Its not a "Bat", its Materials Engineering

They say cricket is ruled by batsmen. Unfortunately people get more entertainment for watching boundaries and overboundaries not by waiting for a wicket to fall. All these fun comes from couple of pieces rather few pieces of wood, called bat. International Cicket Council has a poor definition of this piece. A bat looks like this
can not be longer than 96.5 cm including the handle and maximum width shouldn’t exceed 10.8 cm. must be made of wood. There is no restrictions on the weight of the bat (typically 3 lb), the shape: well its understood, there is no definition by ICC. The blade of the bat can be covered with some material for protection and repair, should not strengthen the bat and the thickness of this cover should not exceed 1.56 mm. Recently a committee headed by Sunil Gavaskar, recommended some more criteria, the important one for this case is that you can not infiltrate anything in the blade moreover it should be made of one solid piece of wood.
Where is the scope for improvement? Material scientists and engineers step in here, before addressing this issue let us know where we need improvement. Of course ball should travel faster than what they do now. When a ball hits the bat at a very high speed, there are lots of vibrations and minimizing this has been challenge for sometimes. Striking the ball hard is easy when its hits at the “sweet spot”. This region is almost 12 cm above the bottom of the bat, the thickest part, we define this place as the place where minimum vibration is felt and the ball travels much faster. The sound we say heavenly when it hit this sweet spot. So extending the sweet spot region is also an important issue.
How to go about it? There are few research institute and Universities in Australia and in England are really doing quite a bit of research in these field. The departments associated with this are Material Science and Design, so its science and engineering combination. Lets see a bat, it has go 2 parts, one is solid part the one piece wood one and the other is the handle. The handle is a composite material its made up of canes put together with rubber and adhesive in between. This actually dampens the vibration which comes after the ball hits the bat. In RMIT university in Australia researchers are trying to make the handle with a composite material containing carbon fiber and polymer, this dampens the vibration more compared to conventional handle. This is the bat which probably Rickey Ponting wanted to use last year, under ICC supervision. In case of base ball bat the vibration control system is a piezoelectric device, which generates voltage to nullify the effect of vibration, it’s a software controlled process and these software were developed after a rigorous study on vibration, soon in cricket too we will see such modification setting in. Due to the rules we can not progress much with the blade part from the material science point of view, this is a pure problem for designers, design aspect only can extend the sweet spot. Tennis and Golf has progressed a lot in these regards. They are using the best possible materials for such application, reinforced graphite of bulk metallic glass are few should be named. Lets hope ICC will overcome its conservative resistance and make cricket more exciting.

Some links:

ICC home page

Bat size specification

Space Research

Discovery of vacuum was a revolution, its helping someway or other the poor souls like ours, but life moves on. Once we have vacuum we can do lots of model experiments, that will gives us a clue of what can happen in the space above us, but, hold on, you can not get rid of the gravity so easily until you cross the field and go in to space. The amount of effort that goes in behind the space research is huge but now research in space invoked a great deal of interests among the researchers. Presently NASA and ESA has carried out quite a few experiments in space and believe me they are really fascinating.
Experiments in space were started probably through sputnik-3 in 1969, which sent mostly some geophysical information. Until very recently, experiments were concentrated mostly on the atmospheric or geophysical studies but the scenario has changed quite rapidly. Experimental research had leap when Mir was placed in space in the year 1986, and from year 1989 till it was abandoned in 1999, there was always a human being in space. The Venture, International Space Station, took the lead there after. Scientists from all over the world including Russia are participating in this program.
The idea of carrying out experiments in a space station appears bizarre to many people, mostly because of the cost and the futuristic nature as we can not see the application. The fact is someway different; these experiments are mostly carried out for advanced technology. I found one nice example; an experiment on flame. The flames coming out of some nozzle appears like a fluid drop due to the gravitational force resulting in an air flow. Now if these experiments are carried out in space under microgravity atmosphere the flame breaks in to balls, the experiment is known as Lwis SOFTBALL experiments. For this combustion the fuel required is extremely low, which is a process all automotive engine companies will look for, as the hydrogen or hydrocarbon based combustion engines requires these informations. This was an example for a direct application to technology. However, the fundamentals for the basic science are getting major benefits from the zero gravity experiments. Imagine a human brain, which has been modeled to function under gravity, when it is exposed to the microgravity condition, the systems response to this change. It is therefore an interesting area for study. Again we know the plants grows in the direction of light, its roots also grows in the direction of gravitational force, hence it is interesting to know how the plants grow in such conditions.
Materials research did achieve much scope to carry out experiment although levitation experiments for solidification of metals have drawn interest. The constraints are mostly forming the experimental module and control over the experiments, the results is unknown till the specimens come back to earth. Among the other materials research semiconductor crystal growth has been quite a revelation. Near perfect crystals can be grown under microgravity, under surface tension driven flow in the melt. A control in the defect concentration in the crystal is also possible, but its is not so straight forward as the density driven flow and surface tension driven flow complicates the process. The container free melt will have hardly a site for defect nucleation hence these processes are really useful.
Every scientific advance comes with a price tag and we had to pay it through the lives of astronauts who were killed the Columbia explosions. These were the part of NASA’s STS -107 program, more than 70 experiments were carried out in space. We have lost Kalpana Chawla, the only Indian female astronaut.
Efforts are on as many other countries are coming up with ideas and launch vehicles for carrying out experiments. Indian space research also as an individual progressed a lot and one day we will also be able to carry out our own experiments in space.

I found infornation from the following places

Future Materials Science Research on the International Space Station (1997), National Academy publishers

NASA

European Space Agency

Russian spaceweb

News about ISRO

memory under freeze

...Saswata has kept a hard disk inside a freeze to retrive data from it :D, First time i had laughed like this. Although he is famous for humourus activities but this time i was fooled as i found people have found it as a good technique for retriveing data from the "failed" hard disk. So just take the HD and keep it inside a freeze for couple of hr. and fix it back, if you are lucky then you'll get your data back. Sounds like a cool trick. May be Semiconductor guys can put some light on it, and from materials scienctist point of view its really interesting.

Materials, Mimicry and MEMS by Dr. Julia King

It’s all about fans! Prof. Julia King, from rolls royce today delivered really a fascinating talk on aero-engine in our prestigious faculty hall. When I first saw those real huge jet engines, I wondered how much science and technology must have been gone into it. She today talked about the physics, engineering and design of the fans and the engine as a whole!
Her talk started with the general concern on global warming and the contribution of aerospace industries to it. She showed a B-52 bombers emitting considerable amount of un-burnt hydrocarbon. According to her noise pollution due to high engine noise levels is also a cause of concern primarily in cities. So she addressed all the problems in sequence. Her presentation began with an animations on how an engine works. It was evident that materials design is the key for the turbines blades inside the engine! The material they use for the fans are Ni bases super alloys and there is a problem with the randomly oriented polycrystals. The grain boundaries parallel to the air flow is a bad news: they are the site where the fatigue crack initiates under cyclic loading so the blades were processed with oriented grains with boundaries perpendicular to the air flow. Final step towards this grain boundary engineering was to remove the grain boundaries, i.e. use of single crystals! No boundaries so no flaws. It is important to reduce the weight of the blades which is a new field of research and shape memory alloys and metallic foam appeared to be potential material for that. There was a job also for the combustion engineers but from the material scientist point of view it was necessary to talk about the chamber material. Composite materials were shown to have better run for that. When the discussion boiled down to noise she mentioned how the noise is generated from the engine, the solution for that was to have a turbulent mix of two kinds of air coming out of the jet, for that it was observed serrated outer wall of the jet instead of smooth wall is quite effective. The criteria was it should remain close while it is flying at low altitudes (high temp. region) and at high altitude they should open up . In a nice experiment she showed actually how shape memory alloys acts as an actuater under changing temperature; it was really a nice piece of experiment. There was an ineresting info: eagles can fly at a speed of 200 Mph and consume an energy equivalent to only 10% of its own weight. At the end of her talk she showed some video clippings of some testing on the fans. They were amazing! First one was under tremendous water flow, 2nd one was fans performance under cold condition (T= 233 K), 3rd one was what if a single blade breaks? And final one was what happens when birds hit the jet, I am not going to tell you what happens then, you have to listen to Dr. King. I could not put any of her slides which I would loved to post, may be some other day......