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A Foundry in Every Kitchen
WolfWithoutAClause writes "Bored with making the same old food or
plasma in your microwave? David Reid sounds like he is. He's using his domestic microwave oven to melt iron, silver and bronze! Over 900C! I don't know about you, but I'm going to be checking the temperature of my pizza rather more carefully in future..."
Now you can steal gold and silver jewelry and smelt it to some other form within minutes of returning to your evil lair. On the legal side of things, perhaps there will be no more waiting a week for the dentist to make a gold crown. Simply make the ceramic mold, insert gold alloy, microware for a few minutes. Viola, instant gold crown.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Back in 1981, I built a small clothes dryer from a microwave. I drilled a hole in the front glass, placed a vacumm tube through it, with a vacumm pump on one side, and a vacumm flask in the m-wave. I them tested various fabrics with differing amounts of H20 in them. Amazing that a jean leg dryed in 15 minutes, tee-shirt in 5, a wool sleve in 25 minutes (low heat to avoid shrinkage). Based on energy calculations, it used about 2/3 the power and was running at lower overall temperatues (I suspected that local temps ran over boiling, but then again they do in a dryer).
I wish I had the money back then to persue the idea.
Notice how the crucible and insulating assembly looks over exposed in the photos linked from the article. I wonder if this is because they are emitting a large amount of IR? This would be invisible to the eye, but visible to a CCD camera, even through a the cheap plastic filters they use.
Speaking of microwaving odd items, don't try a twinkie, at least in your own microwave, they release this nasty white smoke it reeks, and makes me wonder what's inside these that could smell that toxic.
Been there, done that.
Thankfully it was only somewhat superheated, leading to violent bubbling and some spill over, and not the kind of violent explosion your link suggests is possible.
Using an industrial microwave (5kW) with Nitrogen piped through a bed of Al powder I got a max of 1470 C before solid Aluminium Nitrate was formed. Temp possibly got up to 1600 C but thermocouple melted. arse. Seemed that key to getting ignition (or melting) was retaining heat. got one reaction at approx 1KW after 15 mins using carbon powder packed between 2 tubes |c| al |c| |c| al |c| Have u tried Au/Ag powders (heat much faster than solids - sorry if already posted)
unfortunately high school classes have been neutered. Too many people in the 30+ range ruined it for the current generation. All that missing magnesium, stink bombs, etc.
We were lucky if the teacher demoed something for us, much less let us play.
To be fair, some of the blame also has to go to the fact that US schools are becoming more and more equalized to the lowest possible denominator. The only way to walk out of high school without A-B grades is to not do the homework or simply stop showing up for class.
Apparently my microwave's door is made out of that bond. It caught on fire while there was nothing in it!
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I wonder what then would happen if you did that to a MS Office 97 CD. I heard there was something that could make one of those unreadible after three installs. I wonder if that CD cyanide pill could be accentuated in a bath of microwave energy.
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.