On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 3:33 AM andy pugh <bodge...@gmail.com> wrote: > > You say this a lot, but I have never heard anyone else say it. What is > your source? >
THis might be a "Chemistry 101" question. It should be easy enough to figure out except that I last studied this stuff in the last 1970s We all know that burning carbon produces a lot of heat. The chemical equation is C + O2 --> CO2 -394 kJ / mole The corresponding equation of aluminum is 4Al + 3O2 --> 2Al2O3 -1676 kJ/mole Aluminum produces more heat per mole than carbon and also more heat per gram than carbon. It would make good fuel except for combustion stops once the oxide layer is formed. Next, I looked up the specific heat of aluminum. It is very close to 1.0 kJ / (Kg K). So it only takes 1 Joule to heat one gram of aluminum one degree K. So there is plenty of energy and the metal is also easy to heat. But what we don't know is the fraction of aluminum that is oxidized. You could figure this out if you had a good enough scale and could collect all the chips. We could see how much mass the chips gained from the added oxygen. -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
