Voices of Science

So the Super Bainite; this work was being done by a woman called Francisca Caballero in my group, absolutely fantastic scientist, you know.  And one day she came to me and she said, that I've got a steel which sings. So we were trying to model the properties of this structure, and what she did was she made an alloy, which was the composition of one of the parent phases, because we needed to measure the properties of that.  And when she made the alloy she heated it up to 1000 degrees centigrade, and then put it onto a steel table to cool. And suddenly there were bells sounding. So you can download an application on Android called Crying Bainite, which is an actual recording of the sound that she made. So there are acoustic emissions coming from inside the steel. You can hear them and they were amplified by the metal table. So once you hear acoustic emissions you think maybe the transmission is happening incredibly fast. Because that would give out these emissions of sound. so we investigated that further, and that is how super bainite, and then after the initial stage there were lots of calculations and all the rest of it, but it was sound coming from steel which triggered the invention.