Author: Lou Bloomfield

How does cathodic protection work?

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How does cathodic protection work? — MM, Dominican Republic

The rusting of damp steel is an electrochemical reaction in which iron atoms in the steel are converted into positively charged iron ions (Fe2+) in the water. However, each iron atom that becomes an ion releases two negatively charged electrons and rusting can only continue if there is a suitable destination for these electrons. Normally, the electrons pass through the steel metal and are used together with oxygen molecules to form negatively charged hydroxide ions (OH–) in the water. Overall, the rate at which the steel rusts is limited by how quickly hydroxide ions can be formed to use up the electrons.

Cathodic protection is a scheme in which a piece of reactive metal, typically magnesium, is connected to the steel to form an electrochemical cell. Magnesium ions (Mg2+) form more easily than iron ions and enough electrons are given up by the magnesium atoms as they become positive ions to completely dominate the hydroxide ion formation process. With nowhere for their electrons to go, the iron atoms can’t become iron ions and rusting can’t proceed. As long as the magnesium metal, often called the “sacrificial anode”, remains intact and connected to the steel, the steel won’t rust significantly.

As an alternative to this approach, some companies use a power supply to pump negative charges onto the steel to prevent it from rusting. Pipeline companies often do this and that action has led to some interesting complications: metal objects that are brought into contact with such a pipeline can be protected against rusting as well. For example, when people chained their bicycles to protected pipelines, the bicycles became part of the protected materials. This may have been good for the bicycles, but it confused the pipeline companies who found that they needed to pump extra charge onto the pipelines to handle the increased load. It was particularly bad when the bicycles accidentally grounded the pipelines and allowed the negative charges to escape.

For home canning it is necessary to thoroughly sterilize the containers. In the …

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For home canning it is necessary to thoroughly sterilize the containers. In the past, I have had to boil the jars in a large container. This is dangerous. If I were to moisten the jars and place them in the microwave, would there be enough heat to sterilize them? — CM

While you could sterilize jars in a microwave oven, doing so would be extremely dangerous. Your chances of successfully sterilizing the jars without blowing one of them up is very small. Here is an explanation.

When you place a canning jar in boiling water, what you are really doing is exposing that jar to a water bath at a temperature of 212° F (100° C). Boiling water self-regulates its temperature very accurately, making it a wonderful reference for cooking. Below water’s boiling temperature, water molecules evaporate relatively slowly from the surface of water so that when you add heat to the water, it tends to get hotter and hotter. But once the water begins to boil—meaning that evaporation begins to occur within the body of the water—water molecules evaporate so rapidly that when you add heat to the water, more of it converts into steam and its temperature doesn’t change much. When you boil canning jars for 5 minutes, you are simply making sure that the canning jars sit at about 212° F for about 5 minutes; long enough to kill bacteria in the jars. Since the boiling temperature of water diminishes at high altitudes and lower atmospheric pressures, you must wait longer for your jars to be adequately sterilized if you live in the mountains.

Microwave cooking wouldn’t heat the jars to any specific temperature. As you cooked the jars in a microwave oven, their contents would become hotter and hotter. Even if we ignore the fact that microwave cooking is uneven, so that the temperature inside each jar won’t be uniform, there will be nothing special about the temperature 212° F. If you cook the food long enough, its temperature will reach 212° F, but will then keep rising. As it does, the water vapor in the jars will become more and more dense and its pressure will rise higher and higher. If the canning jar had been properly capped, the metal lid ought to be loose enough to allow this steam to escape. However, the canning system wasn’t designed to handle large amounts of escaping steam and an over-tightened jar might not permit the steam to escape at all. With the steam trapped inside, the pressure inside the jar may become large enough to cause it to explode. Since too little time in the microwave oven will leave the jars unsterilized and too much time in the microwave oven may cause them to explode, I suggest sticking to the tried and true method of sterilizing your jars in boiling water.

I recently place a green tomato in the microwave oven. I forgot to turn on the m…

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I recently place a green tomato in the microwave oven. I forgot to turn on the microwave and in the morning the tomato was ripe. Can you explain this? — KH

No. When a microwave oven is off, the cooking chamber contains nothing special at all—just some trapped air and perhaps a little light that enters through the window. Even when it is operating, a microwave oven never produces any ionizing (high energy) radiation so there are no long-term effects such as radioactivity present in the cooking chamber when the oven is off. The tomato was simply sitting in a sealed metal box overnight. Since some fruits ripen faster in sealed environments, perhaps that accounts for your observation.

Does a device that has radio waves and uses ozone and negative ions have the abi…

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Does a device that has radio waves and uses ozone and negative ions have the ability to clean the air in my home? — KTR, Halifax, Nova Scotia

There are many simple electronic devices that claim to clean the air in your home by making negative ions and ozone (if they involve any radio waves, it’s a minor side effect of their internal electronics). The claim is accurate—they do make both ozone and negative ions, and they do clean the air in your home. However, that’s not the whole story. First, ozone may have the “fresh” smell that occurs after a thunderstorm (a potent producer of ozone), but ozone is a powerful oxidizing agent and chemical irritant that’s considered an environmental pollutant rather than a charming scent. The manufacturers are taking a nuisance effect and touting it as a “valuable feature.” Second, the negative charges emitted by these electronic devices attach themselves to dust, ash, pollen, and smoke particles and cause those particles to bind themselves to your walls and furniture. The air really does become cleaner, but every surface in your home becomes dirtier as a result.

If you’re seriously interested in cleaning the air in your home, you are probably better off with a full electrostatic air cleaner. Small home versions of this common industrial workhorse are easy to obtain at a local heating and air conditioning store. Properly designed machines use positive ions to avoid producing ozone and provide a negatively charged surface for the positively charged dirt to stick to so that it doesn’t deposit itself on your walls.

Can light be bent by electric fields, magnetic fields, and gravity fields? If so…

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Can light be bent by electric fields, magnetic fields, and gravity fields? If so, can these fields be made to make light travel in a circle? — RS

Light consists of electromagnetic waves, meaning that it is composed of electric and magnetic fields. While light isn’t affected by other electric or magnetic fields, it is affected by gravitational fields. Like everything else in our universe, light falls when exposed to gravity. However, because light travels so fast, it’s very hard to detect that it falls. The first observation of light falling in a gravitational field was made during a total eclipse in 1919 and served as dramatic confirmation of the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. As for light traveling in a circle, this can occur near the surface of a black hole. When light traveling tangent to the surface of the black hole falls at just the right rate, it will orbit the black hole indefinitely.

What is the chemistry involved with natural dyes adhering to surfaces?

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What is the chemistry involved with natural dyes adhering to surfaces? — AG, Aloha, OR

Unless a chemical reaction binds them permanently in place, dye molecules that are soluble enough to wash into fabrics are equally likely to wash back out of the fabrics later on. To remain in place, the dyes must undergo chemical reactions that attach them to the fibers of the fabric. Some dyes react spontaneously to the fabric molecules but many others need help. The traditional scheme for binding dyes to fabrics involves mordents—relatively colorless chemicals that bind to both fabric and dye, and that hold the two together. Tannic acid and various metal salts have been used as mordents for centuries. They form insoluble compounds that wedge themselves into hollow spaces in the fibers and then bind chemically to the dye molecules. These mordents hold the dye molecules in place in much the same way that technical climbing gear holds rock climbers to the face of a cliff.

How does a fan motor work?

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How does a fan motor work? — JM, Toronto, Ontario

A fan motor is an induction motor, with an aluminum rotor that spins inside a framework of stationary electromagnets. Aluminum is not a magnetic metal and it only becomes magnetic when an electric current flows through it. In the fan, currents are induced in the aluminum rotor by the action of the electromagnets. Each of these electromagnets carries an alternating current that it receives from the power line and its magnetic poles fluctuate back and forth as the direction of current through it fluctuates back and forth. These electromagnets are arranged and operated so that their magnetic poles seem to rotate around the aluminum rotor. These moving/changing magnetic poles induce currents in the aluminum rotor, making that rotor magnetic, and the rotor is dragged along with the rotating magnetic poles around it. After a few moments of starting, the spinning rotor almost keeps up with the rotating magnetic poles. The different speed settings of the fan correspond to different arrangements of the electromagnets, making the poles rotate around the aluminum rotor at different rates.

Do the resonant frequencies of the elements change as the magnetic fields they r…

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Do the resonant frequencies of the elements change as the magnetic fields they reside in change? Can an element such as iron be made to resonate at the magnetic field strength of the earth? — JP, Blakeslee, PA

The terms “resonant” and “resonate” are general expressions that refer to repetitive motions or actions that occur spontaneously within a system. Elements exhibit many different resonant behaviors in different situations, so I must pick an appropriate resonant behavior in order to answer your question.

The best choice I can think of is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)—an effect that involves the flipping of an atomic nucleus’s magnetic poles. Most atomic nuclei—the massive positively charged nuggets at the centers of atoms—are magnetic. When you put an atom with a magnetic nucleus in a magnetic field, the atom acquires a certain amount of potential energy that depends on whether that magnetic nucleus is aligned with the magnetic field or not. The extent to which the atom’s nucleus is aligned with the field can be changed by exposing it to an electromagnetic wave of the right frequency. This electromagnetic wave provides or absorbs the required energy to allow the nucleus’s magnetization to flip. The nucleus exhibits a resonance in response to the correct electromagnetic wave—a phenomenon called “nuclear magnetic resonance.” This frequency at which this resonance occurs depends on the nucleus, on the magnetic field, and on the magnetic environment of the nucleus. The resonance occurs for any magnetic nucleus, in any field, but how interesting or useful the resonance is depends on the situation. So the answers to both questions are yes, but that doesn’t mean the effects are important.

When two identical items are cooked, one with a microwave oven and the other on …

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When two identical items are cooked, one with a microwave oven and the other on the stove, which will cool faster? — CR

If the distributions of temperatures inside the items were the same after cooking, they would cool at the same rate. However, a microwave oven tends to cook relatively evenly throughout the food while the stove tends to cook from the outside of the food inward. That means that food cooked in a microwave oven tends to have more thermal energy near its center than food cooked on a stove, even when those foods contain the same total amount of thermal energy. Since foods lose heat through their surfaces, the extra thermal energy in the food cook by microwave will take longer to flow out to the surface of the food and from there to its surroundings. All else being equal, I would expect the food cooked in the microwave oven to cool slightly slower than the food cooked on the stovetop.

How does an integrated circuit perform computations? I know that it has transist…

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How does an integrated circuit perform computations? I know that it has transistors embedded into it, but how can a circuit of semiconductors be used for multiplication? — DF, Marina Del Rey, California

The transistors used in digital integrated circuits, including microprocessors, act primarily as electronically controlled switches. These transistor switches permit the electric charge on or electric current in one wire to control the electric charge on or current in another wire. In digital electronics, a wire’s charge or current state is used to represent a single binary digit—either a 1 or a 0. By combining transistors in modestly complicated arrangements, the states of several wires together can control the states of several other wires. This increased complexity allows for simple functions such as binary addition to be performed—for example, the charges on two wires can be used to control the charges on two other wires so that the charges on the second pair of wires represent the single binary sum of the two individual numbers represented by charges on the first pair of wires. More complicated adders can be assembled from more transistors and finally multipliers can be assembled from a collection of adders. Overall, it only takes a few arrangements of electrically controlled switches to form the primitive elements from which incredibly complicated digital processors can be built.