S-STEM Scholar Jeremiah Toller's Blog

       Alright, I’m going to level with you, dear reader: this is the last assignment of my semester and it’s almost 2 am on December 23rd (getting closer to 3am at this point). I’ve been reading research paper after research paper trying to find something that inspires me to write about it, and I just haven’t been able to make it work. I tried writing about NASA weather balloons, metallurgical qualities of titanium and gold, chemical and mechanical methods for recycling, and I can’t even remember what else at this point. “I need something…fun,” I thought to myself as I scrolled through database entries on engineering, which, if you are unaware, are often not much fun at all. So eventually I added “fun” to my database search, and I found just what I needed. It may not be a research paper, but apparently its “scholarly or peer reviewed,” and I like what it has to say, so I’m going to tell you a little about it.  From Research-Technology Management May-June 2017 p...

       This entry will be discussing a journal paper from Journal of Materials Processing Technology Volume 117, Issue 3, 23 November 2001, Pages 347-353 entitled Ancient blacksmiths, the Iron Age, Damascus steels, and modern metallurgy by authors Oleg D.Sherby Jeffrey Wadsworth. Why this?  Well, dear reader, blacksmithing just happens to be a hobby of mine and metallurgy is an area I hope to place some focus on in the future, so it’s only natural that I would gravitate toward an engineering paper on this topic. It was a fun read that covered a number of different aspects pertaining to blacksmithing, metallurgy, and Damascus steel, as well as challenging the notion of when the Iron Age actually started, which is what I will discuss first. It is believed that the Bronze Age began around 7000 BCE, lasting until the start of the Iron Age around 1200 BCE. What denotes the beginning of the Iron Age was when iron began replacing the bronze weapons and tools of the t...

          We live in a time where there is a lot of push to get back to the use of natural materials in the production of as many things as possible. From the need for greater availability of materials, cleaner methods of disposal, to overall greater sustainability in all steps of material production, fast growing sources such as hemp present myriad advantages for producing composite materials. However, the “green” ideology of utilizing biobased materials currently has limitations which many hope to overcome by blending natural fibers, such as hemp, into composites with other materials such as epoxies and other resins, known as thermosets, with preference for thermosets which are also derived from biobased sources (such as polybenzoxazine). Doing so gives nearly endless possibilities of changing the mechanical properties of the natural materials in ways that transcend their current limitations and allow these materials to be used in applications which may c...

  I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that when most of you hear the term “soft robot,” your thoughts immediately go to cuddling with it. Who wouldn’t want a soft, squishy robot to cuddle with? Alas, that isn’t covered in this journal entry from February 2019’s Extreme Mechanics Letters Volume 27 entitled An untethered soft chemo-mechanical robot with composite structure and optimized control written by Liyuan Chen, Weijia Chen, Yaoting Xue,  Jie-Wei Wong, Yiming Liang, Mingqi Zhang, Xiangping Chen, Xunuo Cao, Zhen Zhang, and Tiefeng Li. However, what is covered is an example of a soft robot, which is also referred to as a soft machine. Let’s talk about. This soft machine draws its design inspiration from natural muscle.  When a muscle flexes, it does so due to the mitochondrion (the “power house” of the muscle cell) reacting to the introduction of fuel, which causes a decomposition process that generates adenosine triphosphate as a form of “catalyst and react...

  I get it; not everyone is into Sci-Fi, and not everyone cares to think about intergalactic travel. Let’s pretend, however, that you, dear reader, are into it as we delve into one of many real-world theories on how it may be possible, according to Miguel Alcubierre as presented by M.Fil'chenkov and Yu.Laptev’s article in Acta Astronautica Volume 139, October 2017, Pages 254-257 entitled Galaxy travel via Alcubierre's warp drive .  Let’s start from the top; intergalactic travel has been mused upon by humans for centuries. This hasn’t always been well received by society, as Giordano Bruno found out the hard way in 1600 when he was burnt at the stake in Rome's Campo de’ Fiori for proposing it’s likely that life-supporting planets exist in other solar systems which could have intelligent life that we should explore. This shifted over time, and by the 1950’s, society was so accepting of the thought of life on other planets that there were programs in many countries dedicated ...

   When will 2D drawings become obsolete in the realm of mechanical engineering? Likely soon, as implied by authors Nomeda Puodziuniene and Evaldas Narvydas article in Mechanika entitled Standards for Transition from 2D Drawing to Model Based Definition in Mechanical Engineering (2021). There’s already a commonality among designers to start with a 3D solid model drafted using Computer-Aided Design (CAD), which can render a 2D from the 3D solid model when necessary. Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) meshes well with this, which has the engineering world wondering if 2D drawings are even a necessity anymore.  So what’s the hold up? As you may imagine, some engineers, especially those who didn’t learn Computer-Aided Design (CAD) natively, are likely more comfortable with sketching out 2D design renders by hand. However, the bigger contributor to the hold up seems to be establishing universal standards for “allowing different people who speak different languages to read the ...