broadsword
Brigadier
No calculation was made on the energy required to powderize the metal, but even if it were only 3.2x, it would still be resounding.
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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No calculation was made on the energy required to powderize the metal, but even if it were only 3.2x, it would still be resounding.
Are there any other reports of this supposed breakthrough other than the Stephen Chen article? If true it is indeed a big deal but it smells like misinformation.
broadsword
Brigadier
It seems every other report quoted him, even InterestingEngineerying.
The various articles all say the new process uses 30% less energy than the traditional process. The sensational 3600x "productivity boost" that SCMP is referring to is the time it requires to convert the powder to iron (seconds) versus the time for smelting raw ore to iron (hours), which doesn't factor in the time for making the powder from raw ore.
I read somewhere that the scientist cited by the article seems to be one of the major scientiest if the field in China, and allegedly been researching on it for years.. and i think the article also cited a peer reviewed journal published it. So maybe it has some merit, but sure im not aware of the author much... also will a peer reviewed journal publish an article that wasnt peer reviewed tho?
Here is the excerpt:
"The flash iron making method, as detailed by Professor Zhang Wenhai and his team in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nonferrous Metals last month, can complete the iron making process in just three to six seconds, compared to the five to six hours required by traditional blast furnaces. "
I have no doubt the original paper is legitimate and the original scientist reputable. Stephen Chen always takes completely normal stuff and sensationalizes it to an absurd degree. He's done it for years.
The research is probably solid and the breakthrough is probably real. But it probably happened in a lab, under very precise and controlled experimental conditions, and is in zero way representative of any kind of realistic industrial process. Maybe in ten years we will see some refined derivation of it used by real factories. Maybe never, because it was too expensive or inconvenient or otherwise unsuited for anything except research purposes.
The article also claimed that the paper said the lance has already entered commercial production:
Excerpt:
"Zhang’s team has developed a vortex lance that can inject 450 tonnes of iron ore particles per hour. A reactor equipped with three such lances produces 7.11 million tonnes of iron annually. As per the paper, the lance “has already entered commercial production.” "
But yeah, i havent read the actual paper too, so im not sure how deviated Stephen and the paper.
But that is not the "3600x breakthrough" hyped up in the title, that is just a subcomponent used during the process.
I feel the 3600x breakthrough is over sensationalised. You are comparing time to melt some unspecified amount of powder vs time to melt a whole vat of ore. Better comparison will be time to pool enough melted iron from the powder method to fill the vat to the equivalent level to that of melting from direct ore.
Also once melted from powder, you still need a secondary heat source to keep the collected melted iron stay melted while you pool it together.
Also once melted from powder, you still need a secondary heat source to keep the collected melted iron stay melted while you pool it together.