - is a good thing. I appreciate that the latter half o the video explores some of the more complex aspects of this issue - trapping carbon dioxide in plastics isn't the final answer because it still creates more plastics, the causes of the algal blooms, the environmental costs of shipping the algae and products across the oceans.
It sounds like this is a better option than plastics but that it's not perfect.
The initial part of this video from The Engineering Guy isn't anything new to most of us teaching material science: NiTiNOL changes shape as its temperature is raised. From there, though, this video does a great job showing animations and graphics explaining what's happening within NiTiNOL when its temperature changes.
I haven't heard the explanation of the mirrored or non-mirrored rhombic crystals. That's really interesting, and I'd admittedly like to get some confirmation from an expert that it's not an over simplification.
As always and as we should probably preface every conversation that we have about materials, we should lean into the reduce side of the triangle way more than we do.
But, until we get that perfected, we need to figure out better ways to recycle those materials that we use.
In this video, an Aussie company is working on e-waste recycling, particularly toward the recovery of the precious metals: palladium, gold, copper. The activity series comes in at 2:15 when the narrator says, "palladium and gold are still stuck in the solids. They're harder to dissolve."
He really means that they're harder to react and doesn't explain that it's because of their extremely low positions on the activity series that this is true.
"For the precious metals, you need something with a little more oomph."
Yeah, you would.
This company goes on to use - according to the video - microorganisms that consume and absorb heavy metals allowing the company to concentrate those and sort them from the waste. That's fascinating, and I love the idea that they went looking for microorganisms that had evolved to thrive on mine waste instead of trying to 'invent' a new process chemically. Brilliant, gents!
That doesn't seem like much, but when they go on to say that open pit gold mining nets 3-5 grams per ton of rock, that looks way more profitable.
---
And the the video gets to the environmental justice side of things. There is a cost to our consumer culture. We in the wealthy west just aren't always the ones who are paying that cost.
Man, I hope that some of these phenomenal processes that we've heard about over the decades come to fruition and that they don't all go the way of anything into oil.
I've driven across the Hernando de Soto bridge. It was in 2019 when the wife and I took a vacation down the Mississippi River to see the various flood control measures. Seriously, that's a vacation that we took. Yes, it was my idea. Why do you ask?
This video is more about civil engineering than it is about material science, but around 6:00 there's a good discussion of fatigue-induced failure and how improper welds can lead to that failure.
As I post this (back in July 2021, I work in advance when I have time in the summer), it looks like the bridge is scheduled to at least partially reopen in August 2021. Hopefully by the time this posts in December, I won't have to update it with bad news.
Oh, and that video at 8:58 was taken at about the time I went across the bridge. And the photo right after that was way before I was on the bridge. Neither of those facts inspires a lot of confidence in our bridge inspections. Sorry, Derek.
