The class wrapped up this week with a tour of composites (and the start of a frantic race to the finish of our projects).

I don’t have the background in materials / materials science I wish I did, because composites are really cool. A composite is, at a high level, a material composed of two seprate but synergizing materials. One of them is a binder or binding material which surrounds and supports the other material (e.g. epoxy, esters, urethanes); the other is a reinforcement material which has some structural properties we’re interested in. This is some sort of fibre. The reinforcement is shaped (onto a surface, around some sort of foam or honeycomb core) and the binding agent is applied. The resulting composite has crazy tensile strength, and this is basically the basis of things like reinforcement concrete (e.g. concrete + reinforcement bar or rebar). At any rate, we did one particular process for creating composites… vacuum bagging.

"darting" the flax for a comfortable fit around a coffee cup
This was an illustrative rather than impressive output. Though I'm happy to have something for science center Clover coffee.