Angel of the North

The Angel of the North: Image from Wikipedia

At 200 tonnes excluding the concrete piles used to support it, the total cost of The Angel Of The North was said to be £800,000. That means the installed cost for the 200,000 kg was £4 / kg.

The Angel Of The North owes it’s appearance to the weathering steel it is constructed from, these steels are designed to form a stable oxide layer, with a low corrosion rate across the entire surface. This strategy means that it’s possible to have a reasonable service lifetime with a minimum of maintenance, even an initial layer of paint is unnecessary.

Example weathering steel compositions / wt%

Grade	C	Si	Mn	P	S	Cr	Cu	V	Ni
ASTM A242	0.12	0.25–0.75	0.20–0.50	0.01–0.20	0.030	0.50–1.25	0.25–0.55		0.65
ASTM A588	0.16	0.30–0.50	0.80–1.25	0.030	0.030	0.40–0.65	0.25–0.40	0.02–0.10	0.40

Somewhat uniquely for steels, the initial rust layer protects the steel underneath from further deterioration, eliminating the need for paint. This depends on environmental conditions, too much humidity too often mean that the rust layer never reaches a stable point. This can lead to corrosion and loss of integrity.

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edX

edX.org is a really fun site. I tried this course: CS50 introduction to computer science. It seems like a really good course, I attempted to study it a couple of times and registered for the certificate so I would have some skin in the game, but I still didn’t manage to finish, although this course has a very engaging presentation and it very well made. I think trying to do the course along with the regular teaching schedule is probably a better idea than going self-paced for me.

https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computer-science

I had fun pretending to learn about steel on the course “introduction to steel which is presented by Mark Miodownik. This is a short course, if you want a basic introduction to steel, or to look at some of the mechanics of an edx course this course can be completed quickly.

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-steel-tenarisuniversity-steel101x-2

Finally I followed this course from MIT which teaches computer science and programming using the python language, https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mitx-6-00-1x-11. It’s really a good course if you found you are programming already but have never studied programming formally (or even if you intend to program in future!). It took me a whole bunch of time each week to work through the problem sets, maybe try not having too much spare time for it to gobble up. Problem sets and exam questions are completed in python, I think they recommend the spyder ide, and then loaded for automatic marking.

Now I should be learning biochemistry, so I have this to learn from (and Alberts’ The Cell).

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-mitx-7-00x-7

Atom positions in steel

I was able to make some data sets available this year from work published in 2004 and in 2017 showing how atoms arrange themselves in nanostructured steel (Super Bainite).

There are a couple of motivations for making the data sets available. Firstly it is good practice and makes it possible for others to analyse the data to check reproducibility of my work, and there is also possibility to extract further information. It also serves as a back-up for the data sets by putting them on internet, one of the best back-ups available… 🙂

Another is that, at the time of conducting these experiments a frustration of mine was that there was no [simple] way to view the positions without access to commercial software, for me, that was once I had left the facility I visited to undertake part of the work. Hopefully the sharing of atom position data will become more standard procedure in future, with the increasing sophistication of high-level computing languages and expansion of open software. This may allow new developments in reconstruction of volumes, analysis of the atom positions, and education of users; benefiting the atom probe field.

The data were collected by using a pulsed electric field concentrated on the tip of a needle made by electropolishing the steel sample. By pulsing the voltage both the time-of-flight and the position the projected atom hits a detector screen can be recorded. This can then be mapped back to the sample volume, allowing measurement of the composition of the steel with better than nanometre resolution. The technique is called 3D atom probe (3DAP) tomographic atom probe (TAP) or atom probe tomography (APT). This technique is related to field ion microscopy.

The volume studied include volumes from various crystal structures (BCC bainitic ferrite, FCC thin-film austenite, carbides such as Fe₃C cementite) in the particular steel I was studying (nanostructured carbide-free bainite — see papers for details).

Data can be found here:
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/265717
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/265720

The papers describing the data can be found here:

https://www.phase-trans.msm.cam.ac.uk/2004/atom.probe.bainite.html

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/263230

I’m glad to make these data sets available, and hope they will continue to be available in the future from the Cambridge repository website.

At the time I did the experiments, only commercial software was available to view the atom probe data such as IVAS ivas, but today I believe it should be possible to view the atom positions using software such as 3depict 3d epict.

Employers of non-EU workers in UK

Read Rare Books online

http://rarebookroom.org/

Read pages of books from Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Redouté, Galileo, Copernicus, Louis Renard, Kepler, Einstein, etc, etc.

 

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia from 1665 is one example of what can be browsed.

Example content from Rarebooks.com. A page showing the head of a fly from Robert Hookes Micrographia.

University research and collaboration with companies

This article is a bit confused it uses example of steel developed at Cambridge as the example of a component where University research has contributed to the airplane engine (correct) and then talks about how Rolls-Royce benefits from its network of University Technical Centres (UTCs) (also correct). However I don’t believe that any of the UTCs have competence in steel design, that work was done in  Harry Bhadeshia’s phase transformation and complex properties research group in Cambridge. This shows how Universities and Companies benefit from being flexible in their approach to collaboration.

 

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/centres-of-excellence-inside-rolls-royces-utcs/

 

 

80s tracks

These long forgotten 80’s track seem eerily familiar.