This Can Coat Anything in TITANIUM

it may not seem like it but the ability to coat things in very thin layers of metal or metal oxides has shaped our entire world which is probably not what you think about if you were asked what is currently the most important technology every computer you've ever used relies on the ability to carefully lay down patterns of extremely thin layers of metal but computers are just the most obvious use many other technologies also require thin layers of metal or metal oxides to work mirrors in either their normal metallic or fancy dielectric form are at the heart of a huge number of components in a wide variety of machinery and tech and that's only barely scratching the surface even just coating plastic and a thin layer of metal transforms it into an incredible insulator even though together the plastic and metal are only a fraction of a millimeter thick so you can imagine that I wanted to see if it was possible to make something that could coat things in thin layers like this in two previous videos we built and used this thing called a DC sputtering magnetron to coat all sorts of things in all sorts of materials we made a variety of mirrors on glass as well as intricate patterns my favorite was this triple metal piece that I made using copper silver and gold but the one of the most excited about is these electrode arrays for growing neurons in an upcoming video we also coded things other than glass and coded these snail shells and even this Hornet to show that the device can really coat almost any solid material in metal since the last video in the series went out I've continued tinkering with the Machine and tried a variety of other materials I tried brass and got what I think is probably the best mirror so far and confirmation that not only can the machine do pure metals it can do alloys as well I also tried coating a 3d printed part for fun and it worked very well and most fun of all I tried some graphite and it happily coated glass in this amber colored carbon layer I'm currently having this stuff tested to see if it's a diamond so when I have the results from that I'll make a video about it when I built the system it was never more than a prototype just to prove that it was possible to make it work with readily available materials and so wasn't built to last so as these things always eventually go the magnet assembly that sits under the base plate and makes the whole thing work eventually leaked and the magnets corroded so the magnetron aspect of the system was officially out of commission new magnets just arrived but it'll be a while until I can make a new and improved magnet assembly the next set of upgrades will also come with full stainless steel construction to make the whole system permanent rather than the $2 glass jar I've been using as the main chamber of the system though since that's gonna be such a huge build it'll be a while till I get to it and since its fall it's almost time for some more bio videos soon but before I took everything apart there was one last thing I wanted to try you see even with the many many successes I had with the magnetron there were always two metals I could never get working aluminum and titanium after months and months of working on this project it was really starting to drive me insane because it seemed so arbitrary if I could spud her graphite and maybe make Diamond why should these metals be so stubborn we actually talked about the reasons why those metals didn't work with my current set-up in the last video but thanks to my new favorite book building scientific apparatus I stumbled onto the answer I mentioned in the last video something called a getter pump it's a type of secondary vacuum pump so not the thing that's going to remove most of the air from the chamber but rather think of it like sort of the final polish it helps remove the last straggler molecules that remain floating around in the vacuum system even after you remove most of the air they work by spraying a really reactive substance at the wall of the vacuum chamber so that anything that's floating around will quickly react with it and then stay put so now since there's less stuff floating around because it reacted away the pressure is technically lower guess what magical material they use in that reaction titanium all a getter pump is is a hot titanium wire in a vacuum as the wire passes 900 degrees titanium vapor just comes flying off of the wire coating anything it touches in titanium which reacts away any gases floating around the reason this works is because in a vacuum there's no oxygen to form a protective layer over the surface of the titanium and no gases to prevent any metal that evaporates from flying away so the hot wire just sprays titanium at everything in the chamber when I read that my brain ground to a halt all this time all I wanted to do was titanium coatings and all the said I had to do was heat up a wire under vacuum so I threw together at this little prototype I am gonna start with a heads up this design sucks I hate it I hate using it and I think most of my materials election was garbage but who cares because it fricking works the main issue with this is that it's leaky and requires constant maintenance to keep it working between runs which isn't difficult but is very annoying so keep that in mind but again the point was never that this is a great way to do this but just to see if it would work at all and it does because science okay so what did I end up building basically a really crappy light bulb the base plate is Teflon because that seemed like a plastic that could take a reasonable amount of heat and still be decent in vacuum I drilled in top two holes to accept two bits of m8 threaded rod the rods thread into the Teflon and then to make a good seal an o-ring and vacuum grease is added to both sides of the Teflon and secured with a nut on the bottom side I added a second nut to secure a thick gauge copper wire to each of the rods on the top side I added a pair of nuts to secure the filament speaking of which I'm using pure titanium heater wire as my filament to make the coil I wrap some wire around a glass rod the coil was then held in place with the tuneups and that's it easy as that if you'd like to see how I built the rest of the vacuum system I've linked to both previous videos in the description and in the top right corner of the screen the TL DR though is that this jar is the main vacuum chamber and it uses a gasket made of it--and rubber to seal onto the Teflon plate a hole was drilled in the glass jar to accept a special fitting we made in the first video that allows us to connect up a line of tubing the tubing goes to three things to one side it goes to an argon tank and valve on the other it goes to my two-stage rotary vane vacuum pump and then in the middle that goes to a vacuum gauge that tells me what's going on in the system to start things up we close the gas inlet valve place the jar over the base plate and turn on the vacuum and let it pump down once it's nice and low I'll let in a puff or two of argon to help clear out any sticky gases like water and give an inert atmosphere then let it pump down again this is called back filling those two wires we added to the rods earlier were wired to a standard plug which was then connected to my variac this is a special type of transformer that lets you vary the voltage and current you're feeding into a system when we turn it on we're essentially making a dead short across mains so a ton of current is going to flow even a very voltages so I'm using a handheld current meter to make sure I don't go too high and fry the variac as it's only rated to ten amps and let's the magic smoke out if you go above that I found that at this size about five point two amps was the perfect amount to get the coil to the right temperature and we'll just slowly raise the voltage until the meter read the right current but you need to be careful as the point at which the wire will start spraying titanium vapor and the point at which it'll just melt are very close together I lost several filaments this way but titanium wire is dirt cheap so it's fine but a bit annoying when I was first testing this as usual I was using a microscope slide as my test sample and sure enough as soon as the wire got hot enough immediately titanium started to fly and it seemed much faster than the magnetron after one or two test runs just to make sure the system wouldn't melt or explode I let it really go and got a beautiful titanium mirror best of all it was conductive so this really is titanium metal from there I just started coating everything I could fit in the chamber in titanium to stress test the system first just because I know I'm going to get a hundred comments from the biohacker crowd I tried coating some magnets the results were pretty lame and the coating wasn't very strong but it did coat the magnets so I think it's just a matter of process control to get a nice coating it's a nice proof of concept but definitely not something that's implant ready in industry lots of things get coated in titanium because of how vibrant the colors of titanium dioxide can be thanks to the thin layer interference effect we explored in my titanium chopstick video as such you can get a variety of metal parts with rainbow titanium coatings I wanted to try this myself so I found the smallest knife I had and made it fit into the chamber I put the blade edge first facing the filament to try and get a nice coating over the whole blade after a 20 minute coating I took the blade out and it was already starting to get some color to really make it pop I hit it with a flame for a moment and sure enough the colors brightened right up and I got a beautiful rainbow another weird object they gets coated in titanium is crystals and gems you can buy both quartz and a variety of other minerals coated in titanium which is usually then sold for twice the price as rainbow or aura versions of the same rock so I went to a local rock shop picked up a variety of minerals and tried coating them the results were odd every time I tried rather than a nice rainbow it would give a jet-black coating I even tried flooding the chamber with oxygen to try and encourage oxide formation but the best I managed was a small amount of rainbow on one of the smaller aragonite crystals I don't think this is really a big deal though the black coating looks awesome and this is a proof of concept that it is possible to coat even a very uneven surface with this technique just like how the magnetron could just for fun and wrap this up as one last test I tried to pattern the titanium using the same technique we used in previous videos first I cut out of vinyl mask using my vinyl cutter and then stuck it to a glass slide and peel the way vinyl from areas I wanted to get coated in metal then I just popped it into the chamber and let it rip the results were not awesome well it did produce a perfect pattern the titanium was oxidized in a golden color and completely non conductive so I think for a pattern titanium am either gonna need a different mask material or once I upgrade the whole system feed in a constant stream of argon to keep contaminants at bay and allow the pure metal to coat things properly or maybe both so what have we learned titanium can be readily evaporated using nothing but a hot wire can coat almost anything be patterned and is remarkably easy to do the biggest thing now will be control of the conditions to improve the coating quality and aluminum should be easy to using the same sort of technique if you want to learn more about thermal evaporation like this I've linked to several resources and videos in the description bent over it applied science made a similar system that uses a molybdenum boat which you can put a little bead of material into to heat it up and get it to evaporate I also included a link to Sam's a loofa channel as he built an entire home IC manufacturing lab he's used all sorts of metal of operation techniques and used them to make full-on transistors and IC chips also for those interested in this stuff I highly recommend a copy of the book I mentioned earlier as it's got everything you could ever want to learn about vacuum stuff and so so much more but for now that's where I think I'll leave it the final Dragon has finally been slain and now I can start thinking of a massive rebuild of the system to make it all more permanent and from there it'll be on to bigger and better things I think though for now this is gonna be the last vacuum system video for a while as I mentioned it's almost bio season again and I've got some videos coming up that I think are gonna blow your Mines and for the approximately bazillion of you that have been asking about the spider silk we're almost ready to put out the next video in the series and are finally making some progress so if you haven't already consider subscribing so you don't miss any of the amazing stuff coming up oh and one last note for those of you that entered the hana tech frequency generator giveaway in my recent sonoluminescence video I'm excited to announce the winners congrats to Mario gia Neto Krister hans and nicolas lynn day an email has been sent to each of you to collect your prize and thanks to everyone else who entered and your lovely comments on that video as always I need to say a huge thank you to my amazing patrons channel members and supporters on cofee if you liked the video in these sorts of projects and want to help keep the flow of science videos coming and consider kicking a buck or two my way your support is the main thing that lets me continue making videos and I appreciate it so much if you missed them be sure to check out the two previous videos in this series and if you'd like to see these projects long before they end up in videos head over to Instagram where I post very regular photos of the things I'm working on that's all for now and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Thought Emporium

Views: 554,354

Keywords: titanium, thermal, thermal evaporation, vacuum, depoisition, hot wire, rainbow, aura, crystal, csgo, case hardened

Id: -lh1LhoRBaY

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/FD4L]

Thabks for this video...now I want to spend lots of money (that i don't have) on something i know nothing about.

[u/HardenMVP2019]

I'm too dumb for this shit.

[u/[deleted]]

I would love to be able to do this to car parts.

[u/Steellonewolf77]

This guy talks like Bret Weinstein.

[u/HeyaGoncho]

He sounds a lot like Wil Wheaton narrating Ready Player One.

[u/prostateExamination]

Does he gave the prints to build this thing? Please