I'd eat that for a dollar!
The idea that we can create structural color - akin to that found on the wings of butterflies - using a diffraction grating and some tempered chocolate is pretty amazing.
Diffraction grating isn't too expensive, and chocolate is pretty cheap.
Looks like a fun summer project.
(Or you could just buy yourself some holographic chocolate directly.)
Today's fascinating, possible miraculous composite: ferrock.
From CertifiedEnergy...
Ferrock is created from waste steel dust (which would normally be thrown out) and silica from ground up glass, which when poured and upon reaction with carbon dioxide creates iron carbonate which binds carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the Ferrock.
Roughly 95% of the Ferrock is made from recycled materials, Ferrock is both stronger and more flexible than normal Portland cement, allowing it to be used in highly active environments where there is a consideration for seismic activity.
From ScienceDirect...
At 28 days, the strength of Ferrock concrete exceeds that of conventional concrete by 13.5 percent for compressive strength, 20 percent for split tensile strength, and 18 percent for flexural strength.
From the University of Arizona...
"This all started from an accidental discovery in a lab, which is actually the way it usually goes," [Ferrock inventory David] Stone says. "That was back in 2002, and I included as much as I knew in my doctoral dissertation. But the work goes on. It has taken years to get just a basic understanding of the chemistry involved. But this shouldn’t be surprising, since scientists are still trying to figure out Portland cement and they’ve had 200 years.
"I am into this for the long haul. Time is on our side, since in this era of global warming unsustainable processes like cement manufacture will have to give way to greener alternatives."
As always, I am guardedly hopeful but skeptical until I start seeing Ferrock showing up in buildings.
I've been to Butte, MT and stood in the shadow of that smelter smokestack.
The legacy of mining in Butte is...complicated.
Clearly the city wouldn't be what it is without its mining past. The richest hill on Earth made this city - at one time, not now - the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco.
But that same mining industry poisoned the land all around that hill, pumping the products of the smelter as high and far as possible from that giant smokestack.
I've posted about the EPA-lead cleanup from the mining industry before, and apparently Anaconda, MT is happy with how the cleanup is going, but it sounds like some of the folks in Butte aren't so happy.
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| Source - VisualCapitalist |
"What yours is mined." ~ tagline on magnets from the College of Earth and Mine Sciences at the University of Utah
I don't have much to add to today's infographic other than it's amazing to me how much more iron ore we mined than all the other metals combined.
There are certain properties of glass that make this a single-use GLASS FLIPBOOK, namely it's brittleness.
At room temperature, glass is inherently not flexible or workable.
Even the willow glass that our intrepid YouTuber uses in today's video is fragile when bent - less so than normal sodium lime glass would be, but still pretty fragile.
I know what you were wondering: where are all the summer material science teacher camps in 2024?
Well, wonder no more. Here is where they all are.
If you don't know what I'm talking about - first, I'm not sure how you found your way to this blog because I think this is just about the only way people find this blog...second, check out the videos about the camp that I've posted before.
If you're wanting to sign up for one of these camps, head on over to the ASM Education Foundation website and sign the heck up!
In our material science class at Princeton - and in most of the matsci classes that originated from the ASM summer camps, I would imagine - we grow copper (II) sulfate crystals from solution.
It's a fairly easy lab to do, and the students have a high success rate.
For most students, that crystal growing experience is an end, but for others it's just a beginning, a taste of a much richer world of crystal growth.
For those students, crystalverse would be a great resource as it provides instructions for the diy crystal farmer whether they want to grow crystals of copper acetate, monoammonium phosphate, sucrose, alum, sodium chloride, potassium ferrioxalate, or even pyramidal crystals of sodium chloride.
In every case, the procedure is largely the same - make a solution, let the solution cool and evaporate to form seed crystals, continue to let the solution evaporate to grow the seed crystals larger. The great things about the crystalverse website is that it has loads of tips and faqs to help you troubleshoot your growing.
Today you get a whole bunch of videos about making salt (all different from previous salt making videos.)
It seems like such a simple thing - talk salt water from the ocean and boil it down - but there's a lot more to the science of making salt including removing the calcium and magnesium impurities, allowing the crystals to grow to the desired size, and sorting those different crystal sizes.
Who knew that the rate of crystal growth would affect the size of the crystals?
More after the jump...
Self-healing materials could be pretty cool if we get them figured out.
I appreciate the brief dalliance into cold welding between metallic pieces in space - something I've posted about before.
And I appreciate Steve Mould, of course, who sadly keeps his humour (British, natch) mostly in check for this video.
I'm approximately a million hours away from being a structural engineer, but I think I could look at the cracks shown in the video at 6:49, 10:47, and 16:20 and say that maybe they shouldn't be going ahead with moving the bridge into place.
I never would have thought of the shifting forces during the movement of the bridge from its initial fabrication location, but the need to constantly restress the concrete with each move is fascinating. I would think that would require the concrete to be stressed and stressed and eventually over-stressed.
I've been watching videos from Brick Immortar of late and will have another one from the same channel next week, but I could pick probably any of these videos and post them here. They all seem to analyze famous engineering failures, quickly recap the incident, then summarize the causes of the failure.
This one is one I'd heard about and that I've seen discussed as a famous case of plans being adjusted without proper checking to see if that seemingly minor change would be problematic. This is, however, the first video on the incident that I've seen discuss that the original design would have been problematic over time as well.
I'll admit that I do wish today's video would do a little better job of telling what porcelain is rather than just telling why it's so labor intensive to make.
So I went looking around the intertubes to find some definitions of what porcelain is.
From wikipedia...
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including kaolinite, in a kiln to temperatures between 1,200 and 1,400 °C (2,200 and 2,600 °F). The greater strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arise mainly from vitrification and the formation of the mineral mullite within the body at these high temperatures.
From Britannica...
Porcelain, vitrified pottery with a white, fine-grained body that is usually translucent, as distinguished from earthenware, which is porous, opaque, and coarser. The distinction between porcelain and stoneware, the other class of vitrified pottery material, is less clear. In China, porcelain is defined as pottery that is resonant when struck. In the West, it is a material that is translucent when held to the light.
From Webster's...
a hard, fine-grained, sonorous, nonporous, and usually translucent and white ceramic ware that consists essentially of kaolin, quartz, and a feldspathic rock and is fired at a high temperature
From Far and Away...
Ceramic is a broad term for various materials that are made by firing clay or other mixtures at extremely high temperatures. Generally, it includes products such as pottery, tiles, and cookware. The surfaces of ceramic can be painted or glazed to create different finishes and styles.
Ceramics are usually broken down into three categories: porcelain, stoneware, and earthenware.
Porcelain is denser than stoneware and earthenware, which makes it the strongest type of ceramic. In addition to its strength and durability, porcelain also has an extremely smooth surface that lends itself well to decorative treatments such as hand painting or airbrushing. Porcelain is also the least porous type of ceramic material, which makes it ideal for use in bathrooms or kitchens where watertightness is important. Earthenware is the softest type of ceramic material and can be very delicate in nature. It also has a tendency to absorb moisture easily.
Earthenware pieces tend to be thicker than their porcelain counterparts due to their lack of strength and durability. As a result, they are often produced in simpler shapes with fewer decorative details since any intricate detail may be too delicate to survive regular use or exposure over time.
Stoneware falls somewhere between porcelain and earthenware in terms of strength and durability making it a popular choice for everyday items like plates or mugs since it can withstand some wear-and-tear but isn’t overly fragile like earthenware pieces tend to be. Stoneware has been used throughout history for many types of items including storage jars, jugs, figurines and table services sets due its versatility in design options depending on the levels at which it’s fired during production processes.
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Porcelain is a fine-grain ceramic material made from kaolin, a white clay mined in various parts of the world. It is used for tableware, tiles, and other applications where strength, hardness and stain resistance are desired.
Porcelain has an extremely low porosity—it is nearly waterproof—and it is considered to be thermal shock resistant. It can withstand temperatures up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and it does not react with chemicals in the same way as other ceramics. Porcelain can accept a wide variety of decorative glazes and finishes, which makes it ideal for many applications.
When comparing porcelain to its relative ceramic, there are some key differences to consider:
Porcelain has a finer grain than ceramic and its ingredients go through more processing before they can be used as a material choice.
Due to its high degree of density, porcelain is more durable than ceramics but it also costs more because of the processing involved in producing the material.
So, there you go...
Arrggghhh, Action Lab again.
I want to hunt down some of those dialectric mirrors. Their non-isotropic reflective materials sound pretty cool.
I am amazed that there is no metal in the material. It's just made of transparent polymer layers in alternating materials with different indices of refraction.
Argh, Action Lab again.
I don't care for the host as a video host, but I do like some of the experiments he gives and the experiments he shows...sometimes.
This video shows noise-damping tape which incorporates a viscoelastic layer to the tape, causing a significant amount of damping for the vibrations in the cookie sheet that Action Lab uses as a frugal gong.
One of my coworkers recommended this video to me, and I respect the video host's adherence to the scientific method. He tests metal from the same source, prepared in the same way, and has multiple test samples for each coating.
I'm not so sure, however, what these rust convertors actually do. I found this in the wikipedia article on rust converters...
Commercial rust converters are water-based and contain two primary active ingredients: tannic acid and an organic polymer. Tannic acid chemically converts the reddish iron oxides into bluish-black ferric tannate, a more stable material. The second active ingredient is an organic solvent such as 2-butoxyethanol (ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, trade name butyl cellosolve) that acts as a wetting agent and provides a protective primer layer in conjunction with an organic polymer emulsion.
Some rust converters may contain additional acids to speed up the chemical reaction by lowering the pH of the solution. A common example is phosphoric acid, which additionally converts some iron oxide into an inert layer of ferric phosphate. Most of the rust converters contain special additives. They support the rust transformation and improve the wetting of the surface.
The title of this video is wrong.
There is no freezing happening. There is recrystallization happening from sodium acetate dissolved in solution.
That's not freezing - a pure liquid turning into a solid like ice turning into water. The host seems to understand that distinction, but he's sloppy on using the term freezing and freezing point somewhat misleadingly. He also is sloppy on liquid versus solution and melted versus dissolved.
Most of this video is an explanation and comparison of the two types of hand warmers - the reusable sodium acetate solution and the single-use iron rusting type. The video host explains the science behind what's happening and judges the single-use to be the better choice - something that I'll leave up to you.
I use both in class for different purposes and different chapters.
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| Source - xkcd Rollover joke - The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction. |
