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.
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| See if you can spot the agglomeration... It's dead center. And that white one is another up on the top left corner. |
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| 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:
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| Field Scanning Electron Microscope (F-SEM) |
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:
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| Imai Sensei demonstrating filling Nitrogen containers. |
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| My buddy 大西君 Oonishi. Him and I have been working together every weekday, more or less all day. |
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| 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.. |
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| It's calle a Honda Magna. |
April 17th:
More research stuff. I'll explain things vaguely in the caption.
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| Using an abrasive saw with a ceramic blade to cut the Titanium billets down to size. |
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| Those puck looking things are what the metal billet is squeezed through. That colorful rod is the Titanium rod. |
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.
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| 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. |
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| Busy polishing those sample. At least we have a nice view while we do it. |
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| Here is the view. The mountains looks nice. |
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| 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! |
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| 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. |
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.
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!
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| Getting touchy on the train. I think the Japanese people got kinda annoyed by our loud, childish behavior.. Oh well.. Life goes on. |
I will stop for now. I wanna enjoy the rest of my night with some people. Peace!
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