This summer Chris Wallace and I spent a week renovating the chemistry-themed Chain Reactor machine that we built for the Edinburgh International Science Festival in 2011. Since then the machine has appeared every year, not just in Edinburgh but in Abu Dhabi, where it was installed next to a beach.
Unfortunately the salt air in Abu Dhabi meant that we got more chemistry going on than we’d intended, as the rusty condition of the nuts and bolts above shows (pictured not in Abu Dhabi but instead on a chilly November morning on the beach at Portobello in Edinburgh, where I live). Thus a big part of the job was replacing hundreds of zinc-plated nuts and bolts with stainless steel equivalents.
As we did this, I noticed a clear pattern to the corrosion. Surfaces facing upwards suffered much more badly than surfaces facing downwards, and if a bolt was sheltered from above by an overhanging part of the machine, it didn’t rust very much, even though it was completely open to the air.
This would make sense if the corrosive agent (tiny droplets of brine or particles of salt, maybe) was predominantly falling downwards through the air, which such droplets/particles must do if the air is reasonably calm.
You can see evidence of something similar in kitchens, where frying fills the air with an invisible mist of fat particles, each slowly falling through the air. You may not realise this until you see the tacky layer that gradually develops on the top sides of your shelves and cupboards, but not on the undersides. And if you wear glasses, it’s the inside of the lenses that you need to clean after frying; this is the side that faces upwards as you look down to cook.
This makes me wonder whether we’d need to clean or redecorate our kitchen walls less often if they were slightly overhanging so that grease particles were less likely to land on them. A slope of a degree or so from the vertical wouldn’t be too conspicuous and might make all the difference.