April 13, 2020

CERAMIC COATINGS - How It Works | SCIENCE GARAGE



First off, thanks to Eric Moorman who sent me this video. Mad love for Eric.

Let's go through the material science awesomeness in this video about how to get the most durable, prettiest finish on your car.

  • The first four minutes or so are all about the causes of the tiny scratches on car surfaces and how to clean the car before applying a finish coating of either wax or ceramic.
  • At 4:10 we get a discussion of wax, and the host even uses the word hydrophobic, explaining how the water beads up because of the hydrophobic nature of the wax.
  • At 5:10, we finally get to the ceramics, "a non-metallic solid material making up an inorganic compound of metal and nonmetal (or metalloid) atoms primarily held in ionic and covalent (?) bonds." The host explains that those atoms can be crystalline (in various ways) or even vitrified.
  • There's an explanation of the Moh's hardness scale, and a mention that there are other ways to measure hardness like via measuring scratch resistance.
  • Heck, he even shows a very simplified version of covalent bonding with shared pairs of electrons.
  • We get into using nanotextures to increase the hydrophobic character of a surface, increasing the contact angle between a drop and the surface - with a nice diagram, too - explaining super hydrophobic coatings.
Admittedly, I had no idea such coatings existed for cars.

No comments:

Post a Comment