More #Orca #lasers stuff: how can we take advantage of US$1/W lasers? #Light-Materials seems to be one answer.
on 02025-12-12Patrick Gallagher at #Orca discussing possible ways of exciting methane with #lasers to remove it from the atmosphere to stop #climate-change.
on 02025-12-12#Orca harshly, but justly, deprecating US$400/tonne direct air capture #carbon-capture answers to #climate-change.
on 02025-12-12#Orca venture “Light Materials”: “We use lasers to make precision components at high speed. We can make parts out of graphite, metals, and refractory ceramics.” They have what looks like a lightweight lattice on their front page; the alt text says, “A precision microstructure carbon lattice developed by Light Materials, California.” Last updated in October. Hosted on Cloudfront (not Cloudflare) and website-files.com, built with something called Typekit.
on 02025-12-12a list of ideas #Orca has given up on #toread
on 02025-12-12#Orca on trying to improve on Birkeland–Eyde for #nitrogen fixation by using non-equilibrium plasmas. #toread
on 02025-12-12#Orca on “Laser growth of carbon fiber” now that lasers are cheap: “Recent growth in the laser cutting and welding sector has brought down the price of certain semiconductor laser diode systems to nearly $1/W. With an electro-optical efficiency of 60-80% and an average lifespan of over a decade, the economics of these laser diodes are akin to the now-ubiquitous LED lightbulb.” They got it to sort of work, but strength was too low. By Patrick Gallagher, Menyoung Lee and Ian McKay. #toread
on 02025-12-12Austin Vernon at #Orca computes what would be involved in grinding up “a Mount Everest of basalt” to remove the necessary amount of CO₂ to reverse #global-warming. #toread
on 02025-12-12“What would it take to 100x the power density of (...) batteries? (...) We build #batteries as mechanical devices, combining anodes, cathodes, separators, and current collectors microns or mm apart. Could we make them far more powerful by instead synthesizing them (...) by integrating anode, cathode, and separator as separate functional groups along a single polymer chain?” #Orca #toread
on 02025-12-12#Orca on Austin Vernon’s #Standard-Thermal. “The first time we heat it up past 600ºC, the soil transforms—almost manufacturing brick from clay right underground. With an unexpectedly cheap resistor material, ultra simplified electronics, on-site photovoltaics, and a thermal leak rate under 1% per month, we’re looking at sub $0.10/kWhthermal and $50/kWthermal. (...) To give you a sense of the scale: heat travels about a meter through dirt in a month (δ ~ √(α t)), so a system designed for months-long discharge would involve hundreds of meters of pipe and resistor spaced about 2m apart. In that configuration, the system stores about 2MWhr thermal per meter of pipe+resistor. That’s fundamentally favorable—30 times the storage of a Tesla car battery for the cost of a meter of wire and pipe.” Much more detail on #pricing than Austin’s own posts. Also, on who the customer is: first process heat, then high-latitude customers that want renewable power on-site, and as a “world-conquering dream” to provide steam at stranded conventional power plants.
on 02025-12-12Ian McKay at #Orca says dematerialization is really increase in embodied #energy. I think it’s mostly information. His main point is that we should be looking for alternatives that get more energy-intensive. Mention of “IRA” seems to mean “inflation reduction act”, not “Irish Republican Army”. “Thoughts in here originated with Menyoung Lee, Patrick Gallagher, Eli Dourado, Austin Vernon and George Hansel. Graphs were made with Aravindh Rajan.”
on 02025-12-12Ian McKay on “Outside Takes on Clean Energy”, linking to articles outside #Orca, including one on how lower #energy #pricing could make #aluminum cheaper than #steel #materials
on 02025-12-12Bubbling ship exhaust into the ocean would probably reduce CO₂ emissions from shipping by 5–7% but won’t happen. #Orca
on 02025-12-12#materials #pricing and the prospects for decarbonization either via electricity or via biosynthesis, with a table of “idiot indices” for different metals (cost of of metal, divided by cost of ore plus energy at current prices) from #Orca
on 02025-12-12by Aravindh Rajan and Ian McKay at #Orca: #titanium #materials #pricing is 60× the cost of the ore (a cheap white pigment and filler for plastics) plus the change in enthalpy, a very high multiple, so this post explores where the extra cost comes from. Basically refining titanium is a five-step process, the first step being mining, and the cost doubles at each step. After three steps you have titanium sponge, which is hard to turn into the desired fully dense metal, which in turn is hard to machine, quadrupling the cost of final parts. Could you maybe just use the sponge, maybe as the filling/web in sandwich panels? Also ECM seems promising as a way to reduce the cost of the last step, machining. Lists past failed attempts to bring the cost down, including the FFC Cambridge process but also five more recent proposed cheaper processes. There’s an astonishing graph finding roughly 100× lower fatigue life for HIPped (hot isostatic pressed) titanium parts than for wrought parts. “Molten titanium will react with all metal oxides except yttria, zirconia, and calcium oxide. Due to calcium’s volatility at titanium’s melting point, titanium can also react with calcium oxide to form calcium vapor, if there is no excess of the latter.”
on 02025-12-12another #interview with Devine Lu Linvega from #100-Rabbits going deep into the #Orca #livecoding #esolang. #bootstrapping #toread
on 02021-02-09#interview by Daniel Temkin about the #Orca #esolang, a two-dimensional ASCII language for #livecoding #music, by #100-Rabbits Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bell(um?), who live on a solar-powered sailboat called Pino and created a conworld called the Neauismetica. Talks a lot about #Fractran. “#Lisp is a slippery slope that leads inevitably to #Forth.”. #bootstrapping #cc by
on 02021-02-09