Work

We got to work today and really got going on our project. Basically our purpose here is to learn and practice as much as we can about a few types of materials analysis, get some work done for the lab at home by processing some samples, and most importantly to make firmer contacts with the students and faculty here at Birmingham.

The samples we have with us are called Primacor (shown above), which is an adhesive based polymer in pellet form, and a sample of snowboard base material for my senior honors thesis. The snowboard base material is a Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene base which has been sintered and infused with trace amounts of Gallium.

Frank Biddlestone is a lab technician here at Birmingham and our day to day supervisor along with Dr. Stephen Kukureka. Frank is extremely knowledgable about every machine in the lab in both a mechanical sense as well as a theoretical sense, which is fairly uncommon these days. Frank helped us use a thermo-press to mold the Primacor pellets into 2mm thick sheets which will be much more useful for the rest of our testing.

With these sheets we can use various punches to make appropriate sized samples for better material characterization.

<---The punch used is the one shaped like a dumbell

Waiting for the press to cool-------->

The properties we are interested in and hope to characterize while here are tensile strength, thermomechanical properties, possibly some fatigue, and some basic understanding of structure. The first machine we used is called a DSC (Differential Scanning Calorimeter)

We were very productive, even though we took a long lunch break with Dr. Cairns (research advisor at WVU) and his daughter, Dr. Barbero (Chair of MAE at WVU), and Dr. Kukureka. Dr. Barbero treated us (Thanks again!) to an amazing dinner at Barajee, an Indian Restaurant near Birmingham City Center.

I have eaten a lot of Indian food, but this was by far the best I have ever had, and definitely the fanciest, papadam, chicken tikka, lamb tikka, shish kebab, chicken tikka biryani (my new favorite), nan, and "still" or sparkling imported water.