Making Waves
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Making Waves A few weeks ago, I was looking out the window of my Reykjavik hotel room wearing my corduroy jacket and kilt, watching workmen laying underground drainage while talking on the phone to my son about roofing his garage with PVC sheeting. While I was watching, a car collided with the one ahead of it, but luckily no one was hurt. As I put the phone down, my wife looked up from her task of wrapping a present (a print of a beautiful butterfly in a ploughed field) in bubble wrap and cardboard. As I strolled toward the bathroom, I noticed that the door was damaged, and I could see the paper honeycomb, which separated the two veneer panels (it was a cheap hotel). When I emerged, we discussed the potential benefits, or otherwise, of the latest anti-wrinkle cream—for both of us, I hasten to add before my wife reads this. Being a materials scientist, instead of thinking ahead to the organ concert in Hallgrimmskirke booked for the evening or back to the whales we had watched that morning, I thought, as I’m sure you would have, “corrugations” and then “gratings!” Come to think of it, the whales probably had corrugations, too, but they did not throw themselves far enough out of the water for us to see them or open their mouths wide enough for me to resolve the baleen grating. The observation that triggered this train of thought was that many buildings in Iceland use “corrugated iron” for their roofs and walls. Apart from making a lot of noise in the rain, galvanized steel has some excellent properties for use in buildings. When corrugated, it has high stiffness in one direction, and is thin and cheap. But in Iceland, they usually paint it, often in a bright color. This is presumably for architectural impact not for corrosion protection; however, my observation is that on most corrugated roofs and walls, the paint was peeling, whereas almost none were rusting. The effect of the coat of paint was therefore to make most buildings look scruffy and inelegant while offering near-zero additional corro72
sion protection. A victory of form over function? I am surprised that pre-coated, and thus colored, galvanized steel is not used more, but then I live only a few miles from UK’s main coil-coating plant at Shotton. My corduroy jacket, pleated kilt and the ploughed field simply reinforced the ubiquitous and commonplace appearance of corrugations. (Isn’t it a lovely word designed to be pronounced by a French voice with the r’s rolled?)
Being a materials scientist, instead of thinking ahead to the organ concert in Hallgrimmskirke booked for the evening or back to the whales we had watched that morning, I thought, as I’m sure you would have, “corrugations” and then “gratings!” Under the roads, the workmen were laying flexible polymeric pipes, corrugated into the familiar bellows-like shape (and not, I’m sure, painted). My handset was connected to the telephone by a spiral cord, again designed for flexibility, but thi
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