I have just spent rather too much of the last hour and a bit watching videos about heat treatments for metals. some ten years after a colleague "lent" me his copy of Cottrell's Introduction to Metallurgy that took me down such a deep rabbit hole that he eventually stormed into my office with a copy he'd bought for me, demanding his own back 😂, I continue to find this stuff endlessly fascinating. #metallurgy

@sellathechemist Have you ever watched the TV program:

"Forged in Fire".

Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.

@ColinTheMathmo No. I need to watch that. I've just spent too much time thinking about aerospace alloys and now I'm late for a talk I'm giving at Institute of Physics. Yikes. #StrangeIce
@sellathechemist @ColinTheMathmo Dad's PhD was on stress corrosion cracking in marine environments, he ended up working on the metallurgy of submarines, aircraft, climbing kit and oil rigs. I can listen to him talk about it for hours. Takeaway advice: don't clean your safety critical aluminium with steel wool.
@_thegeoff @ColinTheMathmo Aluminium has an Achilles skin.
@sellathechemist @ColinTheMathmo Lovely way of putting it! I did a displacement demo earlier this week, aluminium foil in copper sulphate solution. Bugger all happens, of course, then I squirt in a little hydrochloric. And obviously drop a match in for pretty lights.
Titanium skinned aircraft like the SR71 had a similar issue with, IIRC, scratches from tools containing cobalt? Almost like the Gallium/Aluminium interaction?
@_thegeoff @sellathechemist @ColinTheMathmo
Times like this I miss my dad.
He’d have reminded me what I’ve long since forgotten from A level chemistry.
@OneInterestingFact @sellathechemist @ColinTheMathmo Dad has never really got the more interesting bits of physics, my thing. He's never quite got me to understand the actual mechanism behind "memory metal", which he first showed me about 40 years ago. I think we're both getting the rough idea though...
@_thegeoff @OneInterestingFact @ColinTheMathmo Dislocations are just amazing things. And I was unware of them for 3/4 of my life!!
@sellathechemist @OneInterestingFact @ColinTheMathmo Alpha Phoenix was brave enough to put his PhD viva presentation online. It involves atomic/molecular level dislocations in deposition crystals, and has a lovely shot of an extra-atom and deficient-space meeting and "annihilating" (~35m50s).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiMR6yAFfyA
Five years in 49 minutes

YouTube