Tag
#materials science
Every article tagged “materials science”.
11 articles
Materials Science
The building was painted two years ago and it is already peeling. Almost none of that is the paint's fault
Coating failures are overwhelmingly application failures, and the causes are specific enough to name: a wall painted before it cured, a film half the thickness it was specified at, a recoat window missed in either direction. Here is what actually goes wrong between the can and the surface, and why the monsoon makes all of it worse.
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Materials Science
Your rain jacket stopped repelling water. The coating is almost certainly still on it
A jacket that has stopped beading water usually has not lost its finish — the finish is dirty, or lying flat. Coating a fabric is a completely different engineering problem from coating steel or glass, and the reason the industry cannot yet replace one particular chemistry comes down to a single number you can look up.
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Food Technology
There is a plastic coating inside every food can, and it is the most heavily regulated few microns in your kitchen
Your tomatoes never touch the metal of the can — a polymer lining a few microns thick is in the way, and that lining has been reformulated twice under regulatory pressure. Here is what migration actually means, why food-contact rules measure how much rather than whether, and the questions that separate a real compliance document from the words 'food grade'.
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Materials Science
A chip in car paint spreads. A scratch on a galvanised gate does not. The difference is worth ₹ lakhs on a real structure
Both are bare steel exposed to the same air, and they behave completely differently. The reason is that rust is not a chemical attack on metal — it is a battery, and a coating can interrupt it in three quite different ways. Here is which is which, why a small defect can be worse than no coating at all, and why salt-spray hours are a bad thing to buy on.
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Materials Science
Self-cleaning glass does not repel water. It does the opposite — and that is the whole trick
Everyone assumes a self-cleaning surface is one water bounces off. The self-cleaning glass sold on real buildings works the other way round — water spreads into a sheet. Here is why there are two opposite routes to the same result, which one survives contact with the world, and the number suppliers quote that tells you almost nothing.
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Nanotechnology
A carbon nanotube is stronger than steel. A rope of them is not — and the reason is worth understanding
A single carbon nanotube is among the strongest things ever measured. Fibres spun from billions of them come in an order of magnitude weaker. The gap is not a manufacturing failure — it is physics, and it explains what nanotubes are actually good for today.
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Materials Science
How antimicrobial coatings keep working after the cleaner has gone
A disinfectant stops working the moment it dries. An antimicrobial coating is designed for the hours in between — the gap between one clean and the next. Here is the chemistry behind it, what a 99.9% claim actually measures, and the questions worth asking before you buy one.
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Materials Science
How alloys get properties neither metal had
Mixing two metals can produce something harder, tougher or more corrosion-resistant than either one alone. Here is what actually happens inside an alloy, and why steel is stronger than the iron it is made from.
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Materials Science
MXenes explained: the 2D material powering next-gen batteries, sensors and shielding
MXenes are a young family of two-dimensional materials with metallic conductivity and a surface you can tune. Here is what they are, and why labs from Drexel to India are racing to use them.
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Nanotechnology
Graphene, twenty years on: where the wonder material actually shows up
A single layer of carbon won a Nobel Prize and a decade of hype. Two decades later, where does graphene genuinely deliver — and where is it still catching up to the headlines?
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Materials Science
Perovskite solar cells: the cheap, printable rival to silicon — if it can last
Perovskite solar cells have gone from lab curiosity to near-silicon efficiency in barely over a decade. The prize is cheaper, flexible, printable solar power — the catch is making it last.
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