Re: Copper at Riverside Site, Michigan

From: Philip Deitiker (Donevenask_at_worlnet.att.net)
Date: 06/03/04 

Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 17:05:30 GMT

Martyn Harrison <nospam@spammers.of.the.world.unite> says in
news:is2ub0lu2mq25ocjguo3vlcr9rbv4ig663@4ax.com:

> Suggests the process is endothermic.

Body is mostly water, so yes the reaction is endothermic.
However if the person is overweight and has a large amount of
fat, the the reaction would be exothermic.
 
> There's a jihad about this because of the Nazis needing a
> certain amount of coal to incinerate concentration camp
> victims so there's plenty of propaganda.

The nazi's starved their victims, the weight reduction is less
than the energy reduction, becuase fat and protein are comsumed
before connective tissue.
 
> For the sake of information, there are two things about the
> energy coming off a source of heat. The energy is made of
> photons which means the energy output of a furnace /
> bonfire / welding torch has two components:
>
> Number of photons
> x Energy of each photon.
>
> The energy of a photon remains the same as you walk
> backwards, so the fire is the same colour to your eyes
> receiving the photons, but there are less of them (inverse
> square law, of course). The colour of the fire is
> determined by the energy of the photons and this is the
> temperature it has reached.

Planx rule applies, most of the energy is going to be in the
infrared region, and there are 2 forms if energy, radiant, and
convectional. Both act together. When you see a blue flame for
instance it means that the heat is high enough to release blue
photons, but most of the energy is still in the infrared.
Look up Bar body radiation.
 
> Copper won't melt unless your fire reaches a certain colour
> (corresponding to 1100 centigrade, at the top end of the
> scale above.) I can see how this might be achieved with a
> funeral pyre, which is a sort of casting process IME.
>
> You do have to reach the temperature though, not simply
> achieve plenty of heat energy output.

The issue of design for a funeral pyre is that the heat has to
be high enough to convert biological water to steam rather
quickly, the design generates high internal temperatures and the
body should be at the foci of the high temperature convect
within the pyre. The modest amount of air the reaches the center
is preheated by the external regions and thus when it reacts it
produces a heat that is hotter than simply mixing air and wood.
The color at the interior will be masked by the color at the
exterior and light at the interior will be adsorbed by particles
at the exterior, so that the color is more a reflection of
exterior temperature.

> Smelting is normally a little different. You need the
> furnace to reach a particular colour and you use bellows to
> reach that colour. You know that as the shade just reaches
> the right one, the copper all of a sudden melts.

You don't need bellows to melt copper. A blow touch is used not
to melt copper, but to heat a select region up quickly, to melt
the flux and get induction of the flux into the joint. Once this
is done the heat is released. For melting copper one need to
practically heat the whole peice. As part of my boat building
project I synthesized a bar for controlling 2 motors off the
steering piece I need 1 90' bend along the plane of the
aluminum bar (1/4" x 1"). For this I used alumina. The alumina
was heated to its relaxation point and the conductance was so
hot that away from the site off heating (2 or 3 feet the bar was
too hot to hold). The alumina itself would not melt until the
whole bar is at the temperature. The bending temperature was
achieved with a modest Natural gas/Air pressure burner with a
blue flame that was invisible with lights on about 1/2 wide at
the base and 2 inches long. If for instance I wanted to heat the
whole piece instead of bending a section, I would choose a more
slowly heating fire with a larger heat retention capacities,
like a coal fire, I certainly would design it for maximal
ambient airflow, but one can easily get such fires hot enough to
make an entire copper piece maleable. 

-- 
Philip
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