Making an atomic trampoline [video]
youtube.comBelow is a table of elements used, ordered by boiling point. Beryllium has the lowest boiling point at 2742K. Zirconium has the highest melting point at 2125K. This means the furnace temperature was greater than 2125K.
TIG temperature can easily reach 3000C (close enough to 3000K) [1], more than the boiling point of beryllium. The temperature of the metal slug would rise until it reaches thermal equilibrium through heat loss, the energy loss likely being due to the vapourisation of the element with the lowest boiling point: beryllium.
That smoke was probably beryllium vapour.
I'm no expert, but I would assume the beryllium vapour would not have made it out of the apparatus. By luck, it would have condensed either before reaching the HEPA filter or on its way through the HEPA filter, even though the HEPA filter was not designed to stop a vapour. Nile Red also had the sense to use a fume cupboard. Despite this, the inside of the apparatus could well have been coated with friable condensed beryllium, which would probably not have been flushed by the argon. If doing this, I'd take additional precautions against condensing beryllium vapour containing the equipment (I don't know what they might be).
Maybe it's a case of controlling arc temperature to keep it below the boiling point of beryllium? Maybe a small amount of impurity with a lower boiling point can be added to the mix, so it boils off first and avoids the beryllium boiling? This might also prevent loss of beryllium from altering the composition of the glass?
How would the pros handle this risk?
I gather there are similar issues with the refining of silicon, in which silicon vapour can cause silicosis.
Element Melt Boil
Beryllium 1560K 2742K
Copper 1357K 2835K
Nickel 1728K 3003K
Titanium 1491K 3560K
Zirconium 2125K 4650K
That is interesting. That explains why the Beryllium vaporized... I'm surprised Nile didn't mention or consider that.
I think the simplest solution would be to lower the voltage, aim the arc at the Beryllium, and ensure it and the copper, nickel, and titanium melt together before ramping up the voltage to integrate the Zirconium.
Nile mentions that the mass lost during that step is very close to the mass of beryllium impurities.
I’m no chemist, but it’s possible that all these metals together form a eutectic system, meaning you can’t distill the beryllium alone.
There could also have been moisture on the beryllium.
I recall a display at the Museum of Science and Industry back in the early 1970's that featured steel balls bouncing on steel plinths not unlike the video.
I recall too a pair of angled plinths and the steel balls would appear from an opening in the display, drop and bounce from one plinth to the other before exiting (repeat).
No amount of googling has helped shed any light as to "What that was". Perhaps this metallic glass.
(Also recall a computer that you could play Tic-Tac-Toe against. The input was a more or less a telephone keypad, the display large neon X's and O's. Seven year old me, or thereabouts, was fascinated to read that the computer had never yet lost.)
In the 70s only thin foil or wires could be produced. The alloy in the video was invented in 1992.
Possibly computer controlled bumpers? Making the movement imperceptible would have been hard, but I think possible. Or air jets/magnets, you could do those.
Nile Red never ceases to amaze with his technical competence. If I tried to do something with beryllium I'd be dead. And the trampoline would fail.
Well, he's come a long way from being a horrible chemist to being an average chemist. Took him a few years to realize that chemistry is tedious work and you can't take shortcuts or it doesn't work, unless you spent a lot of time on the new procedure. It's nice to see that he now follows through with his work.
His literature research skills are still pretty mediocre. In this video I would have liked some info what influences the bounciness of the amorphous metal. Maybe there's an even bouncier one, that doesn't even need beryllium. He just copied the one he got from Steve Mould.
Of course doing somewhat dangerous stuff (and then exaggerating the danger) is kind of the theme of his channel and works very well on youtube. He surely is very talented at playing the youtube game and has a very pleasant voice.
But really, if you're amazed by his technical competence you've never worked with a truly competent chemist.
Explains why most everyone is amazed then, doesn't it?
Like how many people do you reckon work with "a truly competent chemist" in their life? A knee-jerk Google search quoted me approx. 100 000 people working as a chemist in the States, compared to approx. 135 040 000 people working a full time job in general. That's 0.07% of the workforce being chemists. Of which who knows how many fit your bill of being a "truly great chemist", and then who knows how many people get a chance to work with them. The number of people who should be able to tell how good of a chemist he is is orders of magnitude lower than the views on any one of his videos.
Comments like yours always baffle me.
I didn't expect that everyone can tell a good chemist. That's why I shared my perspective. Why exactly are you baffled?
For the reasons already explained there.
You are absolutely correct, I've never worked with a truly competent chemist -- my previous instructors are now complaining from the grave, so I'll give them a retroactive pass.
As someone who aced chem but nearly failed the labs, he seems remarkably skilled to me, so you saying "horrible" and "average" really surprises me -- but obviously I have nothing to judge by, never having been exposed to anything near that level of chem work except for his videos.
As you allude to, I wonder how much of the "it didn't work, so I had to try something different" is for YouTube -- if every project worked the first time it would be boring.
In chemistry only very simple stuff works the first time you try it. Even skilled chemists usually fail to replicate research papers, especially in organic chemistry. It's very frustrating. Lots of work, lots of cleaning up.
Pretty much all the chemistry you see on youtube can be considered simple. Even the cubane synthesis, which Extractions&Fire epically failed at, was undergrad stuff at my university. Chemiolis nailed it, I think.
Other great chemistry channels that come to my mind are Chemical Force (breathtaking slowmo videos), Thy Labs, Thoisoi, Prussian Blue, Chemdelic, not exhaustive.
Nice, thanks!
> my previous instructors are now complaining from the grave
Ha ha, did you mean to give the impression that they were in fact not that competent after all?
HA! I didn't think how that might come across, but no: it's just been a long time since I last took a chemistry class, and the instructors were old back then. I'm sure they've all since passed of old age, not from beryllium inhalation or organic mercury exposure or etc. etc.
> Of course doing somewhat dangerous stuff (and then exaggerating the danger) is kind of the theme of his channel and works very well on youtube
I never got that impression from him. He definitely plays up the Rube Goldberg-ishness of his procedures, but his insistence on the risks involved seems to me to be a safety thing.
It’s important to note that he’s never cavalier about the risks. He isn’t playing up the “mad scientist” angle, or portraying any of the risks as cool. Every mention of the dangers involved is presented more in terms of him feeling uncomfortable with the risk, and is swiftly followed with what he did for safety.
Given how much he keeps bringing up that he’s buying all his reagents from Amazon and eBay, there’s a real risk that somebody might decide to try and replicate his videos at home. Ultimately, the stuff he’s doing isn’t super risky for a trained chemist, but it is pretty damn dangerous for the random teenager watching his videos, so you need to make sure they respect the stuff that’s going on.
Yeah, you're right, I was a bit salty. Especially since I think he was the first chemistry channel that didn't get banned and so, with his innocent demeanor, laid the foundation for all the other chemistry channels, that got increasingly bold.
But he did come a long way. When you go back 8-9 years his chemistry was kinda crude. I think he usually just did the reactions once and took what he got. Guess I'm still salty that he didn't optimize, which he now does.
But then he was basically the random teenager then and is a chemist now.
Yeah, it’s nice he’s taking safety seriously finally!
There's a trend in his videos where he can barely smell things that everyone else notices, so I always wondered if he burned his nose out on an experiment.
(The other thing I wonder is, does he just keep all that equipment around that gets used like once a year?)
It’s also possible that it’s COVID-19 related.
I lost a large swath of my olfactory palette in 2021 when I contracted COVID, but recovered some after a few months. Still to this day, I struggle to taste different foods, which is a bit painful because of how excellent my partner is at cooking.
He has a pretty large lab you can see in some of his videos. It's not like any of his equipment is massive. I expect he can keep everything around.
Nah I think it's like (a more mild) Electroboom, he only plays it dangerous but knows how to control the risks
Hopefully
He really is delving into metallurgy with his more recent videos. Purple gold and now this. What's next? Intermetallic titanium gold alloy?
Transparent anluminium ala Star Trek.
Too trivial. You can easily buy it.
Mono crystalline semiconductor grade silicon bullion growth, now that's a video I want to see done from someone like nile red or breaking taps.
At $14k a piece, buying a vacuum forge just to make one video is an eye popping price to pay!
I wonder what else could the forge be used for in future videos?
> Thanks to the advertising and other income he brings in across all of his social media platforms — with 18 million followers and subscribers in total — his company makes a couple million Canadian dollars a year.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901022927/https://www.nytim...
He has an entire chemical lab to himself and only puts out a video every few months. Add to that his own salary and all the other overhead of running a channel, and you quickly realize that the per-video cost is already very high regardless of video specific expenses.
This piece of equipment still seems like a better investment than the ~4.5oz of gold he bought to make golden grills, which would be about 11k at todays rates.
I just finished watching his purple gold video and he looked at, but didn't buy, the vacuum forge for that video.
I'd actually find it cool if he did a shorter video revisiting the purple gold with his additional experience and the new forge to see if he could manage to do it easily at this point.
He could cast a ball bearing from the same material, to further decrease the mechanical-to-thermal losses.
A thought I had when I saw the original Steve Mould video, and this video made me remember it.
What happens if you just use glass for the bouncing surface? I was reading about the materials and I am not sure what property contributes to it's bounciness, but I think it is tensile strength(but it may be surface hardness). and regular glass has a slightly lower tensile strength than these amorphous metallic structures, fused quartz has a higher tensile strength, and I was unable to find out what tempered glass is, but I suspect tempered glass would tend to shatter if a small hard ball was bounced off it. Anyway, I was unable to form a good hypothesis as to what would happen, but I did find that mcmaster-carr sells fused quartz disks if anyone wants to try.
https://www.mcmaster.com/products/glass-discs/ultra-high-tem...
Steve Mould's video: https://youtu.be/QpuCtzdvix4
Grand Illusions original video: https://youtu.be/EzFjZJEAt18
McMaster also sells discs of tool steel and glass bearing balls... and carbide, and ceramic, etc. What if the bearing ball was carbide, even harder? What would happen if you reduced the hardness of a steel ball, which usually only requires normal kitchen oven temperatures? What happens if the materials switch places, say a hardened tool steel disc and glass ball?
Anyway, lots of options to safely experiment with material science concepts in very accessible and tweakable ways! No beryllium or foundry equipment required. I do think the massive, well fitted, rigid surface backing up the disc is important to constrain what this is demonstrating - plastic vs elastic deformation.
What counts is not specifically hardness or elasticity, but the hysteresis loop up to the stress and strain involved for a ball of a certain mass falling from a certain height.
I think electrochemical polishing[1] of the discs on both faces could be done without killing anyone. Since everything happens in a liquid, no vapors should evolve.
A VERY flat surface might greatly increase the bounce.
A surface coating of BAM[2] might also help, by increasing the hardness, and lubricity.
I think there's a lot of room to go in increasing the hang time of the bouncing bearing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_grinding
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_magnesium_boride
I was wondering if you go this route, how do you dispose of the liquid after? Once the liquid evaporates, dust is left behind.
I wish he'd just talk normal instead of inflecting his voice in that robotic way.
I feel lucky that doesn't bother me when watching his videos.
I can sympathize with you somewhat though, because the Food Wishes channel drives me insane for a similar reason. (Chef John has mentioned he speaks that way for his videos on purpose)
I expect it's more like how people often inflect differently when reading from a script, or if they're self-conscious about public speaking in general.
I think it might be partially intentional too. Nigel always has this pristine footage with uniform white backgrounds. It’s almost clinical, and the inflection is kind of on theme with that.
In nileblue he doesn't talk like this. So clearly intentional.
That's why I cannot watch anime dubs. American voice actors are acting. Original seyuu often talk like normal people (there are exceptions of course, but in dubs it's 100% acting, they use "cartoon voice" which I hate).
Yeah I don't find it offputting, it makes sense for the presentation style. Although it's a bit jarring when you can feel like he's paused in the middle of a sentence to move to the next line.
I like his tone. For me as a non-native speaker, I never had any trouble understanding him.
Once I noticed this I can't un-notice it anymore. It's not that it's robotic but that the inflections always follow the same pattern. There's an upswing and then a downswing with almost each and every phrase.
You can definitely hear the difference in his more wacky NileBlue channel.
Think Carmack is faking it too? Some people just have that cadence
I enjoy the way he narrates his videos.
Does anyone know why he did not try to increase the argon pressure? Wouldn't it help to completely fill the mold with metal?
I'm not sure but often in such scenarios you want to work under a slight vacuum so in case there is a leak, air goes in instead of beryllium vapor shooting out.
Unsure, but I also wonder why a secondary pump wasn't used to get even lower pressures, like a cryopump or turbo molecular pump.
Best guess on that might be cost.
I'd assume he was trying to do everything close to the atmospheric pressure even if its an intert gas's, because its less variables. And if a leak occurs you don't have a large pressure difference to help blow the hazardous elements everywhere.
From what I can recall from watching most of his videos over the years, he doesn't have any fancier vacuum pumps, so it would indeed be a piece of new equipment he would have to buy.
He cycled the argon five times, which is probably plenty without the need for new equipment. He also melted titanium to ensure that any remaining reactive gases were destroyed even after five cycles of argon.
The metal coming out of the bottom of the mold was also a frequent issue, and a more dangerous one. More pressure could be bad.
I was disappointed it wasn't related to low level systems programming haha!