Hi friends,
I am glad to see how you all are interested in the process
of the posts of the slides! I believe that an image can say more than a thousand
words, our strategy is going by there and it is working! Thank you all for
your support!
Today I am going to tell you all about an event I
participated last month: The European Researchers Night. The European
Researchers Night is an event that is developed around the different cities of
research supported with founds of the Marie Curie Actions. This specific event
is one of the MSCActions given to legal entities, which are part of the EU
Member State, to organize events related to research outreach developed in the
different European research centers to the local community.
The supported activities can be hands-on
experiments conducted by researchers, science shows with public
participation, debates, "researchers' dating"(meet researchers and
ask them questions), competitions (science quizzes, games, puzzles, photo
and art contests, etc.), workshops for children, guided visits of
labs, research institutes, and other relevant places that are usually closed to
the public. If you want to see more details, you can visit the web page: https://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/actions/european-researchers-night_en
Once, I had explained to you all what is this event about, I
want to tell you my own experience in it. First of all, I can remember you all
that I am a civil engineer and my research topic is related to the application of
magnetic fields in roads. As a civil engineer, we don’t receive any course-related with that, so, I have support from the Department of Physics of the
University of Granada, with professor Guillermo Iglesias (https://www.ugr.es/~iglesias/),
to achieve the corresponding implementations of the tests I am doing in the laboratory. From this collaboration, I started to share knowledge and therefore
time, with the work team of researchers in the Department of Physics (meeting
more people with a passion for science and technology!). They fortunately were planning to collaborate
in the European Researchers Night Event in Granada! So, I joined their group
to do the first approach to these kinds of activities, that as a Marie Curie Fellow
I am called to participate.
I did the following video for you all about the planned activity
(it is in Spanish, but I am going to comment about it in the following lines). The
information in Spanish is in the following link, I am going to comment about
here in the post: https://lanochedelosinvestigadores.fundaciondescubre.es/actividades/fluidos-y-geles-magneticos/
The natural ferromagnetic materials are solid at room
temperature. If you heat them until fusion, they had reached the Curie (yes!)
temperature, over which they lose their magnetism capacity, so, there are not
ferromagnetic materials purely liquids. However, it is possible to synthesize
liquid and solid elastic materials with a ferromagnetic behavior, when we
disperse solid ferromagnetic particles in a liquid or a polymeric matrix (this
sounds interesting, does not it?!). In those cases, the solid ferromagnetic
particles are attracted by a magnet and can change their shape and stiffness.
As you saw in the video, during the activity professors
Modesto López López and Luis Alvarez de Cienfuegos explained how this kind of
materials work, talked about some applications, and showed some demonstrative
videos. After some of their explanations, the researchers Cristina Gila Vílchez
and María Carmen Mañas Torres did demonstrative laboratory tests to the audience. This
time, I was just part of the support team, preparing some materials, helping
them in what is was needed, and learning about these kinds of activities.
Unfortunately, I joined later to properly prepare something more about my topic,
but I promise that in the next activity I will talk about my mechanomutable
asphalt materials! So, stay tuned! This experience is arriving at a really
interesting part of the process and I would love to share it with you all!
Keep in touch,
ESR 14-PLP.
No comments:
Post a Comment