Super nerdy jet engine and material science video
 

This is cool.

Each blade in a turbine is a single metallic crystal. Now I want one of the blades! LOL

Now I'm curious how different the blades in a power plant are (if at all) from the blades in a passenger plane engine (and also military fighter jet engines which i suspect are a bit different again).

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I was going this route when I read the title.

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Wow, does that bring back memories. I've broken hundreds of those little hourglass-shaped test coupons in various kinds of material property tests.
I heard the Phds talking about the promise of growing single crystal turbine blades, but it hadn't been done yet. Much of the focus was on casting near-net blades to cut down on machining. The idea of casting net shape, single-crystal blades was science fiction. Until watching this, I didn't understand why single-crystal was important. But heck, I was just a lowly test engineer (You make em'. We break em'). Most of the work I did was on titanium compressor blade material and aluminum structural materials.

I'll probably watch again to see if there are more details that I remember after a second time. Or maybe I'll look for other videos. I think there are more out there.

There's a company called Precision Castparts in a Portland suburb. It's fun to cycle past because it smells just exactly like a box of crayons some days.

One of the things they make is turbine blades, and there was a writeup back in the day describing some of what is in that video. Good stuff. Humans can be outrageously smart sometimes.

That is one of the best science videos I have seen. No big hype, and just the facts explained carefully, and not like I am just 10 years old. Two thumbs up. And it is astonishing the level of near magic manufacturing almost science fiction like, but real!

Veritasiun is better than any non fiction network tv show ever. Watch regularly with my 14 yo son regularly

Veritasium videos are always like that. Good stuff!
Absolutely, 100%!

Watch his video on entropy.

My personal favorite as a thermodynamics enthusiast

We have single crystal blades in some of our newer power plant gas turbines.

And BTW, I had no idea how they made them until today, thanks!

I'll take "statements that you'd never expect to hear" for $500, please, Alex.

Very cool!

Can I assume that the cost difference between those and the blades that aren't a single crystal is considerable?

I consider myself to be pretty smart. Then I watch videos like this and realize I'm a moron.

When they were showing the wax molds being assembled, I was wondering the purpose of the spiral section. Outstanding metallurgy.

Your and me both. The bit about the spiral causing the single crystal was very cool

Dang, what a great time suck. I just watched the two part explanation of Thermite. How it is made, and how it is used to weld the rail road track together. And you can't ignite it with a flame, so it is safe and easy to transport.

MSME in Heat transfer, thermodynamics more practical cousin. Don't use it much today, but I definitely view the world in a thermodynamic lens. I know people who made it completely through engineering without understanding entropy. I made it through with a working understanding but not a full appreciation. Its simple but has complex implications


https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=_8gZ6_5dxYf76dke

Its a really great video even for less nerdy folks.

Cool, queued up to watch. I took thermo in college. I remember about that much of it.

I got 2 A’s in my college career. Thermo and Heat Transfer. I can’t say I was exactly an enthusiast, but I found the classes interesting.

I showed that video (and a link to the channel’s page) to my partner, who is a science educator. She found herself almost 15 minutes into it before she realized she had to stop and go back to what she was doing! And this is a woman who has no technical interests whatsoever.

(generalizing of course)

In the materials world, you have two sects. The thermodynamics-focused seekers of truth (me) and the kinetics-tainted swill.

Maybe it is that thermodynamics, the drive of nature, directs all? Maybe it's that one or more of us had a really hard time with chemical reaction kinetics?

Let's keep welding out of it. That's a mystical mash of the worst bits of thermo with kinetics. And some voodoo.

But seriously, this versatium video was more or less 100.0% in line with my allegedly proper and rigorous metallurgy education. They captured some concepts that are so fundamental but that are complicated/hard.

The pigtail mold is cool, but the next step up is the float-zone refining that I used to help out with at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We would finish with a seeded single crystal of silicon - purer than any other as it didn't have any container/crucible to muck up the product. Like ppb or better purity. The coolest part was that a few inches above the seed you'd see the last dislocation exit, distorting the solidified surface. Past that was not only very very pure Si, it was also dislocation free - having only the remaining defects required by thermodynamics/physics. This silicon was valuable for solar cell research and very high power density semiconductor devices because defects (dislocations/impurities/etc) knocked down the hole-pair lifetimes sucking up energy and making heat.

I find these sorts of posts interesting. I'd love for you to post more and/or go deeper.

For anyone with an inquisitive mind that has isn't instantly averse to anything STEM, I think this stuff would be interesting.

This one is very cool as well.

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Another channel is Smarter Every Day :https://www.youtube.com/destinws2/videos

I hope you can explain something he said in the video - that 100% of the energy we get from the sun is radiated out into space. It seems to me if that was true we wouldn’t have any coal, oil, natural gas, or even plants and animals. Some of that energy from the sun is converted to chemical energy and stored on earth - isn’t it?