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careysub
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Carbon Foam Refractory Made From Bread
Yes, really:
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2016/...
This could be very useful for people devising very high temperature furnaces.
About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.
-Wittgenstein
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth
- The Talking Heads
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ficolas
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Finally a purpose for the shitty bread they sell in my town.
Or maybe thats why the bread is so shitty, because they are secretly making carbon foam, and they sell the remaining (made with a recipe adjusted for
carbon foam bread...
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phlogiston
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Is it conductive?
I wander if it is similar to the foamy carbon you get by carbonizing sugar with concentrated sulphuric acid.
The smells in that lab... it must be alternating lovely fresh bread followd by terrible burnt toast.
-----
"If a rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down, that's not my concern said Wernher von Braun" - Tom Lehrer |
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Texium
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Ha, that is... actually pretty awesome. Now I'm picturing the chemists consulting professional bread bakers to get the consistency just right.
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Jstuyfzand
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Quote: Originally posted by phlogiston  | Is it conductive?
I wander if it is similar to the foamy carbon you get by carbonizing sugar with concentrated sulphuric acid.
The smells in that lab... it must be alternating lovely fresh bread followd by terrible burnt toast. |
If its conductive it would be the best electrode for electrolysis on the planet, high surface area and cheap.
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Fulmen
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Cool find. Here's the paper.
Attachment: yuan2016.pdf (2.1MB)
This file has been downloaded 1230 times
We're not banging rocks together here. We know how to put a man back together.
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careysub
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| Quote: Originally posted by zts16 | | Ha, that is... actually pretty awesome. Now I'm picturing the chemists consulting professional bread bakers to get the consistency just right.
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Hah! This is were "kitchen chemistry" gets serious. Break out the yeast and flour and set to work guys (and gals)!
About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.
-Wittgenstein
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth
- The Talking Heads
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aga
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Odd.
I watched a utoob vid a while back by AvE (probably no relation to ave) doing exactly this with sliced bread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wex_yKfrTo4
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careysub
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It was put on YouTube four days after the posting date of the ACS item, so it may well have been inspired by the published research.
Also, it would appear that he is using commercial batter-whipped bread not properly risen kneaded dough, which can achieve a dense even porosity (or
even a not-dense even porosity) - notice the huge pores that are present!
An even texture will always be important for consistent, uniform properties.
[Edited on 31-10-2016 by careysub]
About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.
-Wittgenstein
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth
- The Talking Heads
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aga
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'Odd' in the sense that it clearly shows that i watch more utoob than read academic papers.
Didn't think i was that facile and shallow.
I'll have a Word with myself.
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Maroboduus
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This sounds like a very economical process.
And if any of the slices come out looking like Elvis or Jesus you could sell them on Ebay for a hefty profit!
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Scalebar
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Nice find. I'm trying to put a furnace together myself for metal work. I wonder if excluding air would be sufficient for the carbonisation to work. A
really lazy way might be to fill out your insulation cavity with bread then fire up the furnace - anywhere that gets hot enough will carbonise and the
rest will presumably just toast and dry out.
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aga
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Today's All Saints day, or 'Dia de los Muertos', so it's a day off.
What better way to spend it other than to pyrolise bread ?
Two slices of bread (one a dense brown, the other white) were weighed at 31.75g and 32.50g respectively.
The samples were prepared (wrapped in tinfoil) and introduced into the custom-built pyrolysis apparatus (a wood fire).
The fire was left to burn for 1 hour and the bread samples were recovered and allowed to cool for 5 minutes.
The brown slice had disintegrated almost completely, the largest fragment being approx 2cm across.
The white slice had entirely retained it's shape, although the size had decreased by approximately 50%.
It weighed 5.35g, representing an 83.5% weight loss.
Under a cheapo USB microscope, the material appears very porous.
Those lines are 1mm spaced.
I wonder how this will fare as a method to activate carbon ?
One way to find out ....
[Edited on 1-11-2016 by aga]
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j_sum1
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Lovely aga.
Interesting that the white performed so much better than the "healthy" bread.
What I find remarkable about the report is the claims of mechanical strength.
If this proves to be a route to reasonable quality activated carbon then it is certainly cheap, simple and easy to do. I look forward to seeing your
results.
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aga
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The 'bread' is now rigid, yet breaks if you try to bend it, although it does not just fall apart.
Before doing the I.N. thing, i thought i'd test the bread's heat resistance.
Here's a piece with some copper melted on top of the bread with an electric arc.
Neither the arc (2000+ C) nor the 1085 C copper appear to have bothered it at all.
[Edited on 1-11-2016 by aga]
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aga
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Incredibly, the slice of bread from Lidl, wrapped in tinfoil, then stuffed into a fire for an hour, achieved an Iodine number of 486 !
(500 is regarded as the lowest I.N. for it to be regarded as 'activated').
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battoussai114
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I wonder how doing this under a nitrogen atmosphere would change the results. Once the Día de Muertos ends I'll try to get some parts from the
closest hardware store to get a high temperature controlled atmosphere setup running.
| Quote: Originally posted by aga | Incredibly, the slice of bread from Lidl, wrapped in tinfoil, then stuffed into a fire for an hour, achieved an Iodine number of 486 !
(500 is regarded as the lowest I.N. for it to be regarded as 'activated'). |
Without chemical activation? pretty nice!
Batoussai.
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Jstuyfzand
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Aga, have you measured the electrical conductivity?
The paper mentioned a conductivity of 0.26S/cm, which seemed reasonable.
I wonder what numbers your high tech equipment could achieve.
*asking for a friend...*
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aga
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Dunno.
Didn't test electrical resistance. Probably in the Mega-Ohm range.
The post shows it all : bread, some aluminium foil, a fire, 1 hour, you got the same material.
This is not hard to do, at all, for anyone.
Edit:
aga is spelt aga, not Aga.
I'm not the Aga Khan.
Sharim might get annoyed if this keeps going on.
He might be Googling for stuff about one of his many multi-million dollar ventures and get a load of Toast, Carbon and failed chlorination of ethanol
results.
[Edited on 1-11-2016 by aga]
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aga
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Might change it, but harder to Try.
I think that just wrapping the slice of bread in more layers of Al foil would have worked better, say about 6 wraps (i used 2).
The dense bread was fubar in my experiment, but the Al foil had disintegrated as well, letting air in.
I was lucky that i tried with 2 samples.
JUST DO IT and report results - no need for complexity, it's just a slice of bread wrapped in tinfoil in a fire.
Might work in an oven (250 C) too. No idea, not tried it.
This particular experiment requires NOTHING that people do not have access to.
No expense required, apart from the Time.
If you have any interest in the material, just make some as has been fully described.
It is a Wicked material, at least as far as heat resistance and carbon 'activation' are concerned, probably a Lot more.
I zapped some copper to 1000 C+ on top of a slice of Toast today, and the toast survived !
Awesome.
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j_sum1
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Well, when the process is refined and tested, it deserves its own published procedure in the wiki -- as does making potato starch for use as an
indicator.
(Are there any other similar processes that need to be written up? And by similar I mean very accessible using household items, straightforward
procedure and producing an invaluable lab consumable for the home chemist that most professional labs pay reasonable bucks for.)
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aga
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Go for it. You da man.
I just zap, burn and boil stuff up.
Give it some Science spin dude !
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j_sum1
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Ok. Well in time I can do that. So far there are two on the list:
Starch – for which I will write up NileRed's procedure
Activated carbon (aka super-toast) – for which I will summarise the procedure and results of this thread. So long as you post your findings
aga I can do the deed. With my current state of affairs I cannot see me getting the chance to quantitatively test any super-toast any time soon. I
would be interested to know if pre-treating the bread with something will elevate the product from good to awesome.
What other procedures of this nature deserve to be written up?
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careysub
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I will bet that both nitrogen and carbon dioxide will work pretty well. After all carbon is pretty inert with respect to nitrogen and carbon dioxide
(and water).
Aga is probably creating the latter atmosphere with his foil-wrapping procedure.
Pyrolyzing the bread (with some intrusion of air) will produce water and CO2, and while there is the Boudouard (CO2 + C <-> 2CO) and
water-carbon (C + H2O <-> CO + H2) reactions exist they are sluggish equilibrium reactions, and there is huge excess of carbon in the system.
Isn't this sort of how they make charcoal?
About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.
-Wittgenstein
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth
- The Talking Heads
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aga
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Pretty much the same, yes.
The main (only ?) difference is in the structure of the end result - the bread is less dense.
Retaining the structure durying pyrolysis is the hard part when it comes to making things like a carbon aerogel.
http://www.buyaerogel.com/product/carbon-aerogel/
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