A.I.

Dr Nick Coman

A 36‑lecture audio course on the materials that run the modern world—from ore bodies and brines to magnets, batteries, chips, and reactors. Each lecture focuses on one element or mineral, tracing its journey from deposit geology through beneficiation and refining to the devices it powers.

We make the flowsheet legible: comminution and flotation; roasting, high‑pressure acid leaching, solvent extraction, and ion exchange; separation to oxides and metals; alloying and specialty powders. See how neodymium‑iron‑boron magnets are born, why lithium hexafluorophosphate matters in electrolytes, where gallium nitride wins in power, how graphite anodes evolve with silicon, and how the uranium fuel cycle and vanadium flow batteries actually work.

Markets and politics are treated as engineering constraints. Learn to spot yield killers, read offtake agreements, and separate strategic scarcity from narrative. Test real substitutions—ferrites in small motors, sodium‑ion for short‑range storage, gallium nitride versus silicon carbide—and where performance cliffs block redesign. We map chokepoints beyond the mine: separation capacity, reagents, waste handling, water and energy intensity, and manufacturer qualification cycles. Then we follow the consequences—export controls and quotas, permitting and community consent, tariffs and friend‑shoring, standards and labeling rules.

Rigorous, narrative‑driven, and built for the intellectually ambitious, this course is an operator’s guide to the science, supply chains, and statecraft of a materials‑constrained century.

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