Zoom into steel (to the atomic level!)

Science

Weird Weird Science posted this extreme zooming video on the structure of steel – quite awesome. They have video for concrete, brass, aluminium and more available as well. – Weird Weird Science on Dailymotion

Should you prefer a little more color & motion, check out Trey’s macro video of a plasma ball in action –

10 thoughts on “Zoom into steel (to the atomic level!)

  1. Anonymous says:

    The “cavity” they travel into in the video is NOT a defect or erosion, it’s there because this is a powder casted part.

    Powder casting is the most common way to make gears these days. Voids like this are a normal feature of powder casting because you fill the mold with powder, compress and heat it which causes *partial* melting and fusing, and you’re done. It’s very cheap and the finish looks no different superficially than a machined gear (the other method). The technique is also common for casting ceramics.

  2. thoxbui says:

    This video about steel is so full of inaccuracies that I don’t even know when to start correcting! If they can get metallurgists to provide those images, they should get proper explanations and terminologies. Carbon to protect from corrosion? Dendrites on a fractograph? Sheesh.

  3. Austringer says:

    The one that made my teeth hurt was their explanation of tempering.

    That was so “I saw this video where a guy took a samurai sword and cut through a piece of train track” bad that I had to check something and, sure enough: In “The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, 10th Edition” they claim to be showing the microstructure of pearlite at 1000x, not 10,000-50,000x. I don’t know what we were looking at in that video, but I’m gonna bet on the Association of Iron and Steel Engineers on this one.

  4. Volkemon says:

    Forgive my ignorance, but can one really zoom into the atomic level with a microscope?

    With all the other errors in this video, I was wondering if this was a gross misstatement by the narrator…

    Comments rule. Thanks!

  5. Collin Cunningham says:

    @Volkemon – I was assuming the video was actually composited from multiple shots – and yes, these comments do rule. Thanks for the insight, everybody!

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