Hydrogen Embrittlement
I'm at my internship. It's sweet. I haven't really started the work on the project we will be doing all summer, which I've explained like 16 times to 12 different people, so I don't really feel like explaining it again. But I do have 13 min to kill, so... I am designing a circuit which will ultimately test the amount of hydrogen embrittlement on the hulls of ships in the ocean. Metal corrodes in salt water via the oxidation reaction we learned about in chemistry so many years ago. A way to stop that is to put a bias voltage and an extra metal on the exterior of the hull, so the extra metal and not the hull gets corroded. However when you have this potential between the two in the seawater, it tends to force hydrogen atoms into the metal instead of electrons. This also corrodes the metal and currently there isn't a way to determine how corroded (via hydrogen embrittlement) a ship's hull is until it cracks in half and sinks. Our sensor will have three parts to it, one of which is Palladium (Pd) resistance testing. Pd's resistivity goes up proportional to the amount of hydrogen atoms which have embrittled it. We'll put a piece of the metal Pd in the water with the same conditions as the ship's hull, and then we will periodically test the resistance of it, which will give us a measure of the hydrogen atoms in it which will be proportional to the amount of hydrogen atoms in the hull. So the circuit I'm designing has to have all these parameters like: it must be physically connected to the ship (so they have the same voltage), however it cannot allow current to diffuse into the ship, which would corrode the ship at an exponential rate; and it must be able to reverse the reaction in case the Pd reaches it's saturation point and needs to get rid of all the Hydrogen's in it. Anyways that pretty much it, and it's 5. So I'm getting the shit out of here and....