Hydrogen Embrittlement

Steel Absorbs Gas Like a Sponge
Steve Mould

I've known about hydrogen embrittlement for a long time, but I had no idea that carbon and methane were involved. I don't think Steve ever mentions the term 'hydrogen embrittlement'. You have to excuse Steve for his horrible pronunciation of methane, he calls it ME-thane. I dunno, maybe all Brits do that. Anyway, Steve's video is pretty great. He ties several bits of esoteric technology together to tell this story.

At the tale end of the video (14:50) he tells an amusing story about AI scams. That leads into at ad. I don't get any spam calls. My phone tells me it's a spam call, so I just reject the call. Don't know how accurate it is.

Video from U. S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board:

Animation of Explosion at Tesoro's Anacortes Refinery
USCSB

Marathon - Anacortes Refinery, Washington State

Micrograph

Metal Micrograph

The Thermal Spray Guy has a couple of Struers Abramin Polishers for sale. Okay, but what is a Struers Abramin and why do you want to polish it? Struers is the company and they make equipment for examining the microscopic structure of metals. Found the above image on their website. I suspect the actual size of the section shown is about .005" (five thousandths of an inch).

Preparation of a sample for examination takes several steps of grinding and polishing with ever finer grit. They end with grit with a particle size of 500 nanometers. A line drawn on the above sample would hold one hundred thousand of such particles.

Struers has bunch of videos posted on YouTube.

San Cristobal Mine & Carbon Dioxide

Lake near San Cristobal Mine in Bolivia

The screen saver showed a portion of this lake. At least I think it's a lake. We might be looking at ice, we are up around 12,000 feet elevation. It was odd enough to get my attention. Looking at Google Maps I find it is near the San Cristobal Mine. Reading about the mine I come across this odd bit of information.

Silver was discovered at the Hedionda mine over three centuries ago. Repeated attempts to mine the silver ended in failure because of the presence of carbon dioxide gas which caused the death of many miners. The gas continues to issue from the wallrocks of the mine at the present time.

The Hedionda mine was rediscovered in 1896 by the Polish engineer J. Jackowski, who operated the mine from 1896 to 1901 and from 1927 to 1936, after having found a remedy for the carbon dioxide problem. This remedy was simply the excavation of a canal in the floor of the mine workings which allowed the gas to flow out of the mine like water. In addition, mining was confined to work above the adits.

Excerpted from page 3 of a USGS PDF.

 

Fun with Nanoparticles

Silver nanoprisms grown into structural colors by high power LEDs
Applied Science

Some seriously weird chemisty going on here. The best part for me was seeing the tracks on the CD-ROM (just after the 17 minute mark).

Kerosene lamps

I don't know about these two videos, at 30 minutes they are a little longer than the stuff I usually post, and there is something about the presenter that is a little off putting, but I watched both of them all the way through so he must be doing something right. He does do a thorough job of explaining kerosene lamps, including a molecular explanation of how they work, their history and the history of illumination in general.

Why do hurricane lanterns look like that?
Technology Connections

Kerosene lamps are widely used for lighting in rural areas of Africa and Asia, where electricity is not distributed or is too costly. As of 2005, kerosene and other fuel-based illumination methods consume an estimated 77 billion litres of fuel per year, equivalent to 1.3 million barrels of oil per day. This is comparable to annual U.S. jet-fuel consumption of 76 billion litres per year. - Wikipedia

How the gas mantle made lamps 10X brighter
Technology Connections

The book he mentions, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, sounds like it might be interesting. You can get a paperback copy from Barnes & Noble for $30, or if you have money to burn you can get a hardback copy from Amazon for $900. Are you kidding me? Who shells out that kind of money just to get the hardback version? All I can say is that the world is full of strange and wondrous things.

He recommends a video about limelight, but I like this one better.

The Lime Light
Jonathan Bastow
The other video does mention the Charlie Chaplin film Limelight. Must be old comedians week.

Helium, the iPhone Killer

MEMs oscillator sensitivity to helium (helium kills iPhones) Applied Science
Helium diffuses into the microscopic silicon tuning forks and causes them to lose their minds, but hydrogen doesn't. Odd. Presumably, hyrdrogen will also diffuse into silicon, I mean it diffuses into steel, but perhaps the molecular structure of the silicon isn't affected by hydrogen, but it is by helium. There isn't much difference between hydrogen and helium, both atoms are very small, but there isn't much difference between carbon 12 and carbon 13, but corn can tell the difference, so maybe that small difference is enough to bring Apple to its knees.

This is the second time I've posted a video from Applied Science.

Nanons

Electron microscope animation: Carbon nanotubes pulled into thread Applied Science
Watching the carbon nanotubes being pulled into a thread is very cool. It is only a small portion of the video. The rest is Ben Krasnow talking about the electron microscope he used to make the animation. It's an old one, which is cool as well. Good that he caught this machine before it got hauled off for scrap, which is what I suspect happens to most outdated instruments. Nanon is my new word for nanometer. Micron is a stand in for one millionth of a meter, so I think Nanon is a perfectly cromulent word.