28 May: London

Today Mum went for a museum crawl around South Kensington while I visited a colleague (my former post-doc supervisor) at Imperial College. It was a really productive day – we had a bit of a chat about a new project we are thinking of doing regarding corrosion processes on stainless steel, also I talked with her kiwi post-doc about some of her work which is related to some of the things I’m doing. She is keen to come back to New Zealand at some point, so I’ll have to keep my ear out for any opportunities coming up at IRL (or its new improved version, whenever that happens).

But perhaps the most fun thing was to see a kind of sideshow project they are both working on, which is concerning the restoration of a German Dornier bomber that is presently lying in the sea off the south coast of England. Apparently it is the last one in existence, and there are critical questions regarding how the aluminium skin is going to corrode once they take it out. They were given a small piece of it that was lying separately from the main wreckage – and by ‘small’ it’s about 80 cm in length – to do some lab testing. It’s been sitting in a tank full of tap water, and today they emptied the tank and refilled it with a pH-controlled citric acid solution. So that was very cool to see. No pictures unfortunately!