Of similar interest, magnesium production from accumulated mine tailings : https://alliancemagnesium.com/en/products/primary-magnesium/
Metal Without Mining
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Re: Metal Without Mining
#22Of similar interest, magnesium production from accumulated mine tailings : https://alliancemagnesium.com/en/products/primary-magnesium/
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Re: Metal Without Mining
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Re: Metal Without Mining
#24If you are wondering "how" they are doing this, I believe this company is the externalization of this research: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/new-method-extract-mag... (Kind of hard to pin down exactly since they don't say a lot about how they are doing it, but a quick check suggests this is the only "new" thing in extracting magnesium recently and Magrathea is a young company[1]) [1] https://www.crunchbase.c…
Externalization? Do you mean commercialization?
Re: Metal Without Mining
#25Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
Correct, the question that should be asked here is what happens to all of the water after we've removed the minerals we need from it? Do we just pump it back into the ocean? The outlet would need to be far enough away from the inlet to avoid dilution. What impact does that have on marine life? We know that concentrating those minerals into brine when we extract water through desalinization is harmful so how harmful i…
My idea is to combine this with desalination. California could permanently end its droughts and become a major magnesium supplier in one swell foop.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#26Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?
Magnesium parts are already in widespread use. The covers you see on the sides of motorcycle engines/transmissions are often magnesium. In solid form the risk is mitigated because there isn't enough surface area for the reaction with oxygen, it's the powder/shavings that are a concern. You can actually weld magnesium parts without it igniting. Reading up on it a little more - it seems with enough heat solid magnesium…
If the magnesium is not reacting with oxygen, it must react with something else to produce more heat than is put in.
I discount the possibility of nuclear reactions :)
Re: Metal Without Mining
#27Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?
Magnesium parts are already in widespread use. The covers you see on the sides of motorcycle engines/transmissions are often magnesium. In solid form the risk is mitigated because there isn't enough surface area for the reaction with oxygen, it's the powder/shavings that are a concern. You can actually weld magnesium parts without it igniting. Reading up on it a little more - it seems with enough heat solid magnesium…
Welding arcs definitely can cause magnesium fires. Generally the shielding gas used to protect from oxidation prevents it, but it's easy to screw up.
It's a tricky metal to weld because of it. Generally you also need to preheat it so you don't get cracking, which makes it even more of an issue.
There is a passivated oxide layer that forms (similar to aluminum) which generally reduces the risk, but if it's compromised (like from cleaning the weld area)....
Re: Metal Without Mining
#28Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?
Magnesium metal will burn very violently once it gets going. Among the biggest trouble I got into in high school was when my chem lab partner and I decided it would be entertaining to burn a small piece of magnesium metal. It was rather spectacular, and indeed entertaining. Well worth the Very Stern Lecture.
Some aircraft historian will have to fill in the gaps in this story (what aircraft?), but back during the Korean War era, the USAF had a multi-engine piston-driven plane that was either a transport or a cargo aircraft -- not sure which, but the engine blocks were magnesium to save weight. One of the biggest brown-factor events that you could have was an engine fire, because once it got started, your day was going in a bad direction very fast. A friend's dad was pilot-in-command of a plane fresh out of maintenance. An engine caught fire on climb out. He ordered the rest of the crew to hit the silk and he tried to get back to the field. He did, but the landing was not pretty, and he suffered a nasty leg injury. No more combat rating for him, and he finished is USAF career flying transports, and later had a career as a commercial airline pilot. He was luck to survive that engine fire event.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#29Magnesium reacts with water, so I assume that another metal would be used to make some stable alloy?
Magnesium is protected by a passive oxide layer and isn't particularly water reactive (unlike sodium and potassium which will react with water more readily). You can toss a chunk of magnesium and water and nothing happens.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_wheels#Common_issues
I've seen this assurance before that magnesium flammability isn't a practical concern, usually just saying fires are "rare", but never any real information as to why. From that link it sounds like there are alloys that maybe preserve the desirable properties of the metal but aren't as flammable as elemental magnesium. Anybody know more about that? Why it works? How well?
> From that link it sounds like there are alloys that maybe preserve the desirable properties of the metal but aren't as flammable as elemental magnesium. Anybody know more about that? Why it works? How well?
It's been a long time since my metallurgy courses, but in general there are three major ways that properties are altered at the mesoscale due to alloying:
1) a different solid phase of the dominant metal is formed due to the solid solution of the minor alloy components
2) covalently bonded compounds are formed between the base metal and minor components ("intermetallics")
3) the microstructure is changed (think e.g. alternating layers of intermetallics and metal grains)
Because the thermodynamic driving forces are basically identical regardless of the solid phase, #1 is probably not helpful here (also, it's flammable in liquid form -- I checked). But the intermetallics may not be flammable. So then your fire resistance comes from a combination of #2 and #3: if you form a lamellar structure of the non-flammable intermetallics separating the regions of the flammable majority phase, then that may produce macroscopic fire resistance.
I can't comment on how well it works, of course. But if you have some "secret sauce", maybe a sintering process or special heat treatment, you might be able to manipulate the lamellar structure in a desirable way and end up with a very fire-resistant alloy. The catch is that this might be pretty expensive.
ETA: because this fire resistance is dependent on the microstructure and presence of intermetallics, if the alloy is heated back to a temperature where those intermetallics dissolve into solid solution (or, obviously, if it melts), then it's going to be flammable again. So my educated guess is that while you can't actually light these special alloys on fire, if you were to throw some into an ongoing inferno, it would heat up and then combust. So in an otherwise flammable environment cough hydrogen airship cough, maybe not the greatest idea.