“From Dust to Edge” is the documentation of a long journey in the efforts of making a blade out of homemade steel.
Henri Bergius this sounds up your alley. I don’t think my landlord will go for it but there is plenty of space in the finnish woods for a project like this. 2015-02-17: Nanolaminated steel
the Modumetal process can increase the strength of metals such as steel by as much as 10x. Modumetal uses an advanced form of electroplating, a process already used to make the chrome plating you might see on the engine and exhaust pipes of a motorcycle. Electroplating involves immersing a metal part in a chemical bath containing various metal ions, and then applying an electrical current to cause those ions to form a metal coating.
Boston Metal’s process will use 20% less energy than a conventional blast furnace. And if the facility can use cheap, plentiful renewable electricity, perhaps from a hydropower plant, its steel would cost less than the competition. “At scale, we expect to make better metal at lower cost and with no CO2 emissions
Steelmaking is currently extremely CO2 intensive, accounting for about 7% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. As we continue to use ever more steel for new infrastructure around the world, the task of decarbonizing the industry is growing ever more urgent. Hydrogen can now perform that task and Volvo has just taken delivery of the first consignment of CO2-free steel.
2023-02-23: Nice overview of the history of steel production
Blast furnaces continue to be constructed around the world, particularly in China, which now produces more steel than the rest of the world combined. For the foreseeable future, recycling steel scrap won’t be sufficient to supply the world’s need for iron, and we’ll continue to need iron ore based methods of steelmaking. But blast furnaces, like cement plants, have the unfortunate distinction of producing CO2 as a fundamental part of the process: a blast furnace is essentially a machine that turns iron oxide and carbon into iron and CO2.
Direct reduction with CO still produces CO2, but direct reduction with hydrogen only produces water as a byproduct. “Green steel” efforts are thus often centered around finding low-carbon ways to produce hydrogen to use in the direct reduction process. Of the 72 green steel projects listed on this “green steel tracker,” 49 of them involve low CO2 hydrogen production, mostly either “green” hydrogen made via electrolysis or “blue” hydrogen made from natural gas plus CO2 capture.
It replaces 90% of the coke used in the blast furnace with direct CO injection. The CO comes from a system that captures and recycles the furnace’s own exhaust “top gas,” separating out CO, CO2, hydrogen and nitrogen gases at high temperatures. These gases are then sent through a twin-reactor redox system that keeps the carbon inside a closed loop. Retrofitting this thermochemical redox system to existing BF-BOF steel plants should make it notably cheaper to produce steel. And emissions would be slashed by 94%.
“The system we are proposing can be retrofitted to existing plants, which reduces the risk of stranded assets, and both the reduction in CO2, and the cost savings, are seen immediately.”
TL:DR; the current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier’s gangrene. tax evasion, crazy gini coefficient, mining has a CO2 footprint from hell, etc
2014-02-09: While the ship has sailed for buttcoins, all these new cryptocurrencies give the permanently deluded another chance to dust off their “rigs”.
2014-02-25: I don’t have to watch any telenovelas, i’m getting all the drama / lulz from the buttcoin saga. The best part is the (failed) plan to bail them out because “too big to fail” 2014-06-13: This seems bad
The GHash mining pool just reached 51% of total network mining power. Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. GHash can control Bitcoin transactions.
2016-01-14: Where is your god now, buttcoiners? A true believer rethinks his life.
But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.
2021-01-12: Haven’t made fun of buttcoin in a while, time to fix that:
A hedge fund! If you’re a person who bought some Bitcoins and lost the password then, oops, that’s tough for you, and we’ll all have a laugh about it. But if you are a professional investing firm who bought some Bitcoins with your investors’ money and held them as a fiduciary for those investors, and then lost the password, then you probably can’t be a professional investing firm anymore. That’s not good.
And yet it is in a way understandable. If you are a hedge fund and you buy some stock, you will not spend even a moment worrying about losing the stock. That is an entirely solved problem in 21st-century finance. You will have a custodian who holds the stock for you, but it’s not like the custodian is keeping stock certificates in a vault that might burn down. The custodian has an account with the Depository Trust Company, the stock is all on computers (like a blockchain!), there are a lot of backups and redundancies, and in practice stock does not just go missing. We talk occasionally about weird anomalies in this system, places where the system briefly loses track of where some bits of stock are supposed to be, but they are all temporary and marginal. Nobody misplaces billions of $ of stock forever. Nobody misplaces 20% of all the stocks in the world forever, come on
2021-11-18: Avery Pennarun looks at this again, 10 years later:
10 years(!) have passed since I wrote Why bitcoin will fail. And yet, here we are, still talking about bitcoin. Did it fail? Here are some reasons I missed for why bitcoin (and blockchains generally) didn’t and still don’t work, for anything productive:
Scams. Lots and lots of scams. Blockchains became the center of gravity of almost all scams on the Internet. I don’t know what kind of achievement that is, exactly, but it’s sure something.
Citizens moving money out of authoritarian regimes. This is, by definition, illegal, but is it a net benefit to society? I don’t know. Maybe sometimes.
Other kinds of organized crime and trafficking. I don’t know what fraction of money laundering nowadays goes through blockchains. Maybe it’s still a small percentage. But it seems to be a growing percentage.
More and more blockchains. There are so many of them now (see “scams”, above), claiming to do all sorts of things. None of them do. But somehow even bitcoin is still alive, even though a whole ecosystem of derivative junk has sprouted trying to compete with it.
Corrupt or collapsed exchanges. I predicted technical problems, but most of the failures we’ve seen have been simple, old fashioned grifters and incompetents. Indeed, the failures of this new financial system are just like the historical failures of old financial systems, albeit with faster iterations. Some people are excited about how much faster we can make more expensive mistakes now. I’m not so sure.
Gambling and speculation. I wrote the whole article expecting bitcoin to fail at being a currency, but that charade ended almost immediately. What exists now is an expensive, power-hungry, distributed, online gambling system. The house still always wins, but it’s not totally clear who the house is, which is how the house likes it. Gambling has always been fundamentally a drain on society, a tax on the uneducated,, but it’s always very popular anyway. Bitcoin is casino chips. Casino chips aren’t currency, but they don’t “fail” either.
Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan. Likewise, the web3 protocols are slow to evolve. When building First Derivative, it would have been great to price minting derivatives as a percentage of the underlying value. That data isn’t on chain, but it’s in an API that OpenSea will give you. People are excited about NFT royalties for the way that can benefit creators, but royalties aren’t specified in ERC-721, and it’s too late to change it, so OpenSea has its own way of configuring royalties that exists in web2 space. Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms.
The process Alamaro advocates places trees in metal pods that rot on contact with the ground, instead of the low-tech and less sturdy plastic version. The process can be adapted to plant shrubs, and would work best in places with clear, loose soil, such as sub-desert parts of the Middle East, or newly habitable Arctic tundra opened up by global warming. “What is needed is government policy to use old military aircraft” adding that 1000s are in hangars across the globe. Although the original pitch failed, the growing CO2 market is creating new interest, and he hopes to find funding for a large-scale pilot project soon.
2023-07-31: Lots of progress on drones and ingenious ways to ensure the seedlings get into the soil.
Restoring forest worldwide will require a gigantic effort, a challenge made doubly hard by the fact that many sites are inaccessible by road, stopping manual replanting projects in their tracks.
Manual planting is labor-intensive and slow. Drone seeding uses the latest in robotic technology to deliver seeds directly to where they’re needed. Drones can drop seeds along a predefined route, working together in a “swarm” to complete the task with a single human supervisor overseeing the process.
Drone-dropped seed success rates are lower than for manually planted seedlings, but biotech solutions are helping. Specially designed pods encase the seeds in a tailored mix of nutrients to help them thrive. Drones are tech-intensive, and still available mostly in industrialized countries, but could one day help reseed forests worldwide.
Scientists are designing novel approaches to increase the germination rate of seeds dropped by drones. Yao and her team at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a self-burying seed carrier that after dispersal by a drone can gently drill each seed into the soil. Inspired by the structure of seeds from Erodium plants, the carrier requires no battery pack; the burying action is generated by the shape of the materials themselves.
“The coiled body will extend in rain, which creates a downward thrust force that allows the tip to self-bury into the soil”. Burying the seed, rather than leaving it atop the soil, can protect it from the wind, drought or birds.
BacillaFilla is a gengineered bacterium based on Bacillus subtilis that has been modified to fill and bond cracks in cement caused by earthquakes and other violence. The bacteria burrow into the concrete until they have filled all its cracks, then they politely turn into calcium carbonate and die.
2012-06-24: Romans were better at concrete than we are. No modern concrete building will last 2000 years like the Roman Pantheon.
Modern concrete—used in everything from roads to buildings to bridges—can break down in as few as 50 years. But 1000s of years after the Roman Empire crumbled to dust, its concrete structures are still standing. Now, scientists have finally figured out why: a special ingredient that makes the cement grow stronger—not weaker—over time. Scientists began their search with an ancient recipe for mortar, laid down by Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius in 30 BCE It called for a concoction of volcanic ash, lime, and seawater, mixed together with volcanic rocks and spread into wooden molds that were then immersed in more sea water. History contains many references to the durability of Roman concrete, including this cryptic note written in 79 BCE, describing concrete exposed to seawater as: “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and everyday stronger.” What did it mean? To find out, the researchers studied drilled cores of a Roman harbor from Pozzuoli Bay near Naples, Italy. When they analyzed it, they found that the seawater had dissolved components of the volcanic ash, allowing new binding minerals to grow. Within 10 years, a very rare hydrothermal mineral called aluminum tobermorite (Al-tobermorite) had formed in the concrete.
2013-10-28: 3D printed concrete will topple the slow, corrupt construction “industry”. a house can be printed in 20h, to much finer tolerances.
The process could accelerate the $1T (US only) construction industry 200x. Projections indicate costs will be around 20% of conventional construction.
3D-printing startup Apis Cor recently completed its latest claim to greatness: the “world’s largest” 3D-printed building to date. The 700m2, 10m-tall structure was built in Dubai
The concrete industry is one of 2 largest producers of CO2, creating up to 5% of worldwide man-made emissions
2016-08-02: Mesh concrete. Another small step to turn construction from a super slow, error-prone process into a fast and accurate one.
Mesh Mould Metal “focuses on the translation of the structurally weak polymer-based extrusion process into a fully load-bearing construction system” by replicating the process in metal. Specifically, the current research delves into the development of “a fully automated bending and welding process for meshes fabricated from 3-millimeter steel wire.”
By 3D printing concrete at specific angles, the collaborative team was able to produce blocks with layers “orthogonal to the flow of compressive forces,” allowing them to design differently-shaped blocks for different portions of the bridge. The blocks stick together through gravity, meaning no mortar is required. No steel reinforcements are necessary, either. And if needed, the entire bridge can simply be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere.
2021-08-09: Construction Physics describes how 3D printed concrete is at the bottom of an S curve:
For the most part, despite the hype, the current state of building 3D printing is fairly unimpressive. The resolution is poor, the process is sluggish (Icon’s printer can print a 3m x 3m in little over 8 hours – not terrible but not setting the world on fire), the material options are extremely limited, the equipment is expensive and finicky, and the results are generally worse on multiple axes than what you could get from conventional construction.
Human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel.
Concrete will naturally absorb CO2, a process known as carbonation (even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life.) Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO2 during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.
It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete CO2 emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.
Full decarbonization with CCS is expected to double the cost of Portland cement, now about US$100 per tonne. Cement subsidies would need to match that. 0-emissions steel is expected to cost 20–40% more than standard steel, which is typically about $600 per tonne — so steel subsidies would need to reach $240 per tonne. For the EU, we estimate that could cost up to $200 billion over 10 years.
2023-01-12: The chemistry of roman concrete has been decoded
For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.
Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features. These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”
Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability.
But this doesn’t mean that we can simply replace all concrete with this new formula
If we have the possibility of building more durable concrete buildings, why don’t we? Using unreinforced concrete dramatically limits the sort of construction you can do – even if the code allows it, you’re basically limited to only using concrete in compression. Without reinforcing, modern concrete buildings and bridges would be largely impossible.
Other methods of reducing reinforcement corrosion also have drawbacks, especially cost. Stainless steel rebar is 4-6x as expensive as normal rebar. Epoxy coated rebar (commonly used on bridge construction in the US) is also more expensive, and though it can slow down corrosion, it won’t stop it. Basalt rebar won’t corrode but can apparently decay in other ways.
2023-03-23: The 3D printing concrete dream won’t die. These savings are quite modest but a 24 / 7 operation should speed things up another factor of 4
This 100-house addition to the 2500 homes planned for Wolf Ranch is called “the Genesis Collection,” and as the world’s largest 3D-printed community, it is indeed sui generis. 3D-printed homes cost 10-30% less to build than conventional construction, while Coleman expects construction time to be cut 30% at Wolf Ranch. Concrete is carbon-intensive, but the material’s use at Wolf Ranch creates nearly airtight buildings that will reduce homeowners’ heating and cooling costs, while the solar panels installed on each residence will supply carbon-free electricity. Icon’s 3D-printed walls have exceeded building code strength requirements by 350% which allows them to better withstand hurricanes and wildfires. “We are trying to make the case that not only do our robots not need smoke breaks or anything like that, they also are very quiet and should be allowed to work around the clock.”
Eco-city 2020 is a proposal for a domed city for the rehabilitation of the Mirniy industrial zone in Eastern Siberia, Russia designed by the innovative architectural studio AB Elis Ltd. Dome cities can be made profitably and that they can provide energy efficiency and other benefits. Examples were provided of large EFTE (superstrong and light teflon) and aluminum structures that provide climate control for the interior structures and current largest examples of geodesic domes. An EFTE Geodesic dome can probably be brought down to $1K per m2 in cost. However, even $5K per m2 domes can be very profitable. Domes can make buildings inside more economical by reducing the need to heat or cool them. The Dome themselves can leverage atmospheric and other effects to maintain constant internal climate and generate power. The domes can use vents and can have a large chimney for airflow and even more temperature control.
GREEN FLOAT is a new conceptual model for environmentally friendly cities. The idea is to construct artificial islands in the Equatorial ocean, with the aim of achieving self-sufficient, CO2-negative cities with zero waste.
In Helsinki, Finland, 20k truckloads of snow plowed from city streets throughout last winter was stacked into a huge pile, which is only now finally melting away. Just in time for next winter. The pile was measured at 27 meters high in April. Last week, the height dipped below 1 meter, which was enough for the local newspaper to declare victory.
it has been very encouraging to see the development of a city like Freiburg, where CO2 reduction is more than just pandering, where public transportation is done effectively and efficiently, where low-energy housing is taken seriously and near-zero development for public buildings is even mandated.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 