“Magic dust” composition and microstructure: (most sensible proper) a blank baseball floor; (backside proper) a mudded baseball.
Credit score:
S. Pradeep et al., 2024
“Magic dust” composition and microstructure: (most sensible proper) a blank baseball floor; (backside proper) a mudded baseball.
Credit score:
S. Pradeep et al., 2024
Pradeep et al. discovered that magic dust’s debris are essentially silt and clay, with slightly of sand and natural subject matter. The stickiness comes from the clay, silt, and natural subject, whilst the sand makes it gritty. So the dust “has the houses of pores and skin cream,” they wrote. “This permits it to be held within the hand like a cast but in addition unfold simply to penetrate pores and make an excessively skinny coating at the baseball.”
When the dust dries at the baseball, then again, the residue left in the back of isn’t like pores and skin cream. That is because of the angular sand debris bonded to the baseball by way of the clay, which is able to building up floor friction by way of up to an element of 2. In the meantime, the finer debris double the adhesion. “The relative proportions of cohesive particulates, frictional sand, and water conspire to make a subject matter that flows like pores and skin cream however grips like sandpaper,” they wrote.
Regardless of its fairly mundane elements, the magic dust nevertheless displays outstanding mechanical behaviors that the authors assume would make it helpful in different sensible programs. As an example, it would change artificial fabrics as an efficient lubricant, equipped the gritty sand debris are got rid of. Or it may well be used as a friction agent to strengthen traction on slippery surfaces, equipped one may just outline the optimum fraction of sand content material that would not diminish its spreadability. Or it may well be used as a binding agent in in the community sourced geomaterials for building.
“As for the way forward for Rubbing Dust in Main League Baseball, unraveling the thriller of its habits does no longer and must no longer essentially result in an artificial alternative,” the authors concluded. “We fairly consider the other; Rubbing Dust is a nature-based subject matter this is replenished by way of the tides, and most effective small amounts are wanted for excellent impact. In an international this is turning towards inexperienced answers, this reputedly antiquated baseball custom supplies a glimpse of a long run of Earth-inspired fabrics science.”
DOI: PNAS, 2024. 10.1073/pnas.241351412 (About DOIs).
