Can you refine metals by distilling ore?
If you get metals hot enough, they melt and boil right?
So can you distill them?
>>8104372
I googled "distill metal" and found
>Refining of volatile metals like mercury, zinc etc. is done by distillation.
Try harder next time.
>>8104379
Yes but those metals have a low boiling point... mercury is liquid at room temp dude.
I meant something like distilling iron.
Sounds like a waste of energy. Distillation is separation of mixed liquids.
With solid metals, they either sink or swim on top. No need to get them to gaseous phase.
>>8104411
That's what a foundry does. Basically you put ore on a treadmill, and the ore is brought to higher and higher temperatures. When it reaches the fusion point of one of the components, you can extract it while the rest remains solid. And so on and so forth.
>>8104449
Yea it probably is a waste but I'm not sure if it's been experimented with long enough to see what it creates or what happens...
I mean, it's basically distilling iron ore like one would distill a whisky mash, except the iron will go from oxide to liquid to gas to solid metal.
>>8104464
Yes, foundries do separate impurities from the ore but they don't exactly distill it.
I've actually got no idea if you could build a retort or coil that could do it without melting :/
>>8104372
If you distill water you don't get Hydrogen.
>>8104581
No... but if you distill muddy water, you get clean water.
>>8104372
i mean, i guess you could
put it in a strong enough vacuum and high enough temperature and you could probably do it
I have had to distill metal complexes before but i don't know how translatable that is to the naked metal
>>8104372
"Distilling ore" is not a thing.
You're thinking about using the same principle as when distilling water/alcohol to create pure metals.
Well, we're already pretty good at creating pure metals without evaporating the metal, in fact we're so good we can make nearly perfect alloys if the customer pays enough. Gold is made to within a ten thousandth pure per weight while still being kept liquid, not vaporized.
So why would you wanna do it in a way that is maybe a hundred times more energy intensive and only a billionth of a percent more pure as an end result?
Exactly what purpose do you have for creating an atomically homogenous alloy?
>*eyes extraterrestrial suspiciously*
Eventually, you could, just get enough heat and heat resistent materials and it's a go.
Thing is, why?
First, you need a mineral that's composed only by metals or similars, but not light elements (sulfur, oxygen, etc) to properly distill metals (metals from metal solution).
I'll just neglect the fact that you put energy on obtaining such a mineral (alloys aren't those called?) and jump straight into the fact that you must melt something that is commonly unmeltable and that you must heat it basically in Mordor's Mount Doom to achive such a melting, and then you can just begging the task, since you want to vaporize a fucken metal. Sodium is vaporized with plasma if irc and sodium is cutted by a bread knife!!!!!! would you try to vaporize Fe? Ti?
Even if you rise a crowdfounding to build your own personal Mordor reactor, it would be TOO fucking energy expensive.
And as far as i know, it would be just to prove it, cause, i haven't heard shit about it.
>>8104372
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-make-metals-evaporate-vaporize
>Iron melts at 1538 °C and turns into a gas at 2862 °C. Gold is somewhat similiar, melting at 1064 °C and boiling at 2856 °C.
Imagine the machine you would need to contain this. It would have to have a melting point higher than the boiling point of the material you wanted to "distill". At this point it's really a question of what the hell you need that specific technique for, since it's so impractical.
>massive tungsten alembic to distill titanium vapor
>>8105287
Vacuum sealed to avoid oxidation and spontaneous combustion.
>>8105283
how else do you power the anti grav drive
>>8105339
Magnets, you dummie
>>8105312
Maintaining a vacuum vessel for the sake of capturing gaseous pure iron is just to much of an investment in energy and time, I guess it'd be possible for sure but I think the current method of floating the ore to the top and collecting it with electrodes or something is just much cheaper
>>8105312
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
>vacuum sealing a vessel that carries literal tons of vaporized metal
>making heating filaments that don't also vaporize, keep the mixture stable enough that the vessel doesn't implode from sudden heat drops
>finding some way to inject an inert gas into this hell cauldron to make up for the porosity in hot metal
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
You do know that just boiling it won't automatically revert the oxidation, right?
Reversing the oxidation actually becomes thermodynamically favourable at high enough temperatures. Your oxide/metal may be in just about any phase when this starts working. Of course, kinetic considerations mean that it isn't as simple as that but it can be useful for some metals.
Practically, what you usually do is use something like carbon or another metal to reduce your metal from its oxide.
>>8104372
for the most part, yes
Check the phase diagrams to see how you can get thermal phase separation
However there are some combinations that don't because chemistry gets in the way. So you either need to add a reactant to aid in separation, this also makes it far more cost effective in many cases. Or heat it in to a plasma then use magnets to accelerate them apart like they do for old isotope refinement, that works on just about every fundamental element.
>>8104372
Yes, why?
Iron ore isn't really iron, it's iron oxide. You might be able to get iron oxide really hot so that the oxygen isn't bound with it any more and condense out the iron faster than it can react back with the oxygen, but that would not be a very efficient way to do things.
>>8105287
>> It would have to have a melting point higher than the boiling point of the material you wanted to "distill".
Pic related. It's a bag of crisps. Notice how the interior is all shiny? That's a thin layer of aluminium that has been vapor deposited on it plastic. Provided one keeps the surface cool enough, one could make said alembic out of crisp bag plastic.
yeah, yeah if you're gonna be really autistic it's more metal vapor deposition than distillation
>>8106537
those crisps look soo tasty
