JemmyBronze Age technology could aid switch to clean energy
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ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.com
sustainability.stanford.edu/news/bronze-age-tec…
To wit: Firebricks store heat, cheaply.
Primitive Technology on YouTube is waaaay ahead of you.
Glass industry has been doing it since the 1850's with "regenerator" furnaces
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_melting_furnace
regenerators of this kind are also used in some types of iron smelting furnaces
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.
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.
how is smelting similar to CVD, elaborate plz
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.
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
I work in a fab and I assure you CVD is not like smelting...you gave me a chuckle though!
The internet is a series of tuuuubes!!!
But think of the shareholders!!! The poor billionaire shareholders!!!
Well hot damn!!!
Yes. Hot damn. Thats what the planet is. Hot and damned.
With that attitude it is!
*becoming hot and damned. There's gonna be a generation in between who's living in a tropical paradise, depending on where they live.
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.
👍 article. Firebricks may accelerate our transition to sustainable energy.