This is the first time (in 69 years and now 70) that I have ever understood something intuitively in metallurgy! Most discussions of metallurgy concepts tend to give information of various effects, but no real explanation. Thank you so much.
Hey Ralph. It's been a while since you posted this comment. Just wondering how things are going for you and what the most interesting thing you've learned since has been?
Do it! I made one last year, an while it isn't as pretty as Steve's, it's not too hard to build. Get 3 acrylic sheets and ball bearings specced with a radius equal to the thickness of the boards. Cut a hole in one of the boards (I used a Dremel, not the best finish but works), then stack them, pouring the balls in the hole. Then you can drill holes through the corners and fasten. Use progressively larger bits so as to not crack the plastic. Whole thing cost me like 300BRL (About 50USD) and 2h of work (but only because I dropped the balls and spent 40min sweeping and cleaning them again)
Make the demo sheet flexible somehow, and it may visually demonstrate plasticity too. Not sure how I'd bend it on the same plane as the bearings, though, which would be the best demonstration.
Hey Steve. I’m a metallurgist in the United States and I really appreciate the videos you’ve done on crystal structure and how it relates to metals and their properties. I may just share this vid with our team to help explain metallurgy to the non-metallurgists I work with. Thanks for sharing
Does this video then also accurately explain why you can only bend a piece of metal so many times? Because the imperfections are no longer spread out enough through the metal, causing it to break instead?
Eons ago, when I was still a young man, I worked as a heat treater. Who knew how many different types of steel there are? Some harden in oil, some in water, some even in air. It was quite a learning experience. I would never have guessed that the dew point inside the furnaces was an important factor in the successful hardening of steel, but it was one of many things we had to keep track of.
Materials was my favorite subject during my engineering degree. I was one of the weird ones who really enjoyed learning about crystalline structures and defects, and how to achieve the material properties you want in an alloy. I just find the subject fascinating.
I also loved the class too. I thoroughly enjoyed the labs because we got to use different machines to determine the different characteristics of a metal (like hardness, tensile, and shear strengths), and we were able to use different treatment and quenching techniques to see how it impacted the characteristics of the metal, whether that be steel, aluminum, or cast iron. The only part I didn't really care for in the class was all the different units and measurements. It makes sense why there would be so many, but it was always hard to remember what each number and letter represented what when it came to units and measurements of a certain metal.
As a student studying material science and mechanical engineering, this has to be my favortie video to date! That dislocation at 2:29 was incredible! Thanks for the fascinating content steve!
I’m a materials science major, and I always find myself coming back to this video and the last one to hear about crystal lattices and their properties. Everything is, to the best of my knowledge, quite precisely-worded and accurate without sacrificing the accessibility of the language or concepts. And those videos of the vibration causing the lattice to shift around? Phenomenal. What a beautiful visualization. Thanks for making this video! I owe the fact that I do what I’m doing right now partially to science communicators like you.
normally yes but also depends on the alloy , some high cromiun steels become less ductile with high heat and tend to break , steel alloys are amazing with little variations in materials and heat treats the properties can be completly different
Sort of . If heat is slowly reduced then ductility is maintained . But. If temperature is rapidly removed then grains form and solidify rapidly causing hardness (mohs) and brittle characteristics . This is where the metal fun goes off in the ditch . Its a balance of desired traits that an engineer or metallurgist are a seeking . It gets really nuts when alloys or base metals are changed from iron ( steel) to tungsten, titanium , and aluminum .
I think you could imagine the grain as a net. The larger the spacing is in the net, the easier it is to escape, or in this case, bend out of shape. With a smaller spacing being harder to escape/bend out of shape.
When I served my Tool and Die apprenticeship, under my father, I learned about Space Lattice..Austenite and martensite. I have known and felt what you are demonstrating here for my entire 42 year career. I have heat treated, hardened, tempered, stress relieved and annealed and this is the first time I’ve seen what I know, demonstrated perfectly. Thank you so much. I’ve told my apprentices over the years that you have to think like a molecule in order to properly handle the machining of steels..
That's interesting. The liquid you poured from the beaker at the end turned into a gas after pouring and then quickly condensed back into a liquid again.
As a materials engineering student, it's cool to see matsci and metallurgy showing up more in edutainment spaces. Seems like it's becoming more popular overall
I'd love to hear more of this as it relates to Endodontic files. It may sound odd or boring to anyone who isn't involved with dentistry but the extent that manufacturers focus on strength, hardness, plasticity, etc is actually very interesting. Endodontic files have to navigate and clean very narrow winding canals while hopefully not breaking. It's all rather fascinating really.
As a pharmacist, I remember having to study about plasticity in colloidics and physical chemistry and I swear I could never truly understand it as clearly as the video has just explained here.
Perhaps you could test resistance to deformation with your model by allowing for a piece to be inserted which could apply a load at a point or a short distance, then measure the load, distance traveled and behavior of the bearings. See if small grains behave as a harder material than one with large grains. Check out the Rockwell scale of hardness for more info on testing. Another great video Steve!
Oooh, now I'm wondering if one made with differently sized disks (so they'd fit nicely within the same depth) could be used to show grain structure within alloys.
@Andras Libal do it with discs that have half spheres attached on four sides and on both faces of each disc, now they can be of the same width but different diameters, while reducing a lot the friction and bring fairly stable
@Danny Timms I like it, still super easy to do. Would that also introduce a lifting force on the disks? You could vent out all edges to help I guess. Where's Destin? I'm sure he's seen this by now, he'll figure it out.
That's really interesting! I'm a Chemist and generally things with smaller crystals are more brittle, which fits what you are saying about reduced plasticity :) Could just be different ways of talking about the same phenomenon!
This reminded me something I read a couple of days ago. The way the ball bearings are oriented looks like the crystals of zinc that form on the surface of galvanized metal. And by messing with the time it takes for the zinc to cool off (hot-dip galvanizing) you can get various results, from small crystals for total uniform mat result, to bigger crystals that give the galvanized metal its characteristic color. Really cool stuff and I hope it is really connected.
I'm an audio guy from way back when cassettes first came on the scene, and I remember when some manufacturer, maybe AKAI, came up with "Glass Ferrite Heads" and how they were so called "impervious to wear"... You're explanation and demo really gives insight to the metallic structure of those type of heads. I still own machines with "Ferrite" heads, and after more than 30 years, they barely show any wear. Of course, they do wear, but to such a small degree compared to softer "Permalloy" heads, which are more common, and probably cheaper to produce.
It's really all about how the balls are jiggled. If the balls are jiggled gently, you get better results with the main structure. Rubbing them lightly will cause them to warm up a bit which helps them so they move more freely than when they are motionless and bound together. I saw an experiment where they were jiggling blue balls and big red balls so you could clearly see the difference the jiggling made, it was nuts.
This is an excellent video; not only is it accessible without prerequisite knowledge, but the discussion goes deep into the subject matter. I enjoyed learning about dislocations; thank you!
Another idea: Take 2 sets of ball bearings colored differently and stack them on top of each other so that there's a clear interface. Then apply vibration on a flat surface to see how one species diffuse into the other via random motion. Tilt the surface slightly to illustrate how having a driving force will affect rate of diffusion.
Within it's limited scope, this is the best introductory (or refresher) explanation of metallurgy that I have ever come across. This will help grok metals, rather than just pass the exam.
I'm always happy to see a video from my favorite beaker guy! I have a blast thinking about the implications of your explanations and demonstrations. This time, I am lead to wonder if, since atoms at higher and higher temperatures are simply in greater motion, we can use the speed of atoms at certain temperatures to predict the speed we would need to collide pieces of metal to get them to fuse using the energy conversion formula. Also, if atoms shift in metals when they are bent plastically, do the atoms on the inside of the bend actually move to the outer curve along the edges of the crystals on the bend to preserve the thickness of the metal?
Hi Steve! I'm a grad student studying the transition of Opal A from diatoms all the way to quartz in the earths crust, which is to say to transition from amorphous silica to crystalline quartz. This is such an incredible description of that process that I actually showed your video to my advisor who then showed his class! I use X-ray defractometry (XRD) to determine the spacing between atoms based on the angle at which they defract x rays in order to identify the minerals in my samples. Since you love resonance and crystallization, I thought a video in which you break down how we can use x-ray defraction to determine crystal structure sounded like your bread and butter!
Pretty cool way to explain annealing. Worked 15 years in semi conductor mfg. Over time understood what annealing was and why, but this is an awesome visual of the process.
Wow... when I learned about heat treatment of metals back in may this year, I didn't really understand why bigger crystals led to a more ductile metal. I just learned it as a fact. This video helped me to understand it better. Thank you.
Actually, you can demonstrate other properties with that (or similar) model (I did it at uni with soap bubbles). Take a look at what happens when you introduce larger or smaller particles to help understand alloys
This video is brilliant!! I think I understand the process of "Work Hardening" a little better now - such as repeatedly bending a copper wire will increasingly become more difficult, until it eventually snaps. I may have gotten this wrong but from what you've explained I'm guessing that the dislocations within copper grains disperse bit by bit to the grain boundaries until the copper breaks. I could also he totally wrong 😅
Fascinating. I used to get similar effects by accident. When drilling big holes in a sheet of steel with a slightly warped drill bit, drilling at different speeds causes the swarf on the metal to arrange itself into interesting symmetrical patterns.
According to me, this is your best video after the chain fountain one! No surprise it's always based on discrete elements, which makes everything so transparent ... well done!!!
Great presentation and explanation of medals at the atomic level I’m a welding Sheetmetal fabrication pipe welding vocational teacher that teaches materials science and just about everyone of my lessons your lesson and presentation was very helpful in allowing me to grow as an educator I’ve been welding for 40 years and I continue to learn each and every day thanks so much for your presentation it’s so well done and I learned a ton from it
The same ball bearing analogy might be used to explain how the inclusion of other elements such as copper in aluminium alloys affect the strength and ductility of the metal. Would love to see that.
Liked it! I found the movement of the dislocations in the toy fascinating to watch. (i.e. the dislocation diffusing out to the grain boundary, made me think of dislocations/holes in semiconductors.) Moving the dislocations is also part of annealing as well. At first my mind went to how does this show the carbon diffusion? Glad you talked about all the other heat treatments and that covered diffusion for the purpose of this video. It would be neat if you could some how show how the heat treating affects the concentration of carbon with in the interior of the grain and the boundaries. (May be two slightly different sized ball bearings representing carbon and iron??)
Love the channel Steve, nice to see science without so much shouting 😁 A good simple analogy for a vastly complex subject, I'm an occasional knifemaker so I get to play with heat treatment a bit. Fascinating stuff and so many variables, Be good to see you go further down this rabbit hole. Cheers from Tasmania 🍺
Bill, I went down the rabbit hole! Search "Primordial Particle System - The Trailer", there is another where I got heart beat behaviour! I varied many parameters like you wanted!
Hi Steve. That's an issue that moneying mints around the world are up against when making the dies and striking coins. There's an error that is actually called plastically deformed die error. Basically, if a die isn't hardened sufficiently, it will deform over time during the striking process. A good example is the 2019 5c coin from Australia.
I'm studying metallurgy at school, and even if you just explained the basis, you have done an amazing video. Thanks, definitely sending this to my classmates
I'm a knife enthusiast, and it's generally understood that a fine-grained steel is a better performer with regard to toughness, but I never really knew why until now. Thanks for the vid.
@andymcl92 I believe it...... Couple of weeks ago I was watching only V8 engine builds ....then during dinner the kids talked about Tiktok......... Guess what the first commercial was when looking the next V8 video on KZclip????? Right...Tiktok... instead of tech commercials....
Achirag, I made a few videos where I vary more parameters like radius and velocity. Search "Primordial Particle System - The Trailer", there is another where I got heart beat behaviour!
@SOF Careful of confirmation bias! Typing something in to Google then getting a suggestion, fair enough. But saying it aloud then getting a suggestion, I'm still not convinced. But if I read in to your comment that you hadn't come across Steve before, welcome :)
Strangely enough, I think thia applies to chocolate too. My wife and I have been trying to make chocolate by hand (yay, pandemic lockdown activities!). But unfortunately, it has been coming out rather grainy. The texture feels a bit sandy when you eat. I theorized that maybe we were getting the tempering step wrong and the crystals in the chocolate were not merging together and lining up. I bet there is a lot of crossover between metallurgy and cooking since both involve applying heat to change the physical properties of a material.
Good video. As a metallurgist, I even more enjoy it, I guess. You might want to look at Nitinol, an alloy with shape memory. That’s how awesome and interesting a lattice can be.
When I was a business strategy consultant working in the steel industry I remember talking to automotive leaf spring manufacturers who used what they called “stack annealing”. The leaf springs were made from flat steel bars (specialized steel chemistry) and they would have the those flat bars “stacked” to slow the cooling process and impart desirable properties to the grain structure of the steel.
As a Metal fabricator/welder, I've sat through a lot of lessons on metallurgy. First time I've heard about dislocations and their implications. I'd like to thank you and your balls of steel, Mr Mould, for this moment of clarity.
In the late 60s we had a go and emulating this with soap bubbles in a shallow tank with a blade to push them along, but your model is very much better. Love it!
Can you do a video on luminescence? Reasonably this could be a series because of all the different types, although I find the possibilities of sonoluminescence the most interesting because of the physical properties.
This is very interesting. In studies for mechanical engineering, you get taught a couple of things about metals and the behaviors of materials, but never in this depth. You get to know the concepts without details.
I think there could be a way to simulate exceeding the recrystallization temperature. What you'd need to do is get the balls bouncing instead of just settling. Maybe a powerful enough vibration might be able to do it, or maybe you would have to somehow make a 2D version of a fluidized bed. Basically, you need to get your ball bearings "boiling" somehow. Other experiments I'd like to see with this sort of setup is what happens if the balls are not all the same size. Perhaps some smaller ball bearings mixed in with the big ones would change the dynamics of this demonstration and reflect the dynamics of an alloy. You could even play around with the proportion of big balls to small balls and see what effect that has.
I've always been interested by Blacksmithing and stuff like that, heat treating was something I'd heard used a lot as a term and understood it strengthened metal - but I had no idea what that actually meant. This was absolutely fascinating. Also I'm very immature and I giggled at 1:54.
No. Thank you very much. I used to work in metal smithing (jewelry) and I always used to ask these questions...and honestly. I don't think they knew the answers. I would ask "But what is flux?" and "What does it mean to anneal? Why? how?" It was basically, "Just do it like this because." Step 1, step 2, step 3, repeat" and don't ask too many questions because they don't even know. Thanks. This explains A LOT! 🤯👍🏼🙏
He mentioned this but for anyone wondering: Toughness = A materials ability to withstand shocks/impacts. Hardness = Ability to not be scratched or dented easily. Toughness and Hardness are mutually exclusive, in that a material with high toughness must have low hardness, and vis-versa. Ductility = Ability to be drawn into lengths. This is mainly why copper is used as wires as it has high ductility.
Wow! What a great teacher u r! I was confused for whole of my engg. About this topic kindly make more videos like this. These may be very helpful for engg. Students Great way to arise intrest in engg.
Very clear explanation of metallic crystals, Steve. Can you do one on Vortex Tubes? It is a device that can heat and cool compressed air with no moving parts. Other videos show the vortexes inside the tube but not WHY heat transfers to one stream. How do "hot atoms" go one way and "cold atoms" go the other?
This is the greatest example I've ever seen. When I took material science I just remembered stuff, watching this really visually explain what is happening
If you use neodymium magnets shapes like cylinders, then you'll have a really good visual representation of air molecules! You can even compress them closer together too.
Astounding demonstration of grain boundary and dislocation using the balls with energy input from the vibrator. Thank you very much for that. Good teaching dude . . . keep on!
Just this past summer 2021, I was using, for the first time, an annealing process to enable bending of my 0.13" spring steel wire to fabricate proper length bracing wires on my 1:1 scale, WWI SPAD XIII fighter fuselage frame. Now I understand a bit better what I would have seen had I been using my Superman X-ray vision.
it would be interesting if you intruduced different size ball bearings or even different shaped bearings.. like square or triangular or oblong .. and also changing the weight of the bearings using different metal types.. like aluminum copper steel etc
My goodness, this video came out around 2 weeks after I made the exact same (identical down to the tempering metal comparison) observation in a veritasium video. The video I'm talking about is his video the black balls on water reservoirs. They exhibit the exact same effect as what you're showing here, and I thought "Hey, that's a pretty dang good analogy for the crystal structure formation of metal"
Is there any scenario in which all of the ball-bearings align into one big grain all nicely? And related to that, is there any scenario in which you can heat treat metal to do the same thing?
Helps to explain why vibration is used for stress relief in castings and machined items rather than leave out in the weather for years or using low heat cooling cooling cycles they are placed on vibrating tables. Love your channel
What I found fascinating is glass used by zeiss is heated up and very slowly over a WEEK to slowly cool down so as not to cause stress lines that would impair the ability of light to move in a straight way through the glass of lenses making it a faster lens... IE the FStop of the lens. The lower the f stop the better the light transmission How clever is man!!
That's interesting! However, I think there's a slight correction to be made. The "speed" or f/ratio of a lens is the ratio of the lens' focal length to the diameter of the aperture. The heat treating you described must improve the transmittivity and general optical quality of the lens, but would not make it a faster lens, i.e. give it a wider aperture.
The same principle also occurs in geology. The structure of igneous rock depends in part on how slowly it cools, with granite being the product of very slow cooling, resulting in large grains.
I think you forgot about one very important thing - various types of crystals. Every pure metal or alloy may form different kinds of crystals depending on the variables like temperature, pressure, how fast they change. Every type of those crystals (or grains) constitute to various qualities of the whole metal. Heat treatment not only helps the reshape the grains, but also reduces or increases the number of some type in the metal. BTW, exactly same thing can be said about any crystal forming substance. Like chocolate for example. ;P
This makes me very curious about the mechanics and relationship of metals/objects with shape memory that reform previous (some kind of baseline) connections under certain environments, like reheating paper clips
This is the first time (in 69 years and now 70) that I have ever understood something intuitively in metallurgy! Most discussions of metallurgy concepts tend to give information of various effects, but no real explanation. Thank you so much.
I'm just here to say Dido once more
@Ralph Dratman hope life is being good to you!
@Ralph Dratman Ralph sir, you still doing good sir?
Hey Ralph. It's been a while since you posted this comment. Just wondering how things are going for you and what the most interesting thing you've learned since has been?
Que pena por usted
As a materials science teacher. I'm impressed by the level of clarity and accuracy of this video.
Would totally make something similar for my class.
@Peter Santana what
As a material science student, I agree.
Do it! I made one last year, an while it isn't as pretty as Steve's, it's not too hard to build.
Get 3 acrylic sheets and ball bearings specced with a radius equal to the thickness of the boards.
Cut a hole in one of the boards (I used a Dremel, not the best finish but works), then stack them, pouring the balls in the hole.
Then you can drill holes through the corners and fasten. Use progressively larger bits so as to not crack the plastic.
Whole thing cost me like 300BRL (About 50USD) and 2h of work (but only because I dropped the balls and spent 40min sweeping and cleaning them again)
@GlazeonthewickeR im DONE for
@pipebombmailer1978 Whatever it is it’s more interesting than u
They need to show this in materials class. This is so accurate and intuitive.
That would require them to want to make students smart, unfortunately that's not the goal...
Make the demo sheet flexible somehow, and it may visually demonstrate plasticity too. Not sure how I'd bend it on the same plane as the bearings, though, which would be the best demonstration.
My metallurgy teacher had pictures for us.
Hey Steve. I’m a metallurgist in the United States and I really appreciate the videos you’ve done on crystal structure and how it relates to metals and their properties. I may just share this vid with our team to help explain metallurgy to the non-metallurgists I work with. Thanks for sharing
Does this video then also accurately explain why you can only bend a piece of metal so many times? Because the imperfections are no longer spread out enough through the metal, causing it to break instead?
Eons ago, when I was still a young man, I worked as a heat treater. Who knew how many different types of steel there are? Some harden in oil, some in water, some even in air. It was quite a learning experience. I would never have guessed that the dew point inside the furnaces was an important factor in the successful hardening of steel, but it was one of many things we had to keep track of.
As a self taught bladesmith, I really appreciate this kind of “hand on” demo. Thanks man.
Materials was my favorite subject during my engineering degree. I was one of the weird ones who really enjoyed learning about crystalline structures and defects, and how to achieve the material properties you want in an alloy. I just find the subject fascinating.
I also loved the class too. I thoroughly enjoyed the labs because we got to use different machines to determine the different characteristics of a metal (like hardness, tensile, and shear strengths), and we were able to use different treatment and quenching techniques to see how it impacted the characteristics of the metal, whether that be steel, aluminum, or cast iron.
The only part I didn't really care for in the class was all the different units and measurements. It makes sense why there would be so many, but it was always hard to remember what each number and letter represented what when it came to units and measurements of a certain metal.
As a student studying material science and mechanical engineering, this has to be my favortie video to date! That dislocation at 2:29 was incredible! Thanks for the fascinating content steve!
Let’s goooo boys
Hell yeah colleague!
I’m a materials science major, and I always find myself coming back to this video and the last one to hear about crystal lattices and their properties. Everything is, to the best of my knowledge, quite precisely-worded and accurate without sacrificing the accessibility of the language or concepts. And those videos of the vibration causing the lattice to shift around? Phenomenal. What a beautiful visualization.
Thanks for making this video! I owe the fact that I do what I’m doing right now partially to science communicators like you.
Today I learned that, by adding heat to a metal, you increase its grain size, thus making it more ductile.
normally yes but also depends on the alloy , some high cromiun steels become less ductile with high heat and tend to break , steel alloys are amazing with little variations in materials and heat treats the properties can be completly different
Sort of . If heat is slowly reduced then ductility is maintained . But. If temperature is rapidly removed then grains form and solidify rapidly causing hardness (mohs) and brittle characteristics . This is where the metal fun goes off in the ditch . Its a balance of desired traits that an engineer or metallurgist are a seeking . It gets really nuts when alloys or base metals are changed from iron ( steel) to tungsten, titanium , and aluminum .
I think you could imagine the grain as a net. The larger the spacing is in the net, the easier it is to escape, or in this case, bend out of shape. With a smaller spacing being harder to escape/bend out of shape.
When I served my Tool and Die apprenticeship, under my father, I learned about Space Lattice..Austenite and martensite. I have known and felt what you are demonstrating here for my entire 42 year career. I have heat treated, hardened, tempered, stress relieved and annealed and this is the first time I’ve seen what I know, demonstrated perfectly. Thank you so much. I’ve told my apprentices over the years that you have to think like a molecule in order to properly handle the machining of steels..
Yes funny that you can somehow feel what is happening.
That's interesting. The liquid you poured from the beaker at the end turned into a gas after pouring and then quickly condensed back into a liquid again.
It's black magic
woah, that's really interesting
As a materials engineering student, it's cool to see matsci and metallurgy showing up more in edutainment spaces. Seems like it's becoming more popular overall
I'd love to hear more of this as it relates to Endodontic files. It may sound odd or boring to anyone who isn't involved with dentistry but the extent that manufacturers focus on strength, hardness, plasticity, etc is actually very interesting. Endodontic files have to navigate and clean very narrow winding canals while hopefully not breaking. It's all rather fascinating really.
As a pharmacist, I remember having to study about plasticity in colloidics and physical chemistry and I swear I could never truly understand it as clearly as the video has just explained here.
Perhaps you could test resistance to deformation with your model by allowing for a piece to be inserted which could apply a load at a point or a short distance, then measure the load, distance traveled and behavior of the bearings. See if small grains behave as a harder material than one with large grains. Check out the Rockwell scale of hardness for more info on testing.
Another great video Steve!
This is brilliant! I don't think we ever had a live demonstration like this in university but it would have been really great.
Oooh, now I'm wondering if one made with differently sized disks (so they'd fit nicely within the same depth) could be used to show grain structure within alloys.
Brilliant. Make sure to polish the disks so the move smoothly.
@Andras Libal do it with discs that have half spheres attached on four sides and on both faces of each disc, now they can be of the same width but different diameters, while reducing a lot the friction and bring fairly stable
I've seen someone make a model of exsolution using grapes and kumquats or something like that
@Danny Timms I like it, still super easy to do. Would that also introduce a lifting force on the disks? You could vent out all edges to help I guess. Where's Destin? I'm sure he's seen this by now, he'll figure it out.
@Andras Libal
Perforate the plates and run compressed air through them a la air hockey.
How on earth are you that good at breaking down, explaining and articulating a complex subject.
Wow. That is pure talent.
That's really interesting! I'm a Chemist and generally things with smaller crystals are more brittle, which fits what you are saying about reduced plasticity :) Could just be different ways of talking about the same phenomenon!
Incredibile video, very informative!
I've already passed the metallurgy exam but this is just perfect.
Always great content from you!
This reminded me something I read a couple of days ago. The way the ball bearings are oriented looks like the crystals of zinc that form on the surface of galvanized metal. And by messing with the time it takes for the zinc to cool off (hot-dip galvanizing) you can get various results, from small crystals for total uniform mat result, to bigger crystals that give the galvanized metal its characteristic color.
Really cool stuff and I hope it is really connected.
I'm an audio guy from way back when cassettes first came on the scene, and I remember when some manufacturer, maybe AKAI, came up with "Glass Ferrite Heads" and how they were so called "impervious to wear"... You're explanation and demo really gives insight to the metallic structure of those type of heads. I still own machines with "Ferrite" heads, and after more than 30 years, they barely show any wear. Of course, they do wear, but to such a small degree compared to softer "Permalloy" heads, which are more common, and probably cheaper to produce.
It's really all about how the balls are jiggled. If the balls are jiggled gently, you get better results with the main structure. Rubbing them lightly will cause them to warm up a bit which helps them so they move more freely than when they are motionless and bound together. I saw an experiment where they were jiggling blue balls and big red balls so you could clearly see the difference the jiggling made, it was nuts.
such a sus comment
This is an excellent video; not only is it accessible without prerequisite knowledge, but the discussion goes deep into the subject matter. I enjoyed learning about dislocations; thank you!
Another idea: Take 2 sets of ball bearings colored differently and stack them on top of each other so that there's a clear interface. Then apply vibration on a flat surface to see how one species diffuse into the other via random motion. Tilt the surface slightly to illustrate how having a driving force will affect rate of diffusion.
Within it's limited scope, this is the best introductory (or refresher) explanation of metallurgy that I have ever come across. This will help grok metals, rather than just pass the exam.
I'm always happy to see a video from my favorite beaker guy! I have a blast thinking about the implications of your explanations and demonstrations. This time, I am lead to wonder if, since atoms at higher and higher temperatures are simply in greater motion, we can use the speed of atoms at certain temperatures to predict the speed we would need to collide pieces of metal to get them to fuse using the energy conversion formula. Also, if atoms shift in metals when they are bent plastically, do the atoms on the inside of the bend actually move to the outer curve along the edges of the crystals on the bend to preserve the thickness of the metal?
Hi Steve! I'm a grad student studying the transition of Opal A from diatoms all the way to quartz in the earths crust, which is to say to transition from amorphous silica to crystalline quartz. This is such an incredible description of that process that I actually showed your video to my advisor who then showed his class! I use X-ray defractometry (XRD) to determine the spacing between atoms based on the angle at which they defract x rays in order to identify the minerals in my samples. Since you love resonance and crystallization, I thought a video in which you break down how we can use x-ray defraction to determine crystal structure sounded like your bread and butter!
Thank you Steve! I’ve worked years in metallurgy lab in a foundry and that’s why I really enjoyed this demonstration.
Pretty cool way to explain annealing.
Worked 15 years in semi conductor mfg. Over time understood what annealing was and why, but this is an awesome visual of the process.
Wow... when I learned about heat treatment of metals back in may this year, I didn't really understand why bigger crystals led to a more ductile metal. I just learned it as a fact. This video helped me to understand it better. Thank you.
Actually, you can demonstrate other properties with that (or similar) model (I did it at uni with soap bubbles).
Take a look at what happens when you introduce larger or smaller particles to help understand alloys
This video is brilliant!! I think I understand the process of "Work Hardening" a little better now - such as repeatedly bending a copper wire will increasingly become more difficult, until it eventually snaps. I may have gotten this wrong but from what you've explained I'm guessing that the dislocations within copper grains disperse bit by bit to the grain boundaries until the copper breaks.
I could also he totally wrong 😅
I've been working with steel, copper and silver for a while and this video has very clearly shown what others have tried to explain. Thank you!
"That's why dislocations are sometimes called 'the carrier of plasticity.'"
I've ALWAYS wondered why that was.
also explains strain hardening. once the dislocations are all at grain edge, the piece can no longer plasticly deform, and can only snap.
Here I thought it was because you'll need plastic surgery after enough dislocations.
Really really or faky faky?
Fascinating. I used to get similar effects by accident. When drilling big holes in a sheet of steel with a slightly warped drill bit, drilling at different speeds causes the swarf on the metal to arrange itself into interesting symmetrical patterns.
According to me, this is your best video after the chain fountain one! No surprise it's always based on discrete elements, which makes everything so transparent ... well done!!!
Great presentation and explanation of medals at the atomic level I’m a welding Sheetmetal fabrication pipe welding vocational teacher that teaches materials science and just about everyone of my lessons your lesson and presentation was very helpful in allowing me to grow as an educator I’ve been welding for 40 years and I continue to learn each and every day thanks so much for your presentation it’s so well done and I learned a ton from it
The same ball bearing analogy might be used to explain how the inclusion of other elements such as copper in aluminium alloys affect the strength and ductility of the metal. Would love to see that.
Liked it! I found the movement of the dislocations in the toy fascinating to watch. (i.e. the dislocation diffusing out to the grain boundary, made me think of dislocations/holes in semiconductors.) Moving the dislocations is also part of annealing as well. At first my mind went to how does this show the carbon diffusion? Glad you talked about all the other heat treatments and that covered diffusion for the purpose of this video. It would be neat if you could some how show how the heat treating affects the concentration of carbon with in the interior of the grain and the boundaries. (May be two slightly different sized ball bearings representing carbon and iron??)
Love the channel Steve, nice to see science without so much shouting 😁
A good simple analogy for a vastly complex subject, I'm an occasional knifemaker so I get to play with heat treatment a bit. Fascinating stuff and so many variables, Be good to see you go further down this rabbit hole.
Cheers from Tasmania 🍺
🤣 I only went far enuf to get a working knowlegde for the steels that i use. Too much info is bad for a leaky brain 😁
Bill, I went down the rabbit hole! Search "Primordial Particle System - The Trailer", there is another where I got heart beat behaviour! I varied many parameters like you wanted!
Hi Steve. That's an issue that moneying mints around the world are up against when making the dies and striking coins. There's an error that is actually called plastically deformed die error. Basically, if a die isn't hardened sufficiently, it will deform over time during the striking process. A good example is the 2019 5c coin from Australia.
I'm studying metallurgy at school, and even if you just explained the basis, you have done an amazing video. Thanks, definitely sending this to my classmates
Great video! I already knew about some of the concepts behind this, but showing it visually allowed me to understand it further. Thanks
I'm a knife enthusiast, and it's generally understood that a fine-grained steel is a better performer with regard to toughness, but I never really knew why until now. Thanks for the vid.
I'm a blacksmith and absolutely love what you've done with this video!
I'm working on a research paper on heat treatment and this was a pleasant surprise to watch.
@andymcl92 I believe it......
Couple of weeks ago I was watching only V8 engine builds ....then during dinner the kids talked about Tiktok......... Guess what the first commercial was when looking the next V8 video on KZclip?????
Right...Tiktok... instead of tech commercials....
@Chirag Is researching that actually fun and enjoyable or boring?
@TheRainHarvester I will check it out!
Achirag, I made a few videos where I vary more parameters like radius and velocity. Search "Primordial Particle System - The Trailer", there is another where I got heart beat behaviour!
@SOF Careful of confirmation bias! Typing something in to Google then getting a suggestion, fair enough. But saying it aloud then getting a suggestion, I'm still not convinced. But if I read in to your comment that you hadn't come across Steve before, welcome :)
Strangely enough, I think thia applies to chocolate too. My wife and I have been trying to make chocolate by hand (yay, pandemic lockdown activities!). But unfortunately, it has been coming out rather grainy. The texture feels a bit sandy when you eat. I theorized that maybe we were getting the tempering step wrong and the crystals in the chocolate were not merging together and lining up. I bet there is a lot of crossover between metallurgy and cooking since both involve applying heat to change the physical properties of a material.
Good video. As a metallurgist, I even more enjoy it, I guess. You might want to look at Nitinol, an alloy with shape memory. That’s how awesome and interesting a lattice can be.
Great video! Absolutely fascinating topic and great explanation useful for both newbies and experts!! Liked, shared, and subscribed.
When I was a business strategy consultant working in the steel industry I remember talking to automotive leaf spring manufacturers who used what they called “stack annealing”. The leaf springs were made from flat steel bars (specialized steel chemistry) and they would have the those flat bars “stacked” to slow the cooling process and impart desirable properties to the grain structure of the steel.
As a Metal fabricator/welder, I've sat through a lot of lessons on metallurgy. First time I've heard about dislocations and their implications. I'd like to thank you and your balls of steel, Mr Mould, for this moment of clarity.
Gotta say this was way better explained than back in machinist school...
I did my Masters project on material science and I have to say his explanation was out of this world. So much clarity
In the late 60s we had a go and emulating this with soap bubbles in a shallow tank with a blade to push them along, but your model is very much better. Love it!
Can you do a video on luminescence? Reasonably this could be a series because of all the different types, although I find the possibilities of sonoluminescence the most interesting because of the physical properties.
This is very interesting. In studies for mechanical engineering, you get taught a couple of things about metals and the behaviors of materials, but never in this depth. You get to know the concepts without details.
Watching the gaps between the bearings 'escape' from the structure is fascinating. It's like watching cellular automata 'behave'.
Gosh dang it. I spent all day doing grain size analysis in the lab, I guess 8 more minutes of it won’t kill me.
I think there could be a way to simulate exceeding the recrystallization temperature. What you'd need to do is get the balls bouncing instead of just settling. Maybe a powerful enough vibration might be able to do it, or maybe you would have to somehow make a 2D version of a fluidized bed. Basically, you need to get your ball bearings "boiling" somehow.
Other experiments I'd like to see with this sort of setup is what happens if the balls are not all the same size. Perhaps some smaller ball bearings mixed in with the big ones would change the dynamics of this demonstration and reflect the dynamics of an alloy. You could even play around with the proportion of big balls to small balls and see what effect that has.
As a glassblower, this gives me a very nice understanding of glass annealing as well!
I've always been interested by Blacksmithing and stuff like that, heat treating was something I'd heard used a lot as a term and understood it strengthened metal - but I had no idea what that actually meant. This was absolutely fascinating.
Also I'm very immature and I giggled at 1:54.
This has made me better understand welding tests i took years ago, among other aspects of life aswell, thank you so much this was very interesting!
You really are a great teacher, thanks! The implied forwards slash was the cherry on top, during the sponsor slot, you got skills to share:)
Great video as usual Steve! I always feel like I learn something from each of your videos! A very big thank you from Italy!
Skid, "Primordial Particle System - The Trailer", is a similar video you may really enjoy. I vary different attributes of the particles.
No. Thank you very much. I used to work in metal smithing (jewelry) and I always used to ask these questions...and honestly. I don't think they knew the answers. I would ask "But what is flux?" and "What does it mean to anneal? Why? how?" It was basically, "Just do it like this because." Step 1, step 2, step 3, repeat" and don't ask too many questions because they don't even know. Thanks. This explains A LOT! 🤯👍🏼🙏
so simple and so accurate explanation! thank you !
Great vid! This model can still be used to describe a monocristalline structure, as a turbine blade
He mentioned this but for anyone wondering:
Toughness = A materials ability to withstand shocks/impacts.
Hardness = Ability to not be scratched or dented easily.
Toughness and Hardness are mutually exclusive, in that a material with high toughness must have low hardness, and vis-versa.
Ductility = Ability to be drawn into lengths.
This is mainly why copper is used as wires as it has high ductility.
That was awesome ! I was really looking for videoes like this to understand the metallurgy concepts. Thank you Steve
Wow! What a great teacher u r!
I was confused for whole of my engg. About this topic kindly make more videos like this.
These may be very helpful for engg. Students
Great way to arise intrest in engg.
Very clear explanation of metallic crystals, Steve.
Can you do one on Vortex Tubes?
It is a device that can heat and cool compressed air with no moving parts.
Other videos show the vortexes inside the tube but not WHY heat transfers to one stream.
How do "hot atoms" go one way and "cold atoms" go the other?
You have the best way of explaining complex concepts with simple to understand demonstrations. I love it, KZclip best science teacher
This is the greatest example I've ever seen. When I took material science I just remembered stuff, watching this really visually explain what is happening
If you use neodymium magnets shapes like cylinders, then you'll have a really good visual representation of air molecules! You can even compress them closer together too.
Astounding demonstration of grain boundary and dislocation using the balls with energy input from the vibrator. Thank you very much for that. Good teaching dude . . . keep on!
Unusually cool demo. Thank you for making this video!
Actually makes a lot of sense in a simple way, helps explain the process in knife making videos that I've been watching
Thank you for this Steve. I’m already figuring out how I can incorporate this into my training programs.
I love the way you do your video as well as the topics. Great job!
What a concise explanation of how metal tempering works, awesome vid.
Excellent.
Well presented.
Focussed on the point.
Did not get lost in further explanations.
10/10
Steve, how do you come up with these smart, original ideas?? What a smart person
This is amazing. As a refrigeration tech I heat hard drawn copper to bend and expand it. This makes so much sense as to whats happening!
Just this past summer 2021, I was using, for the first time, an annealing process to enable bending of my 0.13" spring steel wire to fabricate proper length bracing wires on my 1:1 scale, WWI SPAD XIII fighter fuselage frame. Now I understand a bit better what I would have seen had I been using my Superman X-ray vision.
This makes my last few years of watching Alec Steel make so much more sense. Thank you Steve!
There are different ways to teach things... I happen to learn easily the way you teach them. Thanks for giving me a better understanding of metal!
Informative and easy to understand that deserves to be watched twice.
Let's just say I feel like Steve's vids are a lot more interesting than the fun-oriented ones you see with other youtube creators!
it would be interesting if you intruduced different size ball bearings or even different shaped bearings.. like square or triangular or oblong .. and also changing the weight of the bearings using different metal types.. like aluminum copper steel etc
I worked with sheet metal in the Air Force for almost four years. This would really have helped my understanding back then
My goodness, this video came out around 2 weeks after I made the exact same (identical down to the tempering metal comparison) observation in a veritasium video. The video I'm talking about is his video the black balls on water reservoirs. They exhibit the exact same effect as what you're showing here, and I thought "Hey, that's a pretty dang good analogy for the crystal structure formation of metal"
Is there any scenario in which all of the ball-bearings align into one big grain all nicely? And related to that, is there any scenario in which you can heat treat metal to do the same thing?
Helps to explain why vibration is used for stress relief in castings and machined items rather than leave out in the weather for years or using low heat cooling cooling cycles they are placed on vibrating tables. Love your channel
What I found fascinating is glass used by zeiss is heated up and very slowly over a WEEK to slowly cool down so as not to cause stress lines that would impair the ability of light to move in a straight way through the glass of lenses making it a faster lens... IE the FStop of the lens.
The lower the f stop the better the light transmission
How clever is man!!
That's interesting! However, I think there's a slight correction to be made. The "speed" or f/ratio of a lens is the ratio of the lens' focal length to the diameter of the aperture. The heat treating you described must improve the transmittivity and general optical quality of the lens, but would not make it a faster lens, i.e. give it a wider aperture.
The same principle also occurs in geology. The structure of igneous rock depends in part on how slowly it cools, with granite being the product of very slow cooling, resulting in large grains.
I think you forgot about one very important thing - various types of crystals. Every pure metal or alloy may form different kinds of crystals depending on the variables like temperature, pressure, how fast they change. Every type of those crystals (or grains) constitute to various qualities of the whole metal. Heat treatment not only helps the reshape the grains, but also reduces or increases the number of some type in the metal.
BTW, exactly same thing can be said about any crystal forming substance. Like chocolate for example. ;P
This makes me very curious about the mechanics and relationship of metals/objects with shape memory that reform previous (some kind of baseline) connections under certain environments, like reheating paper clips