Indestructible books

A month or so ago, my wife brought home an Indestructibles book. She'd picked it up from our local Target store as a baby shower gift for a coworker and said it was made of a neat material that didn't rip.

I asked if it was Tyvek, knowing that Tyvek is a rip-stop fabric. She, a successful Appalachian Trail thru-hiker knows Tyvek as a lightweight ground cloth, and she said she wasn't sure whether the books were Tyvek or not.

So off I went on an internet hunt...

On the Indesctructibles FAQ page, I found the following... 

What are Indestructibles made of that is so durable yet paperlike and delightful for my baby?  

Indestructibles are printed on a synthetic material made from flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers (getting technical here, we know). It feels like paper, but liquid water cannot pass through it and it is very difficult to tear.

Which then sent me to the wikipedia article on flashspun fabrics...

Flashspun fabric is a nonwoven fabric formed from fine fibrillation of a film by the rapid evaporation of solvent and subsequent bonding during extrusion. 

...and wikipedia links onward to 'see also' Tyvek...

Tyvek (/ˈtaɪ.vɛk/) is a brand of synthetic flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers. The name Tyvek is a registered trademark of the American multinational chemical company DuPont, which discovered and commercialized Tyvek in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

 

Tyvek's properties—such as being difficult to tear but easily cut, and waterproof against liquids while allowing water vapor to penetrate—have led to it being used in a variety of applications.

See the parallels between the Tyvek entry on wikipedia and the Indestructibles description?

waterproof...liquid water cannot pass through it...

difficult to tear but easily cut...very difficult to tear...

flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers...flashspun high-density polyethylene fibers

The books might not be made from the branded Tyvek, but it sounds to me like they're made of a generic Tyvek.

I'm going to take that as a win.

Explorations in Materials Science (discontinued)

About twenty years ago Arthur Ellis, Wisconsin chemistry professor, visited our senior chemistry class at Wabash College. He was a friend either of Richard Dallinger, one of our chemistry professors at Wabash and one of my advisors, or of David Phillips, another chemistry professor and husband of Pru Phillips under whom I did my student teaching.

Dr Ellis presented information about light-emitting diodes, teaching us about p-gaps, n-gaps, and lots of other stuff that I don't really understand anymore but that I need to learn again now that it's in the recently-revised AP chemistry curriculum.

At the time, though, Dr Ellis took some time to speak to me, the lone chemistry teacher in training in the senior class at Wabash. He was particularly excited about the Institute for Chemical Education (ICE) at the University of Wisconsin. They had at that point recently published Teaching General Chemistry: a materials science companion (see the yellow book down and to the right), and Ellis (or maybe Pru, I can't remember) gave me a copy of the book. I filed it away somewhere, kept it in my supplies, and forgot that it existed for ten or fifteen years. Then one of the master teachers in the ASM program mentioned the book, and I bought a copy - with no memory of already having a copy somewhere in my supplies already.

Recently I went looking at ICE's website seeing what was still around there for purchase and use. One item in particular caught my attention, something called the Explorations in Material Science kit (the image up top is of that kit). It looks to be a trio of silicon molds allowing for the creation of nine roughly identical samples for, I assume, subsequent testing. The kit seems to also include a pound of tin shot (at least that's what's available as replacement supplies from their catalog.


The idea of materials samples in identical shapes, sizes, thicknesses, but widely varying compositions (different metals, various polymers, ceramics, glasses, composites) for testing is something I would love to have for my material science classes.

Does anybody out there have one of these Explorations in Material Science kits out there? Is it worth hunting?

Book review request

I would like to add a topic for book reviews to the blog to cover books that could be useful for the teaching of material sciences. The books could be useful as teacher background reading, student reading sources, lab manuals, historical materials connections, anything, really.

I don't, however, have a whole lot of time to do the semi-in-depth book reviews that I would like to do. Are there any folks out there who might be interested in helping out and writing any sort of review of one of your favorite books with a material science connection, something you might already have read and are using in your classroom, perhaps? Or maybe there's a book you particularly enjoyed and that has some material science content but haven't found how to use in the classroom.

I already have a partial list of books that I would like to review (but would be very much willing to add in new ones):

• The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
• Eight Amazing Engineering Stories by Bill Hammack
• The Backyard Blacksmith by Lorelei Sims
• The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites
• Serendipity: accidental discoveries in science by Royston Roberts
• Napoleon's Buttons by Penny Le Couteur
• Bulletproof Feathers: how science uses nature's secrets to design cutting-edge technology by Robert Allen
• Teaching General Chemistry: a materials science companion by Arthur Ellis, et al
• Stuff: Materials World by Ivan Amato
• Materials in Art and Technology by Rohit Trivedi

Shrink! Shrank! Shrunk! Make Stylish Shrink Plastic Jewelry

One of the great attractions of materials science as a course and subject is the number of non-science connections that our students can make. There are hooks for the sport kid (composite baseball bats and hockey sticks), the builder kid (galvanizing deck hangers), the destroyer kid (dropping cement 'hockey pucks'), the art kid (glass making), and most definitely the craft kid (shrinky dinks and lots more).

Sometimes, though, I feel that I'm far out of my depth in that last area. Sure, I can explain to most student - at least to a depth of understanding with which they are comfortable - the concepts of a thermoplastic returning to its original structure/size/shape when heat is applied. I can even demonstrate it a few different ways (2L bottles, shrinky dinks).

What I can't do, though, is to show them anything really neat that I've made with a shrinky dink. I was a pretty linear, geometric kid. When the teachers gave me a blank piece of paper, crayons, and the instructions to 'make something', I invariably went in for a random bunch of geometric figures colored in all the crayon colors - sort of a stained glass mosaic with no planning at all. I do sometimes like how these look on the shrinky dinks because the colors get so dark and rich, but it's not exactly something that's going to hook the artsy-crafty kid into the neatness of shrinky dinks. That's why I was happy to stumble upon this book when looking at the 741s (comic books) at my local library.

This book is filled with ways to turn shrinky dinks into earrings, necklaces, even rings. There are techniques in ink jet printing, plastic sanding, and shaping that are far more crafty than I could ever have thought on my own. It's going to make a nice addition to my classroom library and just might open up a whole new section.

You can check out some of the interior pages and download pdfs of some of the designs from the book at the publisher's site or on the blog of one of the contributors. The book is available from Amazon. Here are a few others in the shrink plastic realm.

And in the interest of going multimedia, here's a video review of the book...