Making Aerogel, It’s Not For The Faint-Hearted

April 3, 2020 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Aerogel — that mixture of air and silica — is one of those materials that seems like a miracle. It is almost not there since the material is 99% air. [NileRed] wanted to make his own and he documented his work in a recent video you can see below.

If you decide to replicate his result, be careful with the tetramethyl orthosilicate. Here’s what he says about it:

And the best part is, that when it’s in your eyes, it gets under the surface, and the particles are way too small to remove. For this reason, you could go permanently blind.

It can also mess up your lungs, so you probably need a vent hood to really work with this. It isn’t cheap, either. The other things you need are easier to handle: methanol, distilled water, and ammonia.

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Color-Tunable LEDs Open Up Possibilities Of Configurable Semiconductors

May 6, 2019 by Inderpreet Singh 26 Comments

The invention of the blue LED was groundbreaking enough to warrant a Nobel prize. For the last decade, researchers have been trying to take the technology to the next level by controlling the color of emission while the device is in operation. In a new research paper, by the guys over Osaka University, Lehigh University, the University of Amsterdam and West Chester University have presented a GaN LEDs that can be tuned to emit different colors from the same substrate.

GaN or Gallium nitride is a wide band-gap semiconductor that has been employed in the manufacturing of FETs that are known to have higher power density due to its high thermal capacity while increasing efficiency. In the the case of the tunable LED, the key has been the doping with Europium for creating energy bands. When an electron jumps from a higher band to a lower band, it emits energy in the form of light and the wavelength or color depends on the gap of energy jumped as per Plank-Einstein equation.

By controlling the current density and duty cycle, the energy jumps can be controller thereby controlling the color being emitted. This is important since it opens up the possibility of control of LEDs post production. External controllers could be used with the same substrates i.e. same LEDs to make a lamp of different intensity as well as color without needing different doping for R,G and B emissions. The reduction in cost as well as size could be phenomenal and could pave the way for similar semiconductor research.

We have covered the details of the LED in the past along with some fundamentals on the control techniques. We are hoping for some high speed color accurate displays in the future that don’t break the bank on our next gaming build.

Thanks for the tip [Qes]

Who Knew Cut Grass Would Be So Tricky To Move!

April 1, 2019 by Jenny List 20 Comments

Like all publications, here at Hackaday we are besieged by corporate public relations people touting press releases. So-and-so inc. have a new product, isn’t it exciting! But we know you, our readers, we know you like hacks, and with the best will in the world, the vast majority of such things have nothing of the hack about them. Just occasionally though a corporate offering does contain a hack, and today we have a fascinating one from Charm Industrial, who are doing their best to make hydrogen from biomass. They were finding cut grass to be an extremely difficult material to handle, and their account of how they managed to feed it from a hopper into their machinery makes for interesting reading.

You might expect grass to flow from a conical hopper like an ungainly liquid, but in fact it readily clogs and forms bridges, blocking the outlet. Changing the design of the hopper made little difference, so they tried an auger. The auger simply compressed the blockage harder, resulting in the counter-intuitive strategy of running the auger in reverse. But even that didn’t work, leaving the area round the auger clear but the rest of the grass as a solid clump. Rotating plows were tried with multiple different profiles followed, but finally they settled upon a vibrating bin activator. It’s a crash course in materials handling, and though the Hackaday bench is likely to avoid having to handle cut grass except when emptying the lawnmower, it’s still worth a look.

We may have done very little with handling cut grass, but we’ve certainly taken a look at creating it.

Lost In Space: How Materials Degrade In Space

March 12, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 31 Comments

Hackaday readers are well aware of the problems caused by materials left exposed to the environment over time, whether that be oxidized contact pads on circuit boards or plastics made brittle from long exposure to the sun’s UV rays.

Now consider the perils faced by materials on the International Space Station (ISS), launched beginning in 1998 and planned to be used until 2028. That’s a total of 30 years in an environment of unfiltered sunlight, extreme temperatures, micrometeoroids, and even problems caused by oxygen. What about the exposure faced by the newly launched Tesla Roadster, an entirely non-space hardened vehicle on a million-year orbit around the sun? How are the materials which make up the ISS and the Roadster affected by the harsh space environment?

Fortunately, we’ve been doing experiments since the 1970s in Earth orbit which can give us answers. The missions and experiments themselves are as interesting as the results so let’s look at how we put materials into orbit to be tested against the rigors of space.

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Network Analysers: The Electrical Kind

September 22, 2017 by Inderpreet Singh 18 Comments

Instrumentation has progressed by leaps and bounds in the last few years, however, the fundamental analysis techniques that are the foundation of modern-day equipment remain the same. A network analyzer is an instrument that allows us to characterize RF networks such as filters, mixers, antennas and even new materials for microwave electronics such as ceramic capacitors and resonators in the gigahertz range. In this write-up, I discuss network analyzers in brief and how the DIY movement has helped bring down the cost of such devices. I will also share some existing projects that may help you build your own along with some use cases where a network analyzer may be employed. Let’s dive right in.

Network Analysis Fundamentals

As a conceptual model, think of light hitting a lens and most of it going through but part of it getting reflected back.

The same applies to an electrical/RF network where the RF energy that is launched into the device may be attenuated a bit, transmitted to an extent and some of it reflected back. This analysis gives us an attenuation coefficient and a reflection coefficient which explains the behavior of the device under test (DUT).

Of course, this may not be enough and we may also require information about the phase relationship between the signals. Such instruments are termed Vector Network Analysers and are helpful in measuring the scattering parameters or S-Parameters of a DUT.

The scattering matrix links the incident waves a1, a2 to the outgoing waves b1, b2 according to the following linear equation: $\begin{bmatrix} b_1 \\ b_2 \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} S_{11} & S_{12} \\ S_{21} & S_{22} \end{bmatrix} * \begin{bmatrix} a_1 \\ a_2 \end{bmatrix}$ .

The equation shows that the S-parameters are expressed as the matrix S, where and denote the output and input port numbers of the DUT.

This completely characterizes a network for attenuation, reflection as well as insertion loss. S-Parameters are explained more in details in Electromagnetic Field Theory and Transmission Line Theory but suffice to say that these measurements will be used to deduce the properties of the DUT and generate a mathematical model for the same.

General Architecture

As mentioned previously, a simple network analyzer would be a signal generator connected and a spectrum analyzer combined to work together. The signal generator would be configured to output a signal of a known frequency and the spectrum analyzer would be used to detect the signal at the other end. Then the frequency would be changed to another and the process repeats such that the system sweeps a range of frequencies and the output can be tabulated or plotted on a graph. In order to get reflected power, a microwave component such as a magic-T or directional couplers, however, all of this is usually inbuilt into modern-day VNAs.
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Hackaday Prize Entry: The Strength Of 3D Printed Parts

August 6, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 16 Comments

[Sam Barrett] is doing something that is sorely needed. He’s doing real materials research on FDM parts.

There’s nothing wrong with the rough experiments like hanging a 1 L bottle of water from the end of a rectangular test print to compare strengths. We also have our rules-of-thumb, like expecting the print to perform at 30% of injection molded strength. But these experiments are primitive and the guidelines are based on hearsay. Like early metallurgy or engineering; 3D printing is full of made-up stuff.

What [Sam] has done here is really amazing. He’s produced a model of a printed ABS part and experimentally verified it to behave close enough to the real thing. He’s also set a method for testing and proposed a new set of questions. If it couldn’t be better, he also included his full research notebook. Make sure to read the FDMProperties-report (PDF) in the files section of Hackaday.io.

Sam finally answered a question we've had of what it looks like when the printer over extrudes. — Sam finally answered a question we’ve had of what it looks like when the printer over extrudes.

If research like this is being done elsewhere, it’s either internal to a large 3D printer manufacturer, or it’s behind a paywall so thorough only the Russians can help a regular peasant get through to them. Anyone with access to a materials testing lab can continue the work (looking at you every single engineering student who reads this site) and begin to help everyone achieve an understanding of 3D printed parts that could lead to some really cool stuff one day.

MDF as a mold master. It works, but nowhere near as well as tooling board.

Materials To Know: Medium Density Fiberboard

April 14, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 77 Comments

MDF is the cheapest and flattest wood you can buy at local hardware stores. It’s uniform in thickness, and easy to work with. It’s no wonder that it shows up in a lot of projects. MDF stands for Medium Density Fiberboard. It’s made by pressing materials together along with some steam, typically wood, fibers and glue. This bonds the fibers very tightly. Sometimes MDF is constructed much like plywood. Thinner layers of MDF will be made. Then those layers will be laminated together under glue and steam.The laminated MDF is not as good as the monolithic kind. It tends to tear and break out along the layers, but it’s hard to tell which kind you will get.

Proper way to attatch a fastener to MDF.

MDF is great, but it has a few properties to watch for. First, MDF is very weak in bending and tension. It has a Modulus of Elasticity that’s about half of plywood. Due to its structure, short interlocking fibers bound together by glue and pressure, it doesn’t take a lot to cause a crack, and then, quickly, a break. If you’d like to test this, take a sheet of MDF, cut it with a knife, flip it over, and hit the sheet right behind your cut. Chances are the MDF will split surprisingly easily right at that point.

Because of the way MDF is constructed, fasteners tend to pull out of it easily. This means that you must always make sure a fastener that sees dynamic loads (say a bearing mount) goes through the MDF to the other side into a washer and bolt. MDF also tends to compress locally after a time, so even with a washer and bolt it is possible that you will see some ovaling of the holes. If you’re going to use screws, make sure they don’t experience a lot of force, also choose ones with very large threads instead of a finer pitch. Lastly, always use a pilot hole in MDF. Any particle board can split in alarming ways. For example, if you just drive a screw into MDF, it may appear to go well at first. Then it will suddenly jump back against you. This happened because the screw is compressing the fibers in front of it, causing an upward force. The only thing pressing against that force is the top layer of laminate contacting the threads. The screw then jumps out, tearing the top layer of particle board apart.

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