Catalytic converters are simple, but getting them to work is not

I've never known what the inside of a catalytic converter looked like before. Admittedly, I had to replace my converter at one point and told the mechanic that I wanted to old one to take in to school and show my students - with some idea that I'd ask the old technology (shop) department to cut it in half for me long, long ago - but I eventually just threw the thing out without doing anything with it.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray when confronted with laziness, eh?

Clearly, the catalytic converter isn't lazy at all, however, and the technology used to keep the catalytic converter converting is insanely complicated. 

The simple version is that the catalytic converter combusts any unburned hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide byproducts from the combustion happening within the pistons every second of a car's functioning. 

...but to make that secondary combustion take place efficiently requires a whole lot of oxygen sensing to and adjusting along the way of that car functioning.

Americans Have No Idea How Much Fuel Idling Uses

There's a relatively new development in cars that I've never quite understood: start-stop systems.

That's when stopped cars - at a red light, for example - automatically turn their engine off and start up again when the driver tries to get the car moving again. According to this video - which cites research articles - it only takes about seven seconds of idling to use up more fuel than it takes to simply turn the car off and restart it.

It's almost like engineers know what they're doing.

Pothole patch - some updates

Source - link

We've been showing videos about the Case Western Reserve students who invented a better pothole patch for years in our summer camps and in our material science courses at Princeton.

I usually add the fact that most of those videos, however, are now a decade old, and I haven't seen the product being used. Thankfully one of my campers last summer took that as a challenge and went hunting for an update. 

Here's what he and I have been able to find...

• Feb 2017 - Cleveland.com - "It has been more than five years since Okoye and three other students created the product, which received entrepreneurship recognition in 2012. Okoye said the idea never died, but attending college and finding a job while refining the product and seeking funding, took time." 
• U-Patch Canada (YouTube) - 20 short, non-narrated test videos of the Thumper Pad in potholes, all from January 2018
• Yeu Patch (Facebook) - No new posts since Feb 2019
• KMBC.com - "KC uses thump pads as temporary fix to potholes" 
• KMBC.com - The same story as above but as video.

There are a bunch of other, similar stories from those time periods, but the websites that the company website that I found - http://yeupatchtechnologies.com/ - doesn't seem to be registered anymore.

Electric Vehicles' Battery Problem

"To replace the UK (not the UK) 31.5 million gasoline cars will require 236,000 tons of lithium carbonate." ~ quote from about 1:00 in the above video.

That would - again, according to the video - require all the world's output for 9 months.

And that metal comes from some countries with awful human rights records and workers' protections.

Then, if we mine the US's lithium, we have to use up water and leach arsenic into the water supply of Nevada...and dig into land holy to Native Americans...and destroy habitat for endangered animals.

It's the frickin' Kobayashi Maru, man.

Then we have to look at the cobalt mining.

To quote a magnet I got from the University of Utah, "what's your is mined," but clearly what's mined is bad for the planet and people.

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.

Inside the 23-Dimensional World of Your Car's Paint Job

We're continuing this week with a little more on the art theme. It's a very different kind of art from last week's memory metal flower, but there are still pedals involved. (groan)

Wired magazine has a brilliant article detailing the incredible process of color matching the paint on a repaired part of a car to the paint on the rest of the car. At first blush, the process seems awfully simple - pick up a can of the paint used to paint the car originally. Things are a little more complicated than that, however, as no repair shop is going to stock 50,000-60,000 different paints (the number of car colors on the road according to the article), no car in need of repair looks exactly like it did when it first rolled off the production line. and because the original paint job on most cars involves twenty three different dimensions to the color - sparkles, coarseness, red, blue, green, angle, diffuse coarseness, and so on.

The knowledge and skills involved in color matching are absolutely mind-boggling. There's an art to it all.