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If you’re vaporizing you’d simply use fans to pull the vaporized material out?
by bilsbie 2y ago
If you’re vaporizing you’d simply use fans to pull the vaporized material out?
- amluto 2y agoI don’t know anything about geology in particular, but: vaporized rock is vaporized rock, not air. It’s going to cool off as it travels up a relatively cool shaft, and some or all of it will condense and/or solidify into something that will be, in the best case, fine dust. The gasses in the shaft will need to be moving upward faster than the terminal velocity of the removed material for the material to continue moving upward. In the worst case, I can imagine the vaporized rock depositing (directly in the strict chemistry sense or indirectly via a liquid intermediate) into the walls of the shaft higher up.
- lazide 2y agoAdditionally, keeping the vapor from cooling/depositing will also require keeping it above the vapor point of rock - which is well above any metals they might make anything from.
- mrguyorama 2y agoIn the "Real Engineering" youtube channel video of this company, they VERY BRIEFLY show that the test area gets covered in a material that is essentially rock-wool. Any attempt to "blow" the vaporized material out will get clogged constantly and at the worst possible times, and they didn't even approach that as a concern or concept in their video. They genuinely seem to be treating "Get the material out" as a "We will figure that out later" problem instead of one of the MAIN PROBLEMS OF THE INDUSTRY. This project is DOA unless they come out with solutions to that and other serious issues.