Understanding Metals

Well, that just about covers the entirety of our metals chapter for both our summer camp and our year-long material science course.

If my students could understand the totality of this seventeen-minute video, they would rock my end of chapter test. It covers...

• BCC/FCC/HCP
• crystalline v amorphous
• slip planes
• defects - point, line, and screw
• grains and grain boundaries
• cold working / work hardening
• alloying - both substitutional and interstitial
• heat treating
• two-phase alloys & precipitation hardening
• the iron/carbon eutectic diagram with ferrite and austenite

Thankfully the video is incredibly well laid out, animated, and presented. This would make a great end of the chapter review for students to watch.

Why are metals so stretchy? (2^13 sub special)

Very few videos leave me with my jaw hanging open, but this is one of them.

Do yourself a favor and skip to 5:10 in the video if you haven't already. Watch from there until 8:40.

That's the meat of today's video. 

That's the good stuff.

That's by far the best explanation and visual of how dislocations allow bulk metals to bend while still maintaining crystallinity that I've ever seen.

I feel like I never understood how dislocations worked until I watched this video this past summer.

The rest of the video is okay. The host embosses a copper foil rectangle into a play button and reinforces it with some 3d printed parts and hot glue. It's mildly interesting, but the bubble raft demo is brilliant.

Props to Dr Bragg...and to whoever the host of AlphaPhoenix is. The latter has earned my subscription.

There's good, historical background to the theorization and discovery of dislocations from 2:00 to 5:00 that is worth watching, too, but only after you pick your jaw back up off the floor.