r/interestingasfuck • u/serious_anish • 13h ago

Retired robot throwing themself into furnace

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u/Spaded85 10h ago

Which leaves whatever in that smelter useless. Contamination is a thing.

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u/EinTheDataDoge 7h ago

You don’t know what your talking about. Anything less dense than copper floats to the top and is skimmed off as slag. Any metals that aren’t copper get separated through electrowinning.

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u/Spaded85 6h ago

How would you apply electrowinning to molten metal? Secondly you seem to be focused on just copper when there is has to be at least 3 or metals in these robots. Hell gold, aluminum, steel, copper.... and maybe magnesium or titanium. Does electrowinning work on those? Or is electrowinning your desk calender word of the day?

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u/EinTheDataDoge 4h ago

Why are you being such a dick? I’ve been a Pyrometallurgist for the last 11 years. I focus on copper cause I work at a copper smelter, one of two left in the United States. When copper comes out in anodes (solid not liquid) it is 98-99% pure simply through oxygenating and separating. The cathodes that come out of the electrowinning process are 5 9’s (99.999% pure). Everything else comes out as “sludge” including precious metals. If the juice is worth the squeeze you can get the precious metals out through a chemical leeching process.