| ▲ | adrian_b 4 hours ago | |
Heat exchangers for metal vapors at temperatures of a few thousand kelvin would be a significant technical challenge. A heat exchanger needs fluids between which heat can be exchanged. Besides the fact that it would be very difficult to have pipes for fluids at such temperatures, it would not be so easy to efficiently heat the fluid more than it was heated by the recovered heat and then control somehow a fluid jet to transfer efficiently heat to the iron that must be vaporized. Even if some heat would be recovered from the vapors, the losses due to imperfect heat transfer from fluid to iron might be greater than the recovered heat. Moreover, it is not clear what could be used as the working fluid, because those asteroids are depleted in volatile elements, so any fluid must be brought from elsewhere and any fluid losses would be irreplaceable. Probably the easiest and most efficient way to heat iron until vaporization would be with an electron beam, but it would not be easy to ensure that the iron vapors do not destroy the installation and they condense in a safe place, from which the iron can be somehow evacuated. | ||
| ▲ | DoctorOetker 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |
working fluid? the same hot iron vapour is used to heat the incoming molten iron, no heat exchanger is perfect so the preheat would inevitably be a few percent short of the target temperature, the remainder is just the energy you supply to negate any heat lost through insulation (space is large, so one could use a ridiculously large insulation) not that any of this matters, since chemical methods would be much more efficient | ||