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- Hello. My name is Benjamin Gould
and I'm a material scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
Argonne is located in Lemont, Illinois
just outside of Chicago.
It's one of 17 Department of Energy laboratories
across the country.
And this year Argonne is celebrating its 75th anniversary.
Over those 75 years
researchers have used the labs facilities
to make many groundbreaking discoveries.
I work in an area called tribology,
which means I study the way surfaces interact
as they rub together.
You may know this as friction and it's all around you.
I really got into tribology
because I loved wind energy
and I wanted to find ways
to make wind turbines more efficient.
Argonne does work in this field
because there's so much to learn.
The more we can learn
about the effects of friction in our lives
the more we can improve things like cars or wind turbines.
Studying friction is definitely not new.
Over 500 years ago,
Leonardo DaVinci studied tribology,
Today's activity, you'll be thinking about
and experimenting with tribology,
just like DaVinci did in the 1500s,
and just like I do at Argonne today.
One piece of advice that I have for today's activity
and for any future scientific or engineering activities
that you do is don't be afraid to fail.
Failure is an important part of learning, trying something
then learning what you use to move forward
is a part of research
that has aided me throughout my career.
Now let's get to the fun stuff.
I want to introduce you to Brandon Pope.
He's an Education Outreach Coordinator at Argonne
And today he'll be leading you through some experiments
that focus on tribology, DaVinci
and some of his thoughts on friction.
- Thanks Ben. Hello everyone.
My name is Brandon Pope.
I'm the Outreach Education Coordinator
at Argonne Laboratory,
and thanks for being here today.
We're going to talk about friction.
Now, if you know what friction is wonderful.
If you don't that's okay, too.
So I want everyone to start by doing this,
take your hands, rub them together.
You feel that heat?
That heat is a result of your hands rubbing together.
And friction is a study
of what happens when surfaces rub against each other.
Now you may know the Leonardo DaVinci
as painter, sculpture, as an inventor.
But he also was a tribologist, just like being an art guy.
And he had a lot of assumptions about friction
and one assumption was that he thought
that the friction between all surfaces was same.
Today, we know that's not correct.
And we're going to learn about that today
doing this experiment.
So first things first, you also have your supplies.
Thing about these supplies,
they should all be in your home.
You should not have to go buy anything with this experiment
all the things we need should already be in your home.
So the first thing you're going to need
for your experiment is a string.
A shoestring is the best thing to use.
So here's my shoestring.
Shoestring is the first thing you need.
The second thing you need is a small Ziploc bag.
So what you're going to do is take a pencil,
or ask a parent, take your Ziploc bag
and punch a hole right under the seal of Ziploc bag.
We're gonna do that.
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You have that hole, you're going to take your string,
put it through the hole and tie a knot,
so it's tight and so it hangs,
but there's still able to put something in the bag,
like this right here. Okay.
Next thing you're gonna do, take your ruler.
And I want you to measure one foot of string
from the end of your bag out.
So that you have a foot of string right here,
You have that?
Secondly, well the next thing, take your object.
Maybe a can of soup.
I used a bar soap
and then tie the string around an object.
Tie it tight.
Where it can hang just like this.
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In the end you should have
the string with a Ziploc bag on one end
and the item on the other end.
This is your experiment. This will not change.
It stays the same for the entire experiment. Okay?
So now we want to do,
we're going to measure how many weight items
does it take to move your item on a surface.
Now that weight item really depends
on what you have at home.
Now, the thing about the weight item
is that they all should be the same,
and you need a lot of them.
So I was able to find a bunch of pennies around my house
in the couch, in my car, I left them places.
But you can use pennies.
You can use coins,
paperclips, batteries, whatever you have.
It doesn't matter just as long as they are the same
and a lot of them.
Now we have our weights
and we're going to determine,
at how much weight does it take to move this object
on a variety of surfaces.
The first one being aluminum foil. Okay
So what we're going to do now,
we're going to set up our experiment. Right now.
Okay. You can see, I have my aluminum foil on a flat desk.
It can be a kitchen table, it can be a kitchen counter,
but it should be flat.
Have your foil on the surface like this.
Make sure it's flat.
Then I'm going to take my object, my bar of soap,
put it flat on the surface, just like this.
Then you want to have your bag so it hangs off of the desk.
So this is what you want to have
your object on the surface somewhere flat
and your plastic bag hanging off of the table.
Off the surface.
And then your going to take your weight items.
And we're going to put the weight items in the bag,
to see how many items does it take to move this object
on this surface. Okay.
Now, if I add one penny at a time
it'll take a long time to figure that out.
So I'm going to start with five pennies.
I'm going to see if five pennies
can cause this object to move on the surface.
All right. So here's five pennies,
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Five pennies. Nothing. Alright. Add five more pennies.
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Five more pennies. Alright.
Alright. It moves.
So now we know that for this bar of soap
it took 10 pennies to move on this surface.
Now what you can do
you can change the surface to a mirror table.
You can put a t-shirt here, put a sock, a paper towel,
you can put a little bit of soil here,
but the main thing is determine,
how many pennies or how much weight does it take
to move your item on different surfaces.
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So DaVinci was incorrect.
One reason, is that we think
that DaVinci's labs were much different than today's lab.
His lab may have been dusty, not as well lit.
Whereas Argonne has labs we call clean rooms.
These are rooms without the desk that may have been found
in the DaVinci's lab.
And these rooms allow much more precise measurements.
So why is this important?
You remember from the video that tribology
is the study of wear or friction.
And at Argonne for biologists like Ben,
focus on how to decrease friction in a variety of things
that play a role in all of our lives.
So, I hope you had fun.
I hope you learned something.
And I hope now you have a better appreciation of friction.
Thanks. And we'll see you soon.
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