This coming Sunday, I will be attending and giving a talk at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire. In case you aren’t familiar with the Maker Faire, its a gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors from all ages and places coming together to show what they’ve made, and share what they’ve learned. What could be cooler than that?

Not much, except for being able to meet, learn AND share what I’ve been working on!

My talk is titled Making stuff Social.

How will we do Engineering, Design, and Manufacturing in the future? The digital social constructs of today are growing in all the right places. The creative process is fundamentally the same whether you are creating a new piece of music, a robot to clean your grill or a new type of CT scanner. Because of this social revolution, the line that separates artists and engineers is becoming blurry and this is to everyone’s advantage.

If you’ll be attending, I hope you’ll stop by and listen. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. If you won’t be able to attend, I will be tweeting throughout the weekend, so feel free to follow me via @charlestheurer. I’ll also be spending time at GE’s manufacturing co-lab, GE Garages, so be sure to stop by there as well. Finally, below is a short video capturing my thoughts around the maker movement. I’ve been a MAKE fan since issue #1, so its an honor to attend.

Looking forward to meeting, sharing and learning!

Thanks again for taking the time to submit your Stump the Scientist questions! We had some great questions submitted this week, hope you enjoy this one!

Question from fan Nicolas Roux:

“How close are we to making nuclear fusion a reality?”

Response from Chief Scientist Jim Bray:

Nuclear fusion is the process whereby 2 lighter atoms combine (fuse) their nuclei to produce a heavier atom. This process often produces a lot of energy for lighter combining atoms, since some mass is converted to energy during the fusion process. We can say that nuclear fusion is certainly a reality now, since it provides the energy that causes all the stars shine; all stars are powered by fusion of light elements like hydrogen. It is also a reality here on earth, since it is the method by which thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs) work. So we now get to what we suppose Nicolas is asking: how close are we to making nuclear fusion a viable controlled power source for commercial power needs on earth?

This is a very hard problem because, in order to fuse the nuclei of atoms of a material, we must raise the temperature to many millions of degrees. There is no container for such temperatures, so physicists resort to using containing magnetic fields or quick energy inputs to try to raise the temperatures before the hot materials escape. The experiments and equipment are so complex and expensive that many nations have banded together to make a large experiment (using magnetic fields) called ITER in France. This experiment will not begin until around 2020 and will not produce commercial power. It will take a number of years after that to produce a plant to make commercial power, so we can guess that at least 25 more years will be needed. Another experiment in the US at Lawrence Livermore National Lab is producing fusion by quick energy input (by lasers) into materials. It is supposed to begin working this year, but it is also not going to produce any commercial power. 25 years might also be a good guess at how long it would take to commercialize that approach. So, in summary, no one knows for sure when fusion will be a reality for commercial power on earth. The problem is a hard one and the equipment is very expensive. The numbers I have given are just guesses.

Our next image in the series was submitted by Srinivasan Swarminathan.  This is one of the more compelling and interesting photos to look at it if you ask me.  The structure is incredibly intricate and interesting.  Srinivas told us that what we are looking at is:

“A scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a bamboo plant’s broken surface. The image reveals numerous channels (with different sizes) for water transport by capillary motion that enables the bamboo plant to grow. A porous “composite” structure as seen in the image would help in engineering structural materials capable of carrying fluids or gases internally.”

However, as always, what do you see here??

For our next image in the “Science as Art” series, Michelle put together a complete blog for us to explain her images.  I will turn it over to Michelle now!

Have you ever been sitting in your car in the parking lot of the grocery store, minding your own business, when suddenly you see a rogue shopping cart go rolling at full speed, only to be abruptly stopped when it runs into some poor unsuspecting stranger’s car door?  For most normal people, their first thought is, “Oooo.  Bummer.  That’s gonna leave a mark!”  For me, my second thought is typically, “Hmm.  I wonder what the strain field would look like around that ding.”  (But then again, I’ve never claimed to be “normal”.) 

The majority of the work I do here at GE Global Research focuses on measuring “plastic strain” (as in…how much plastic strain did the grocery cart just put in the car door?).  Although I’ve never actually looked at a car door dent in my microscope, the concept is pretty much the same – I use a technique called Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) to look at various metals that have undergone some type of deformation process, then get a general idea of how much plastic strain or damage was introduced into the metal.  (For anyone that read my previous blog entries, these are the same type of measurements I made on the Space Shuttle bolts .)  Being able to measure plastic strain helps our understanding of how metals behave under certain conditions, and can also help us predict when a metal may fail.  I doubt that anyone has ever had their car door fall apart as a result of a shopping cart hit, but for the types of materials we work on here at GE, predicting the effects of plastic strain on things like aircraft engines and nuclear power plants is a pretty big deal!

Last year, my group held a contest to submit some of our work for a 2012 calendar, and I was lucky enough to have two of my images selected!  The January image is a “misorientation map” of a material in which we’re able to see fields of plastic strain produced by a second phase particle in a stainless steel.  What this means in plain English is the following:

I was looking at a stainless steel material when I noticed some weird, linear shaped particles in the matrix of the stainless steel.  (This was kind of a “Sesame Street” moment for me.  Remember the “One of these things is not like the other…” song?  Who knew that something I learned in elementary school would be useful when doing research?!?)  I knew that stainless steels have these particles, so I decided to have some fun and take a closer look at them (Figure 1.)

After getting a better look, I found that these particles had a different crystal structure than the stainless steel matrix, so I decided to collect a map of the area (Figure 2.)  Although the phase map is neat to look at, it doesn’t give me any real information about the plastic strain in the sample.  If I take the same data set and process it with a “misorientation” algorithm (developed here at GE Global Research), I get a different result – one that gives us insight into what the strain fields actually look like!  (Figure 3.)  So what exactly is this mysterious “misorientation” thing?  The term “misorientation” refers to a concept in crystallography where you measure the angles between two crystals.  Going back to our shopping cart and door dent example:  the car door had a certain orientation when it was sitting innocently in the parking lot (let’s call this “Orientation 1”).  Then along came the evil shopping cart and put a big dent in the door (this one will be “Orientation 2”).  The door now has a certain amount of distortion to it – a different shape than it originally was.  If we want to figure out how much the door has been deformed, we can calculate the difference between before and after the door was hit (or the difference between Orientation 1 and Orientation 2).

Misorientation is a little more complicated than this (and it occurs at a MUCH smaller scale!), but hopefully you get the general idea…it’s just a tool for us to measure strain.  In Figure 3 below, an area in red has high deformation (~10° or more), and an area with low deformation is blue.  What we learned from the measurements I made were that 1) we didn’t have a pure stainless steel matrix – we also had delta ferrite.  2)  In addition to having particles in the matrix, we can see from the misorientation map that the delta ferrite particles have a visible “plume” of strain coming off of them.  Ultimately, we learned that this material isn’t the composition that we thought it was, the delta ferrite particles were causing additional strain in the material.

Figure 1 (above): Backscatter electron images of particles.

Figure 2 (above): Phase map of delta ferrite particles (red) in a stainless steel matrix (blue).  This map is showing that the red and blue areas are crystallographically different.

Figure 3 (above):  Misorientation map of the same particles.  Note the red “plumes” of strain coming off of the delta ferrite particles.

Using the same technique, (EBSD for misorientation mapping) I measured a different material for the 2012 calendar’s July image (Figure 4).  This material is made from a cobalt alloy and during testing, the material ultimately failed.  (Cobalt alloys are typically used in high temperature corrosive environments .)  From the map below, we can see that there are multiple crack regions, plus there are areas of localized high strain (as indicated by the areas in red).

In the previous example, we were studying the material to prevent failure.  In this example, the material had already failed, but we needed to understand the mechanisms that lead to the failure.  In either situation, it makes for an interesting and colorful map.  (And I’ll bet that you never look at a grocery cart in a parking lot the same way now!)

Figure 4 (above):  EBSD misorientation map of a cobalt alloy.  Areas in black indicate regions where the material cracked, and ultimately failed.  Areas in red indicate localized regions of high strain.