Mining And Refining: Tungsten

April 2, 2024 by 16 Comments

Our metallurgical history is a little bit like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, only without the paper; we’re always looking for something hard enough to cut whatever the current hardest metal is. We started with copper, the first metal to be mined and refined. But then we needed something to cut copper, so we ended up with alloys like bronze, which demanded harder metals like iron, and eventually this arms race of cutting led us to steel, the king of metals.

But even a king needs someone to keep him in check, and while steel can be used to make tools hard enough to cut itself, there’s something even better for the job: tungsten, or more specifically tungsten carbide. We produced almost 120,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2022, much of which was directed to the manufacture of tungsten carbide tooling. Tungsten has the highest melting point known, 3,422 °C, and is an extremely dense, hard, and tough metal. Its properties make it an indispensible industrial metal, and it’s next up in our “Mining and Refining” series.

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The Greenhouse Effect Isn’t For Greenhouses

March 19, 2024 by 22 Comments

Think of a greenhouse. It’s a structure with glass walls that lets light in and traps heat, all for the benefit of the plants inside. As for how it works, that’s elementary! It’s all down to the greenhouse effect… right?

Alas, no. So many of us have been mislead. Let’s rexamine how we think greenhouses work, and then explore what’s actually going on.
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Sprint: The Mach 10 Magic Missile That Wasn’t Magic Enough

February 13, 2024 by 74 Comments

Defending an area against incoming missiles is a difficult task. Missiles are incredibly fast and present a small target. Assuming you know they’re coming, you have to be able to track them accurately if you’re to have any hope of stopping them. Then, you need some kind of wonderous missile of your own that’s fast enough and maneuverable enough to take them out.

It’s a task that at times can seem overwhelmingly impossible. And yet, the devastating consequences of a potential nuclear attack are so great that the US military had a red hot go anyway. In the 1970s, America’s best attempt to thwart incoming Soviet ICBMs led to the development of the Sprint ABM—a missile made up entirely of improbable numbers.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Windshield Frit

January 18, 2024 by 29 Comments

You probably see a frit every day and don’t even notice it. What is it? You know the black band around your car’s windshield? That’s a frit (which, by the way, can also mean ingredients used in making glass) or, sometimes, a frit band. What’s more, it probably fades out using a series of dots like a halftone image, right? Think that’s just for aesthetics? Think again.

Older windshields were not always attached firmly, leading to them popping out in accidents. At some point, though, the industry moved to polyurethane adhesives, which are superior when applied correctly. However, they often degrade from exposure to UV. That’s a problem with a windshield, which usually gets plenty of sunlight.

The answer is the frit, a ceramic-based baked-on enamel applied to both sides of the windshield’s edges, usually using silk screening. The inner part serves as a bonding point for the adhesive. However, the outer part blocks UV radiation from reaching the adhesive. Of course, it also hides the adhesive and any edges or wiring beneath it, too.

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Neutrino Hunters Hack Chat

January 15, 2024 by 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, January 17 at noon Pacific for the Neutrino Hunters Hack Chat with Patrick Allison!

It’s a paradox of science that the biggest of equipment is needed to study the smallest of phenomena. The bestiary of subatomic particles often requires the power and dimension of massive accelerators to produce, and caverns crammed with racks full of instruments to monitor their brief but energetic lives. Neutrinos, though, are different. These tiny, nearly massless, neutral particles are abundant in the extreme, zipping through space from sources both natural and artificial and passing through normal matter like it isn’t even there.

That poses a problem: how do you study something that doesn’t interact with the stuff you can make detectors out of? There are tricks that neutrino hunters use, and most of them use very, VERY big instruments to do it. Think enormous tanks of ultrapure water or a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, filled with photomultiplier tubes to watch for the slightest glimmer of Cherenkov radiation as a neutrino passes by.

join-hack-chatNeutrino hunting is some of the biggest of Big Science, and getting all the parts to work together takes some special engineering. Patrick Allison has been in the neutrino business for decades, both as a physicist and as the designated guru who keeps all the electronics humming. He’ll join us on the Hack Chat to talk about the neutrino hunting trade, and what it takes to keep the data flowing.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 17 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Featured image: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ultra-Basic Thermal Camera Built Using Arduino Uno

December 22, 2023 by 17 Comments

Thermal cameras can cost well into the five-figure range if you’re buying high-resolution models with good feature sets. New models can be so advanced that their export and use is heavily controlled by certain countries, including the USA. If you just want to tinker at the low end, though, you don’t have to spend a lot of scratch. You can even build yourself something simple based on an Arduino Uno!

The build uses Panasonic’s cheap “Grid-EYE” infrared array as the thermal sensor, in this case, a model with an 8×8 array of thermopiles. It’s not going to get you any fancy images, especially at long range, but you can use it to get a very blocky kind of Predator-vision of the thermal radiation environment. It’s a simple matter of hooking up the Grid-EYE sensor to the Arduino Uno over I2C, and then spitting out the sensor’s data in a nice visual form on a cheap TFT screen.

It’s a great introduction to the world of thermal imaging. There’s no better way to learn how something works by building a working example yourself. We’ve featured a few similar projects before, too; it’s all thanks to the fact that thermal sensors are getting cheaper and more accessible than ever!

How Germany’s Troubled Pebble Bed Reactor Came Of Age In China

December 14, 2023 by 57 Comments

Although the concept of nuclear fission is a simple and straightforward one, the many choices for fuel types, fuel design, reactor configurations, coolant types, neutron moderator or reflector types, etc. make that nuclear fission reactors have blossomed into a wide range of reactor designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The story of the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is among the most interesting here, with its development winding its way from the US Manhattan Project over the Atlantic to Germany’s nuclear power industry during the 1960s, before finding a welcoming home in China’s rapidly growing nuclear power industry.

As a reactor design, PBRs do not use fuel rods like most other nuclear reactors, but rather spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’) that are inserted at the top of the reactor vessel and extracted at the bottom, allowing for continuous refueling, while helium acts as coolant. With a strong negative temperature coefficient, the design should be extremely safe, while providing high-temperature steam that can be used for applications that otherwise require a coal boiler or gas turbine.

With China recently having put its twin-PBR HTR-PM plant into commercial operation, why is it that it was not the US, Germany or South Africa to first commercialize PBRs, but relative newcomer China?

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