Behind the Scenes: Designing and Engineering Adhesives
Carlos Barrios, a materials engineer at 3M, describes some of the latest engineering projects taking place at 3M and what his typical day is like inside and outside the lab. Barrios specializes in adhesives.
Transcript
00:00:06 one of the most rewarding moments for a materials engineer is seeing the product being produced in a mass scale my name is Carlos baros and I a materials engineer materials Engineers like Carlos work with the structure properties processing and performance of different materials or stuff in order to engineer new and improve stuff
00:00:31 so that's what makes my job so Dynamic since everything in the world is made of stuff there's no limit to what kinds of materials Engineers might invent or reinvent materials for biomedical applications like artificial skin and Prosthetics high performance composits for Aerospace even materials for sports equipment and apparel you'll find materials Engineers working in
00:00:55 three different venues government academic and corporate environments caros designs and develops sticky stuff as a material engineer I'm part of the adhesive group of 3M so what we do is study different adhesives and we stick to different surfaces one of the big things for adhesives is using adhesives that last longer are more resistant to
00:01:17 environmental conditions and can be used in a very small amount we try to develop new films thinner films using Technologies as nanotechnology that uses very small particles or use material that are coming from biological source for example so once we have these new materials we use them into commercial products high-tech adhesives engineered at companies like 3M are used everywhere
00:01:42 from in the home to Aerospace architecture construction electronics and Automobiles we interact every day with people from different disciplines bubbles coming off indicate that the the byproduct is coming off so the reaction must be going it looks like everything's just like we expected during the development process products
00:02:04 go through several stages before fullscale production can begin most of the times we start in the bench we make the material we characterize it and we start making very small hand spreads so once we have these new materials we prepared films that are becoming new adhesives and in this area you can see the little spheres you were describing and it turns out they're not fully
00:02:27 covering the surface but they are present my wife also works in the materials area and we like jogging running and in Minnesota we have very nice parks and very nice landscapes no matter where he is Carlos is always thinking about stuff if you go to Nature you can see for example leaves leaves are highly structured surfaces and they are
00:02:53 selfcleaning so one of the approaches that we use now is to try to mimic these properties of the nature to incorp them into the new products of the future is crucial tool to understand the physics and the chemistry at the surface you can see here that we increase the volume of the droplet the droplet basically is sliding at the surface in some cases we have very
00:03:18 strong requirements in terms of a strength of the material so we have very specific tests to make sure that we are under the specifications of the design application one good example of that is a impact test yeah we have a impact tester that we're able to test at a variety of different conditions so we can look at very cold conditions which sometimes
00:03:39 make Plastics very brittle and then we can also take it up to higher temperatures too to make sure that it has the wide range of performance that you need once we find the optimum conditions for the materials that we use for this film we go to the pilot plant in the pilot plant we simulate in a very small scale what is going to
00:03:58 happen in the factories so this is looks very nice but it has a very smooth pull off as well we need to hear the customer because he or she is the one who's going to use it so for this we use Focus panels I say the red one is probably the toughest one to unwind it stretches a little bit what when you're unwinding it what we have now is a green light to go
00:04:19 to the factories and start making the product in the commercial scale like most research Engineers Carlos loves a good challenge even when he's not working Ruster Ruster Ruster my car has been with me for a few years it's getting old but I can detect the problems from the materialist perspective and try to get
00:04:42 to a solution so something that makes our work at Tri very interesting is that we are a global company and we have labs and production plans in every single spot of the world for our material engineering is very important to know what's going on around us not only inside of trim but outside in the decades to come materials Engineers will be at the Forefront of
00:05:04 solving problems on a global scale engineering Next Generation fuel cells solar cells water treatment systems even new drug delivery techniques for fighting disease one of the main impacts of the job of a materials engineer is coming with new solutions for example for environmentally friendly materials by doing that we're replacing materials commonly used for example from oil and
00:05:28 try to Green materials materials Engineers typically hold a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical mechanical or materials engineering most continue on to get a master's degree in materials engineering I work for a while as a process engineer but then I wanted to go deeper in the properties of materials and I obtained a MERS and a PhD in polymer science when
00:05:50 everything has a place to go it's easy for kids to stay organized I'm very pleased to see some of my materials going to scale production one of the focuses of my career is to develop adhesives that stick to everything so something called a universal adhesive take a good look at your stuff materials Engineers like Carlos are working hard to make all our
00:06:14 stuff even better at home and around the world [Music] [Music]