"Plastics"
Posted on 04/20/2016 2:07:43 AM PDT by jmcenanly
Jeffrey Grossman thinks we've been looking at coal all wrong. Instead of just setting it afire, thus ignoring the molecular complexity of this highly varied material, he says, we should be harnessing the real value of that diversity and complex chemistry. Coal could become the basis for solar panels, batteries, or electronic devices, he and his research team say.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-electronics-coal.html#jCp
But to generate the energy to do that, you have to burn them and heat a working fluid.
Steel is mainly an alloy of iron and carbon. No burning off coal’s impurities to make coke, no steel.
Steel seldom has more than 1% carbon. Other alloying components such as chromium can be up to 20%.
"Plastics"
It’s still the carbon that makes it steel, due to the properties and how the carbon interacts with the iron and other alloying agents.
Also can’t have cast iron without carbon.
As a teenager working delivery for a family owned pharmacy I got to see some interesting things. One being the pharmacist "compounding" a ointment for a Female D.O. for her patient. One ingredient? Coal Tar!
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I went to crypto school in the Army and during my basic electronics course (COBET), an instructor told us about a large radar set that was installed with a “bug” problem. After about an hour it started working properly. The “bug” was the end of a broom handle in the power supply had been lightly sanded off and painted with a resistor color code. Paper clips were inserted into both ends and soldered into the circuitry. The broom handle had become so hot, it became charcoal and transferred the correct OHMS. The student in the test had ignored the burnt paint.
“Our whole synthetic materials industry began with coal tar derivatives. There is a lot that you can do with hydrocarbons besides burning them.”
Probably in the early next century, our descendants will not believe how crazy and wasteful it was to burn hydrocarbons for heat, given the value that they have as a building block for materials, plastics, and chemicals.
Steel, and , I believe, even most iron today is made in electric arc furnaces, where oxygen in injected to burn off excess carbon. Smoke spewing coke ovens using coal went the way of buggy whips.
;>)
That’s true, steel needs carbon, but very little of it. I was trying to clarify the “steel is mainly an alloy of iron and carbon” statement, which could be misleading to some.
Molten iron is tapped from the blast furnace is cast to provide pigs which can be used in foundries or is sent to further processing in open hearth furnaces or other refining processes AOD crucibles to produce steels of controlled carbon contents and to adjust other alloying elements.
Finally, after more than enough fits and starts, the tall new Zilwaukee bridge opened across the bay. Except, by then, the smoke stacks were gone, replaced by electric furnaces, and the river was empty.
And where does the electricity for the electrodes come from?
Not to mention, EAFs are used to reprocess steel for most of its function, and either coke or coal is used for the slag-foaming phase.
Iron is crystalline-—adding a small amount of carbon results in formations of only fine grain crystals, bonded by an amorphous iron glue. The grains provide hardness and the reduction of cleavage planes leads to ductility.
The coke is a relatively cheap oxygen removing agent, a reduction agent with more affinity for oxygen than hot iron. The residual carbon is usually too high for the pig iron to be useful without further processing.
Kilo-volt arcing between the paper clip end pieces charred the dummy resister?
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