Tuesday, April 22, 2014

2014年4月15−19

April 15th:

Last Tuesday was a hard day of work. After the rocking mill (a big machine that violently shakes samples) failed to separate the agglomerations of carbon nanotubes, we tried throwing a mesh into the container, along with .1 g more oil. This ended up working out pretty well. The average size of the nanotube bundles shrunk and more were adhering to the Titanium particles. Here's proof.

See if you can spot the agglomeration... It's dead center. And that white one is another up on the top left corner.

An example of a nicely coated Ti powder particle.
In case you were wondering what the machine looks like that takes these pictures, here it is:

Field Scanning Electron Microscope (F-SEM)
Ok, so I'm gonna try and keep the science down to an acceptable 'travel blog' level. So yeah, there was Tuesday. Let's go on to Wednesday.

April 16th:

On Wednesday, I performed my first Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS). Here's how it basically runs:


First, you grab a graphite die, and fill the inside with your powder solution; Titanium with Vapor Grown Carbon Fibers in my case. To ensure the metal doesn't melt together with the die itself, you spray BN (Boron Nitride) as a lubricant between the two materials. Anyways, next you put the entire die in between two massive, extremely powerful punches. During the "cold sintering" process, all you would do here is compress the sample so much that the sample powder forms one big body. In my case,  "spark plasma sintering", you heat the Titanium sample to 800 degrees Celsius, and run a current corresponding to a 10,000 V of electric potential through it. The current, according to theories, creates local in-situ hot spots between Ti molecules caused by the massive amount of electrons smashing and colliding their way through the sample (A current is just a transfer of electrons. The more electrons pass through a point per second, the higher the current). If you remember from physics class, V = IR, and the V = 10,000 Volts. Titanium, being a conductor, offers fairly little resistance (R), so the current (I) will be extremely high. If you didn't understand that, basically you don't want to put your hand near it. Not that you would anyways, since the whole oven it's contained in heats up to 800 degrees.. Ok.. I'm getting off topic. We also wen to refill nitrogen from a massive tank on campus. Here's a pic:

Imai Sensei demonstrating filling Nitrogen containers.
I've been eating lunch with my new friend Motohiro Oonishi. After this lunch, we hit up the bookstore and found a good English book, cause he has been trying to practice with me a lot. In exchange for some Japanese tips of course. Synergy at its finest.
My buddy 大西君 Oonishi. Him and I have been working together every weekday, more or less all day.  

This was our first SPS Titanium billet. The faces were made of a carbon sheet (used to prevent bonding between die and sample), so we practiced our names in it. Along with 最初 meaning, "first". You can see my kanji needs work..
 After work, Motohiro took me and some hall mates out to a good ramen place he knew of. I had no idea he was a motorcyclist. It turns out a lot of the engineers at my lab are. After food, he came over briefly and we shared some good music. He introduced me to the infamous avant gard Japanese electronica scene. Some pretty classic Japanese stuff..
It's calle a Honda Magna.


April 17th:

More research stuff. I'll explain things vaguely in the caption.

Using an abrasive saw with a ceramic blade to cut the Titanium billets down to size.
Next, I ran through my first extrusion. If you saw the Ti billet up top, we basically ran it through a really hot pasta maker. The result is this long thin rod of Aluminum.

Those puck looking things are what the metal billet is squeezed through. That colorful rod is the Titanium rod.
 In case you are wondering why it is so colorful, it is actually due to a nanoscopic layer of oxidation that forms on the surface of the Titanium. The varying thicknesses of the oxidation layer cause light waves to bounce back with varying interference patterns, leading to the beautiful rainbow-like display.

April 18th:

The day before my birthday! It had been a long week. So much information to retain. Friday was rather peaceful. I spent all morning polishing our Titanium samples. We needed to get them polished finely enough so that you can't see scratches with a 100x microscope (100 times the actual size image). So you can see why it took all morning, but they were all shocked with how clean my samples were coming out. They even went as far as to call me a 職人shokunin, a person who 'lives to work' (that translation doesn't do it justice) because I was so focused on the polishing job. I was flattered. Oh! Also, I did my first X-Ray Diffraction. Don't ask me exactly how it works. I understand the basic principles behind this machine; Here are some pics from the day.
Blasting the sample with x-rays to find out what time of lattice it is, how it's oriented, and how many solid solutions are embedded in it.

Busy polishing those sample. At least we have a nice view while we do it.

Here is the view. The mountains looks nice.
 In the afternoon, Professor Kondoh called us all in for a student meeting. Here's what he had in store:
He asked me what the next day was. I had completely forgotten about my birthday at the moment. After I realized it, he said, "What do we do for a special occasion? We have tea time!". Hell yeah!

It was also the guy in the white sweater's birthday on the 19th. The puff pastries were amazing. And the guy in the back is my lab's head Professor. What a guy.
 I headed home after work and took a stop for a video and picture. This road I bike home on is always so pretty. First, a bamboo forest



 followed by these:




I got home, ate some worms.. Who cares! 


We went out for Karaoke that night with the hall mates. All you can drink slurpees and soft drinks.. Soda is honestly worse for you than beer..

April 19th:

My birthday! Started it out right by doing some laundry. The best part was the 100 JPY for 20 minutes of shitty drying. Yeah! On a real note, I went and played tennis with one of the German girls in the hall. She was pretty good, and we both had fun. And afterwards, all the Germans in the hall got together in the park to have an early Easter picnic. Nena and Jana baked cakes and hid eggs around the park. Big thank you for the delicious birthday treats they made me, and the awesome German birthday song they sang for me. They really made me feel like I was at home celebrating with my family.
Afterwards, I Skyped my family briefly before heading out for Shakey's "all you can eat pizza". Woohoo! The way there was cool. Here are some pictures:



My buddy Stefan and I had 6 beers in an hour at Shakey's. There was only 1 hour of free drinks for 700 JPY. We finished one beer in the first hour and realized we still needed to get our money's worth. So we went to the counter, got a beer, chugged it before we got back to the table, and got another. We went through about 5 beers in 30 minutes. I expect nothing less of a German! During dinner we all shared interesting local words from our home locales. I learned Wegbier, literally translates into waybeer; a beer that you drink on the way to or from a bar or club. Another word for it was Fussbiltz, or footfungus, but biltz also means beer in German. Here is a shot of all the crew with their Wegbiers!


Getting touchy on the train. I think the Japanese people got kinda annoyed by our loud, childish behavior.. Oh well.. Life goes on. 
On the walk back we stopped by a convenient station to get even more booze, except this time it was a cheap bottle of "umeshuu" plum wine. So sweet, such a bad hangover. At least I know I did right! Amuhrrrrica!

I will stop for now. I wanna enjoy the rest of my night with some people. Peace!

Monday, April 14, 2014

2014年4月11−14日

April 11th:

Friday was a great day. I got to the lab at 9 unsure what to expect from our meeting. I had decided vaguely what I wanted to research. But considering I don't know too much about what has already been done in the field of powder metallurgy, I wasn't able to give a perfectly concise research goal. The meeting began around 10, and it turned out to be a presentation session in Professor Kondoh's lab. Each research student came up and gave a presentation on their last month of research, the Japanese presented in Japanese and the Chinese exchange students spoke in Chinglish. As if materials science is not already difficult enough. Try learning it in another language... Professor Kondoh would interrupt the presentation from time to time and force his students to explain to me in English what they were saying. With my broken Japanese and their broken English, we found an understandable compromise between our mother tongues, enough so to at least get our points across. The meeting lasted all day, from 10 AM- 4 PM with a lunch break for an hour.
After the last presentation, I went back to the computer room to read more research articles. About half an hour later, I was called in to discuss my research topic with Professor Kondoh. It was just me, the Prof, and Imai senpai a 35 year old guy who seems to have loads of experience in the lab. I presented my list of topics I had conjured up, and explained the ones I had the most interest in. I told him I want to make aircraft parts for Boeing civil aircraft. So we narrowed it down to Aluminum, Titanium, and Magnesium. We agreed on Titanium because Magnesium has poor corrosive properties, and Aluminum has a higher material potential than Titanium. This is something I still don't fully understand, but Titanium has a higher specific strength than Aluminum, so this makes it more ideal for aircraft parts. Obviously there are already a lot of Titanium/Ti alloy aircraft parts, but the field of titanium composites is relatively unexplored. The Prof. himself did research on carbon nanotube dispersion in pure titanium and Titanium alloys, both which yielded strong materials, but there was some small bugs to be fixed out. To put it into as summarized words as possible, my research topic is:
Pure Titanium and Titanium alloys dispersed with Vapor Grown Carbon Fibers (VGCN) consolidated by spark plasma sintering (SPS) methods.
It is extremely interesting to me.

At 5:30, I went out with all the lab members and staff. We went to わらいお好み焼き, where they offered a huge full course Osaka style meal with all you can drink for 1 and a half hours. I sat with the professor for most of the night and got to know him a little bit more. He is basically a badass. He gets called in by the US military to work on bulletproof materials and tank armors.. Among many other awesome jobs. And he seems pretty well off because he just gave us a 10,000 JPY to spend on whatever we wanted after dinner. We decided to go this other Indian restaurant to have some drinks. Here is a picture of the end of the night.
Awesome group of guys. Very intelligent, helpful and a great time to hang out with. By the way the lighting definitely makes me look whiter than I am.  
After dinner, I biked home with the crew. The night was pretty fantastic, and for the first time here, I caught a strong whiff of fresh grass and trees. The campus area is pretty green and dark at night. Japan is definitely a special place. 

April 12th:

Saturday, I got up early to visit Kyoto with the International Student Club at Osaka University. I'm just gonna post a bunch of pictures and caption the happenings.

Train cockpit.

Felt bad cause our whole group of 40 foreigners stopped to take pictures of these two. I guess that's half the point to them dressing up.

GIANT

Postin by some sakura trees with lunch.

Heian Jingu Shrine

Courtyard. Pretty classic.

Towers on the side of the courtyard.

The garden by the shrine. This was pretty serene. Wish I woulda seen this at night with the lights.


The Sakura are on the wane. The leaves are a nice color as well though.  
One more close up because it is so pretty. 
That pine tree sakura contrast is pretty primetime. 

The oldest train in Japan. Really random that they put this in the Heian Shrine garden... lol. 



Stone spotted with sakura leaves.

Cool engravings.


Write your wish on a pink paper, and hang it on the branches.

Big.

Thanks for ruining the shot taxi car..

Group shot with some pretty kimono girls. They were just sight seeing from Tokyo and wanted to get into the Kyoto feel.

Some badasses. They helped bring Japan out of isolationism apparently.

Guess they are still alive...

Cool narrow street.

Turn 180 degrees from the last shot and this is what you see.

Geishas and an awkward lady.

Another cool street with shops on both sides.



Crowded, but majestic nonetheless.

Buddhist temple. I took some time to pray for the 2011 Earthquake/Tsunami victims. 


Big bell.



Springtime in Kyoto



That green is so vivid and brilliant. I got lost in it.

Lover's shrine. 

Kyoto: The old and the new... and the pollution...  


This thing was tiny. If you go up 4 pictures, this the red tower you see in that picture..

Some lovely flowers next to it though. 
Some rocks with faces and aprons.

Traditional restaurant.

More praying.

Some more rocks with faces and aprons. 


Pretty serene

Get that bronze on brah. \o/

Very efficient toilet. Looks like a toilet, sink, and shower all in one. Do you stand in the toilet while showering?
April 13th:

Went to 回転寿司 Kaitensushi, conveyor belt sushi. 100 JPY for a plate. Basically a dollar for 2 pieces of sushi. But first we we saw this fleet of McDonald's delivery carts. Thanks a lot A-meh-rica... 
As if eating McDonald's isn't bad enough. Here they don't even need to leave their room to do it..

From left to right, there's Felix (Germany), Emilio (UC Berkley), and Duncan (New Zealand). Great guys.
 This place kicked American conveyor belt sushi's ass. You could use the screen to order specific dishes instead of waiting for the one you want to come along. Also, for every 5 plates you put into the machine, a little anime sequence would play on the screen, and if your character did something cool, you would win a little sushi phone decor. Unfortunately, only 1 in every 4 games is a winner, so I came out empty-handed. Next time.
After lunch, we went to Daiso, Japan's infamous 100 Yen store.
This cracked me up. 
After buying some cheap, kind of useless but cool things, we headed home.
You can take your pets to Honey Poo for a good time!
Relaxed that evening. Played some guitar and prepared for the coming week.

April 14th:

Today was all research. I started the day off right with by reading and taking thorough notes on a paper similar to my topic. Then I was presented with 2 more papers to read. I only got through one more. Took a 20 minutes nap after lunch on my desk, cause that seems to be an ok thing to do and I literally could not stay awake... Anyhow. I prepared my first sample to analyze today.

199 g of TILOP-45, 1 g of VGCN

Same sample after 30 minutes of Table Milling. Basically mixing.

Pure TILOP 45 Titanium
 The powder is EXTREMELY fine. The average particle size of the Titanium powder is 45 microns, or .000045 m. The black stuff is even finer. Here are some EXTREMELY blown up images of the first picture.
The x650 basically tells you this image is 650 times as large as the object you are looking at. So yes, these are individual particles of EXTREMELY fine titanium powder. As a reference the white strip represents a distance of 10 microns, or .000010 meters. Isn't it a whole world of its own at that scale? My mind is blown every time I look through the scanning electron microscope.
The smooth balls are Titanium and the the clusters of tubes are Carbon Nanofibers.


This is roughly what I am working towards. Having every Titanium particle coated with a light layer of Carbon nanofibers.

These carbon clusters are my enemies. These tubes should be dispersed throughout the Titanium matrix. Otherwise the carbon reacts to form Carbon solid solutions and Titanium Carbide TiC, which is not as strong as the individual nanofibers.


A close up of the fibers. So pretty, but so useless like this...

Titanium Carbon interphase 

An extreme close up. 20,000 X magnification. The white stripe at the bottom right represents .000001 meter.

The bike ride home. Same thing tomorrow. お疲れ様でした!Good night!