Mr. Messina,
It's great that you have done the Teacher Camps! I am pretty sure that there is additional material made available to you through ASMI in terms of aids, reference materials, and topics/projects. And I'll say that you should do some basic research, say Wikipedia articles, on your areas of interest, so that you can better understand any responses that you get here. Any community college that prepares students for engineering degrees should have a basic Materials course, maybe you can find one nearby? Regarding your questions:
1 - All of materials science goes into building circuit boards. Temperature resistance, thermal expansion coefficients, ease of manufacturing/cutting/machining, these are all of paramount importance. The boards have to accept metal plating and are made with multiple layers of board and connection paths between chips and components, to reduce the total amount of space taken up by the design and to shorten the signal paths. These boards have to resist the temperatures of liquid solder without deteriorating or flexing too much from one side getting hotter. As far as alloys, high purity copper is most often used for situations needing high conductivity. Adding alloying elements to any pure metal decreases the electrical conductivity. Sometimes silver (slightly higher conductivity, much higher cost) or gold (better corrosion resistance, not as good conductivity) are used.
2 - I'll leave this for others.
3 - The materials for a limb need to be compatible with the body tissues that they will be in contact with. If metals corrode or non-metals deteriorate, the degradation products are often irritating to the body. It is also important to design parts with the right amount of flexibility, also called modulus of elasticity. If there is a large change in the relative stiffness of a limb appliance at the connection point, compared to the body part it's mating with, then that causes strain and relative movement of the part at the connection. This can cause irritation or wear, and those are both undesirable.
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Paul Tibbals
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-19-2023 16:35
From: Joseph Messina
Subject: Information for students
As an educator, I am just a dabbler in materials science - I have no real formal training outside of the teacher camps. However, I have a few questions that my students might be interested in learning more about:
1) What is the role of materials science in building circuit boards? Have materials scientists developed any specialty alloys to assist in the transport of electrons or adjusted the plastic of circuit boards to improve their effectiveness?
2) How do LED lights work and what materials went into that assembly?
3) Given the need for prosthetic limbs, what decisions need to be made to create such an item?
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Joseph Messina
St. Charles School District
St. Peters MO
(636) 443-4100
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