Bronze Age technology could aid switch to clean energy

submitted a month ago by ArtikBanana

sustainability.stanford.edu/news/bronze-age-tec…

163

Log in to comment

18 Comments

To wit: Firebricks store heat, cheaply.

DJDarren a month ago

Primitive Technology on YouTube is waaaay ahead of you.

lemming741 a month ago

Glass industry has been doing it since the 1850's with "regenerator" furnaces

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_melting_furnace

skillissuer a month ago

regenerators of this kind are also used in some types of iron smelting furnaces

Ogmios a month ago, edited a month ago

One thing that really got my attention when I studied nanotechnology is how many original technologies we still use regularly, just in a refined/modified form (Chemical Vapour Deposition, a technique used heavily in the production of many ordinary products from computer chips to chip bags, is fundamentally the exact same technology first used to smelt ore). It actually wouldn't be hard at all to transition to lower impact technologies in a lot of places if people were okay with not electrifying/connecting everything possible.

It actually wouldn't be hard at all to transition to lower impact technologies in a lot of places if people were okay with not electrifying/connecting everything possible.

I would assume the push to connect everything under the sun is driven more by cheap electronics and corporate marketing teams rather than actual consumer demand. Making products "smart" is cheaper and more profitable than making them better quality. Go figure.

skillissuer a month ago

how is smelting similar to CVD, elaborate plz

Ogmios a month ago, edited a month ago

They're both essentially vaporizing a metal with high heat to deposit upon a substrate above. Early smelting was just looking to purify the metal and remove impurities, and now we've refined that same technique with strictly controlled parameters to deposit exactly what metal we want to have where, to build the microscopic features of modern computer chips.

skillissuer a month ago

this is neither what smelting is or what CVD is. smelting goes from oxide to metal, and uses carbon monoxide at ~atmospheric pressure for that. early smelting was used for smelting, but early purification method was forging. there's Mond process, but it's not smelting. CVD occurs in vacuum and uses something probably rather reactive on its own that decomposes on target surface, sometimes giving one atomic layer at a time, and it doesn't have to be metal

Entropywins a month ago

I work in a fab and I assure you CVD is not like smelting...you gave me a chuckle though!

Lost_My_Mind a month ago

The internet is a series of tuuuubes!!!

Lost_My_Mind a month ago

But think of the shareholders!!! The poor billionaire shareholders!!!

shortwavesurfer a month ago

Well hot damn!!!

Lost_My_Mind a month ago

Yes. Hot damn. Thats what the planet is. Hot and damned.

Cocodapuf a month ago

With that attitude it is!

Darkenfolk a month ago

*becoming hot and damned. There's gonna be a generation in between who's living in a tropical paradise, depending on where they live.

TimeSquirrel a month ago

Yep, same concept as molten salt, or gravity battery. High school physics stuff. Put kinetic energy into a system, store it as potential, and release it as kinetic again. The next few decades are going to be interesting as people come up with more and more ways to store it.

drawerair 3 weeks ago, edited 3 weeks ago

👍 article. Firebricks may accelerate our transition to sustainable energy.