100 percent alloy

Great pedantic comment on the Amazon website. Component was made of “100% aluminium alloy”. If people don’t know what alloy means, why are they so keen to claim they are using it? Just because they think ‘alloy’ means it is good.

Fictional Materials: Transparant Aluminium

Transparent aluminium is used in ‘the Star Trek Universe’ to make exterior windows of star ships. This material features strongly in the plot of the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The crew of the enterprise has gone back in time to bring back a pair of whales to communicate with an alien probe. [...]

Tin Pest Observation

The transformation of tin from it’s metallic state into a powdered state is increasing important due to the use of lead-free solders, which are almost pure tin. The transformation involves two naturally occurring forms (allotropes) of tin, the semi-conducting powder form is labeled the alpha-tin and the metallic form is a beta-tin. The transformation usually [...]

Making Podcasts

More podcasts this weekend… Crystallographic texture and intervening transformations Stress of Strain affected martensitic transformation Quantitative Metallography of Deformed grains Steels for Fusion

New Podcasts

I made three new podcasts with Prof. Harry Bhadeshia on his latest papers on transformation texture, the new delta-Trip steels and on prediction of Hot Strength of ferritic steels. The work on transformation texture is from Saurabh Kundu’s thesis were Patel and Cohen’s model has been shown to correctly predict the orientation relationship between ferrite [...]