How It's Made Steel Forgings

The jokes just never stop coming from How It's Made. Their opening jokes are as corny as Kansas in August.

Our Tuscaloosa camp got to see an electric arc furnace at work at Nucor Steel. If ever you get the chance, do not miss seeing one of those at work. They're stunning and absolutely awesome.

The glowing blocks at 2:45 would be amazing to see in person, as would the forging press at 3:00. Wow...

How honeycombs can build themselves

Image source - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/17/honeycombs-build-themselves-physics-bees_n_3611825.html

A recent article in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface explored the physical reasons behind the creation of the classic beehive hexagons, whether they were intentionally created by the bees to be hexagons or whether the hexagons arose naturally from the physical forces at work within the beehive.

Apparently in this case physics beats biology...

Karihaloo and his colleagues seem to have clinched this argument with their study. The team interrupted honeybees making a comb by smoking them out of the hive, and found that the most recently built cells have a circular shape, whereas those just a little older have developed into hexagons. The authors say that the worker bees that make the comb knead and heat the wax with their bodies until it reaches about 45 ^oC — warm enough to flow like a viscous liquid.

Stupid physics...

2012 Eisenman Materials Camp Lab

This video - published on ASM's YouTube channel - takes a quick tour of the Eisenman Materials Science camp, ASM's longest ongoing summer student camp. Since this camp was first run more than a decade ago now, the program has expanded to more than twenty-five student camp around the country.

The camps are largely run by volunteers and see the students broken up into five- and six-student teams who then work on a single project for the week under the supervision of an industry mentor/expert. It makes for a spectacular introduction to the world of materials science for the students who get to attend.

Check out the full camp schedule and start thinking about which of your students should be attending these entirely free camps.

ASM Materials Camp 2012

I kinda wish I would've gotten to go to an ASM materials camp when I was a high school student. I'm thinking that if I had, I might've ended up heading down a different path.

Not that I don't love my job now. I do love it. Especially if my principal happens to stumble upon this blog. I love my job and my boss.

This video gives a glimpse into the week-long student summer materials camps. In the camps the students are broken into small (five- or six-student) groups and spend the week exploring an group-specific problem. Along the way, the whole group comes together for some materials instruction and a few activities - like the forging going on under the tent above. It's a very different set-up from the teacher camps and one that lets the students be even more hands on.

The above video captures some highlights from and interviews at the Eisenman Materials Science camp that takes place each summer at the ASM headquarters in Materials Park, OH - one of more than twenty student camps each summer. Check out the full camp schedule on the ASM foundation website.

Training Camp for Science Teachers

Image source - http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i21/Training-Camp-Science-Teachers.html

The summer of 2012 saw a number of new teacher camps as the ASM Foundation continued to expand the materials science teacher camps to a larger and larger audience. One of the new camps was held at the University of Indianapolis, and we (I taught the camp that year with Becky Heckman) were lucky enough to get a pop-in from Mitch Jacoby from Chemical & Engineering News. Mitch's article took a few months to find its way into print, but the article is well worth a read.

I am particularly happy about the last few paragraphs...

ASM’s data show that of the roughly 4,000 “graduates” over the past 10 years, about 60% of whom teach high school chemistry, more than 80% incorporate some of the camp activities into their teaching.

Marilyn Weiss, who teaches Advanced Placement and other chemistry classes at Park Tudor Upper School in Indianapolis, says she includes many of the lessons she learned at the camp last summer. Examples include exercises on metal plating and electrochemistry, as well as experiments on the properties of metals and alloys and physical differences between two polymers.

In addition to picking up valuable teaching techniques, Tracy Schloemer, a 10th-grade chemistry teacher at Denver School of Science & Technology, says she made great contacts at the camp last summer. “As a teacher, I find networking can be tough. The ASM camp enabled me to meet a diverse crowd of teachers and academic faculty.” Schloemer gives the camp a thumbs-up and is quick to recommend it to colleagues. “It’s free, and you get plenty of stuff to use in the classroom. Why wouldn’t you want to go?”

Thanks for the good coverage, Mitch

One order of steel; hold the greenhouse gases

Image source - http://www.petrodrillingtools.com/factory.asp?bigclassname=factory&smallclassname=Steel-making

Stepping into a steel mill is like walking into the gates of hell. I can't possibly describe my feelings when I toured the Nucor plant in Tuscaloosa, AL this summer any more clearly.

I don't mean to say that the plant tour was bad or unpleasant, it was far from those. Instead, it was one of the most fascinating industrial settings that I have ever, ever seen. Instead, the heat and fire and sparks and glowing light could only be analogous to our cultural images of eternal damnation in hellfire.

...and it's apparently bad for our environment, something else I got to see in Provo, Utah, when I saw the remnants of Geneva Steel, a cleanup that has been ongoing for more than twenty years.

But I digress...

Today's article - from the MIT website - reports on a paper in the journal Nature titled "A new anode material for oxygen evolution in molten oxide electrolysis". The paper describes a new process of steel making that promises to produce higher quality steel at a cheaper cost and with less carbon dioxide production. Instead of using a carbon to chemically reduce iron ore (producing carbon dioxide as greenhouse-effect-worsening byproduct), the described process initially used an iridium anode but finally settled on a chromium/iron alloy which is, according to researcher Donald Sadoway, is "abundant and cheap."

The connections to our summer workshop are all over the place...

• oxidation happening more quickly at high temperatures ("about 1600 degrees Celsius")
• chemical reduction via the activity series (carbon used to reduce iron oxides)
• electrolytic reduction at the anode
• protective oxide coatings (like aluminum's) on the iron/chromium alloy anode
• ceramics and some metals having much higher melting points than others
• interdisciplinary approach to science ("Electrochemistry is a multidisciplinary problem, involving chemical, electrical[,] and materials engineering.")

It's a great read.

How It's Made - Fiber Cement Siding

I can say that I am a homeowner of a home covered in fiber cement board, specifically HardiePanels.

At 1:03 the video says that water is pumped into the pulverized sand to 'liquify' the sand. Really? In my head, liquify means melting. The sand clearly isn't melting, but it is coming together into a slurry. Is the word liquify being used correctly there?

Production of the cement fiber boards here are conceptually simple - sand, cement, wood fiber, water - but impressively complex in processing, particularly the use of pressurized steam to speed up the cement curing process.