Educating Students Around the World in Materials Analysis and Characterization

In addition to my writings on this blog, I have written most of the website content for my materials analysis laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc.  That website consists of nearly 80 pages of information about the laboratory, materials analysis techniques, applications of materials characterization to a wide range of materials to make better use of materials and better products, information about the industries, companies, universities, and governmental agencies we support, and background and specialization information about our scientists.

AME's Dr. Kevin Wepasnick is a home brew-master. He recently collaborated with C&EN, a publication of the American Chemical Society, to make a helium beer. Helium actually is soluble in beer, gives it a very fine head, and maintains a very rich and creamy taste. But it has a much lower solubility than carbon dioxide does and does not create the carbonic acid that CO2 does. Carbonic acid gives beer a sharper taste.  Consequently, helium beer is quite flat.  Because the solubility of helium is very low, Kevin used a much higher pressure of helium in the brewing process. Due to that high pressure, much of the brewing was performed in our laboratory at Anderson Materials Evaluation using higher pressure hardware than is used for the usual carbon dioxide beer. See the C&EN video at www.andersonmaterials.com/beer.  Note the remark that our AME logo is Tight!

An incredible number of students are coming to our website to learn about analytical techniques and materials characterization. In just the last week, about 100 university internet users came to our website. Visitors came from Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, the Universities of Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, Wisconsin, Colorado, Ohio State, Texas Tech, Virginia Tech, Cal Poly, UCLA, UC at Davis, Oregon State, Michigan State, U. of Rochester, RIT, Case Western Reserve U., Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, Kent State, SUNY at Potsdam, Lehigh, Arizona State, Missouri U. of Sci. & Tech., Carnegie Mellon, U. of Pittsburgh, Northeastern U., UMBC, George Mason U., Purdue U., Washington State, and many more have visited in the last week.  Visitors from McGill, U. of Toronto, U. of Alberta, U. of Calgary, and other colleges in Canada visited the AME website.

In the United Kingdom, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Universities of Strathclyde, Sheffield, Southhampton, Northhampton, Windsor, Reading, Bath, Leeds, and Birmingham have provided visitors. In the rest of Europe: Uppsala U., Ecole de technologie superieure, U. of Ulm, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz U. Hannover, Picardie U., U. of Mons, Flinders U., U. College of Dublin, Waterloo U., U. Libre de Bruxelles, and others have visited. Many South American, Middle Eastern, African, Indian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese university visitors have also been to our website in the last week. AME is certainly doing its part to educate the world in materials science and engineering!

Helium-Pressurized Homebrew Beer at AME Featured in C&EN Article

Our own Anderson Materials Evaluation (AME) chemist Dr. Kevin Wepasnick guided a Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) investigation of the properties of a helium-pressurized beer in an article entitled Helium Beer, From Prank to Tank in its 2 November 2015 issue written by Craig Bettenhausen.  C&EN is a publication of the American Chemical Society.  Kevin brewed a 5-gallon batch of a cream stout beer for C&EN over a two-week fermentation period at Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. with writers from C&EN visiting our laboratory at the start and the end of the process.  He used a kegging process, but instead of pressurizing the keg with carbon dioxide, he pressurized it with helium.  The experiment was set up to test the claims that drinking a helium-pressurized beer would cause the drinker to speak with a high-pitched voice, as demonstrated in some on-line videos.

Scientifically, issues are to be expected.  Foremost is the difference between a polar molecule with excellent solvent properties such as carbon dioxide and the inert gas helium.  Carbon dioxide has a solubility in water of 1.7 g/kg, while helium has a solubility of merely 0.0015 g/kg in water!  It would be a challenge to dissolve enough helium in a beer to turn a drinker's voice squeaky!  Kevin pressurized the keg at 50 psi in a chilled keg, which is a much higher pressure than is used with carbon dioxide, and he held it at this pressure for five days.

The resulting beer had an excellent head of very fine bubbles, which it maintained as the visiting three writers from C&EN and the scientists of Anderson Materials Evaluation, Lorrie, Kevin, and Charles, sampled the beer at our laboratory.  Because the beer had little carbonic acid in it, it was a mellow beer.  The alcohol by volume was measured to be 6.2%, so it had a kick.  Yet, the beer was definitely flat and no one developed a high-pitched voice.  The Internet videos claiming such a result are fabricated!  Can you imagine that?

Well, yes, thinking as a scientist, the more than a thousand times lower solubility of inert helium in water compared to the highly polar carbon dioxide molecule, told us those videos were faked prior to doing the experiment.  Nonetheless, the experiment was fun for all, which is more the natural state of science than is the gloom and doom associated with much environmental science of our times.