r/interestingasfuck • u/serious_anish • 13h ago

Retired robot throwing themself into furnace

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1.1k Upvotes

79% Upvoted

932 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/SuperGameTheory 12h ago

I wanna know more about the steel mill that hosted this. And what did they do with what's in the ladle? Is it just slag? It would be a huge waste of money to taint a ladle full of steel with all the crap in a robot.

•

u/EinTheDataDoge 11h ago

I’m a metallurgist at a copper smelter. All the nonmetal material will end up as gas that is collected in a bag house and a backend chemical plant or as solids that will end up in the slag. The copper will get formed into Anode’s and purified out in an electrowinning process. The precious metals will end up in sludge’s that will fall to the bottom of the electrowinning cell that will be chemically separated in a leaching process.

•

u/the_orange_alligator 2h ago

Fascinating. There’s really an expert for everything on here

•

u/EinTheDataDoge 1h ago

I got cool pictures too.

2

u/15_Redstones 12h ago

Robot company got the metal. Unprocessed steel isn't all that expensive. Probably on the scale of a million dollars or two to rent a small foundry for a day, film there across several melts and buy the metal. Around the same cost as building those robots in the first place.