Engineering Open House (EOH) Committee
This year's EOH took place on Friday, March 11th and Saturday, March 12th, 2005. It is the 85th year in a long tradition of Engineering Open Houses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Engineering Open House is one of the largest student-run events at the University of Illinois. EOH is a great forum for teaching a broad variety of audiences about how engineering affects their lives. Over 160 exhibits were on display during this time. The EOH is attended by many local elementary, middle and high schools as a field trip, so we were able to increase ceramic awareness to many levels of students.
Our exhibit investigated the material our chapter used to create our mug for last year’s mug drop. After winging the Mug Drop Competition last year, we were inspired to investigate this advanced ceramic material and determine what caused the unbelievable strength. The title of the presentation was “Geopolymers, Novel Ceramics that don’t have to be Fired.” We explained the chemical reaction involved in this chemically bonded ceramic material and compared the properties to traditional ceramics. We had examples of both the geopolymer material and traditional ceramics and allowed the visitors to observe the strength difference by dropping the different materials on the ground. The booth was visited by a wide variety of visitors from young children, to high school students to adults of all ages.
Not only did we get a chance to research this ceramic material and inform the public about our findings, but we also spent ample time in the lab synthesizing display samples. We spent many hours making different geopolymer samples for a wide variety of applications and then spent even more time trying to destroy them with flame testing.
