Articles on historical and technological subjects informed by literature and dreaming.
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With research, I found my idea of using Dewar’s findings to separate air has been widely used in industry. of course. In fact, it is still used for volumes of less than several tons of oxygen or nitrogen production per day. (at rates greater than that, More...
I was reading the papers of James Prescott Joule (experimental physicist/chemist from the mid 1800’s). One paper of his discussed the economic possibilities of using zinc batteries instead of steam engines and generators to produce electricity. More...
Refining clay for silicon production
Kaolin clay is a complex of silica and alumina created in some (unknown to me) geochemical process. More...
I read in Gaviotas about this huge wheel that they built, where water was boiled in a bulb and condensed in a bulb much higher up. The higher bulb got heavy and eventually swung down. There it was heated and began to fill the previously heavy bulb. More...
Industrious use of activated charcoal
This post relates to using activated charcoal to separate nitrogen and oxygen from air. Oxygen heavy air is useful for pyrolysis and combustion operations. Nitrogen is useful for pyrolysis (as an inert gas) or producing nitric acid, ammonia nitrate, etc More...
I think nitric acid is going to be a very helpful waste product to collect. It can be used to precipitate products from basic solutions, or to break down organic matter for easier digestion by bacteria/yeast/fungus (saccharification of cellulose). Its s More...
New to me refrigeration method
Previously I had thought the only productive way to use heat directly to cause cooling was an adsorption/absorption cooler. There, heat is used to drive a working fluid (water, methanol, ammonia) from an adsorbant (activated charcoal, alumina, aerogel) or More...
Purification of oxygen with charcoal
It occured to me the the selective desorption of oxygen and nitrogen from activated charcoal mentioned here was related to another separation process. In packed column chromatography, substances diffuse through a long molecular sieve jungle at different More...
Last time I talked about using carbonic acid from flue gases to neutralize an alkali solution. With a little research i realized nitric acid is much more suited for this. More...
These are books and writings that have helped sculpt the image of permafacture for me: More...