Matthew Fyhrie: So, we’re at about 2300 degrees
for the surface temperature...
Miles O’Brien: For Matthew Fyhrie,
the heat is on.
This little bead is made
of what’s called a “rare earth oxide.”
It’s a high temperature material.
Alex Navrotsky: High temperature materials,
very loosely speaking,
are materials that are like rocks.
Nothing much happens to them until you heat them up.
Miles O’Brien: With support from the National
Science Foundation,
chemist Alexandra Navrotsky and a team
at the University of California, Davis have built this instrument
to study the structure and stability of rare earth
oxides when they reach their melting point.
That’s when chemical reactions can start to take place.
Alex Navrotsky: All the interesting things
that happen in terms of their thermodynamic properties,
in terms of their changing from one structure
to another occur at temperatures at white heat and above,
above let’s 1,500 degrees Centigrade.
[♪♪]
Miles O’Brien: Rare earth oxides are a key
component in many electronics.
Cell phones, batteries, lights, medical scan machines,
and many more devices all contain
these relatively-poorly understood elements.
Matthew Fyhrie: We have erbium, lutetium,
thulium, ytterbium, neodymium; we have yttria.
We have...oh, jeez, I should be able to name all of them.
Miles O’Brien: They begin their study
of the rare earths
by making them into little beads.
Alex Navrotsky: The problem is
at high temperature,
everything reacts with everything.
How do you overcome that problem?
You try to make a sample such that it’s not in contact
with anything other than the inner atmosphere.
How do you do that? You levitate the sample.
[♪♪]
Miles O’Brien: The technique is called
“drop and catch calorimetry.”
They levitate a bead, zap it with a laser to melt it,
and then drop it.
Matthew Fyhrie: And so what happens
is that the bead is heated up here and it falls
and then we just [clink!] -- like that.
Miles O’Brien: As the bead solidifies,
sensors behind those copper plates measure heat flow
and a property called “heat of fusion” -
how much energy it takes to melt the material.
Alexandra Navrotsky: If you want to calculate
how many different materials interact with each other,
you do this by a series of theoretical calculations,
and these properties of the melting have to go into that.
Miles O’Brien: Navrotsky says insights gleaned
from this work
could have applications for nuclear waste storage.
Rare earths are a byproduct of nuclear fission.
Also, the aerospace industry in the form
of new heat-resistant materials for spacecraft,
and also improved coatings for aircraft engines
to keep them from overheating.
Alex Navrotsky: We’ve built it and we
are still improving it little by little.
Eventually perhaps it will get commercialized,
but right now it’s a prototype, and as far as I know,
we’re the only ones that have anything like it.
[♪♪]
Miles O’Brien: Matthew Fyhrie helped develop
this instrument as an undergraduate.
For him, breaking new scientific ground has been a revelation.
Matthew Fyhrie: Honestly, when I first realized
it I just kind of sat there for a minute just being like,
“This is magic!”
Because through the development and work of others,
all those generations, you kind of feel like --
I don’t know, I guess I get philosophical on it,
like you actually feel like
you’re a part of a grander movement,
something that’s really important and bigger
than yourself.
Miles O’Brien: Alex Navrotsky can appreciate
his enthusiasm.
She’s been a chemist for more than 50 years,
a leading one for much of that.
A pioneer, for sure, but an unassuming one.
Alex Navrotsky: Basically, I just, you know,
went my own way and did the things I wanted to do,
and perhaps surprised myself - look where I am.
Only in retrospect do you realize that you were a pioneer.
You know, it’s all in a day’s work.
Miles O’Brien: Going to extremes,
probing the properties of high temperature materials -
unmasking the mysteries of rare earth oxides.
For Science Nation, I’m Miles O’Brien.