Cody's Lab again as in using thermite, this
time to refine iron metal from magnetize. Apparently you can make thermite by wrapping layers of magnetize in aluminum foil and starting it burning with a blowtorch. Very impressive.
You end up with an iron slag rhst will need drop forging to refine.
Any highly oxidizable metal with a lower energy oxidized one should work. An example is tantalum and manganese dioxide. Those two are combined to form tantalum solid electrolytic capacitors. The good news is that a small perforation of the oxide dielectric can electrolytically grow back. The bad news is if significant energy is dissipated through the resulting short, a thermite reaction can get started.
ReplyDeleteA high performance stabilized camera system design used 18 tantalum capacitors in series parallel as an energy store for its motion control motor driver. In the field, one of the capacitors shorted and the other 17 plus the aircraft power all ganged up on it. The thermite reaction chain reacted to all 18 of them. You can imagine the effect on the electronics, optics, etc.
The designer had left the company before I came aboard and got to redesign that...