Arc Reactor Replica

This Arc Reactor is a great re-creation of the fictional source of Iron Man’s power. It’s really just a holder for a bunch of LED’s, but it exhibits some fine craftsmanship which we enjoy in any project. This rendition is much more true to the movie than the last look-a-like we saw. These might end up being for sale (the webpage narrative is kind of weird) but you really shouldn’t be wearing this kind of thing around unless you made it yourself, or if you can add it to some kind of Iron Man simulator.

[Thanks Cr8vie]

Arch Reactor Hackerspace Is Moving!

What happens when your hackerspace grows too big for its building? Well — you can either take over the other units in your building — or move to a bigger building altogether!

We toured Arch Reactor almost three years ago, which is located in St. Louis, Missouri. The present facility is 2400sqft, which over the past few years has gotten a bit cramped. They’re moving to a new building at 2215 Scott Avenue, which is over twice the size of the current facility at a whopping 5100sqft!

As you can imagine, it’s not an easy task to move a hackerspace of this size to a new building, but their community is strong and they’re still hacking away, even during the move! If your hackerspace has a move in its not-so-distant-future, you might want to take note and follow along on their blog for some lessons learned.

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Hackerspace Tour: Arch Reactor In St. Louis Missouri

Over this last weekend I was lucky enough to find myself in St. Louis, Missouri. Some of my favorite places in the universe are there, the city museum being one that pops into mind most frequently.  I realized I had never toured a hackerspace in St. Louis though!

A quick phone call to Arch Reactor remedied this. Even though it was Easter Sunday, they came down and gave me a tour.  The  space was quite nice with a lounge area, electronics workstations, fabrication tools and a complete wood shop. On top of the hackerspace’s pleasant atmosphere, the building also includes a fun little art-bike group called the Banana Bike Brigade,  and even has a roof-top bar made from reclaimed materials. For those of you who are into cars, in the bike shop there were several nice corvairs and a porsche 911 that appeared to be mid 80s.

If you ever get a chance to stop by, you should definitely try to visit Arch Reactor.

St. Louis Hackerspace: Arch Reactor

Here at HackaDay, we are always a fan of a group of hackers coming together to create a place to share ideas, tools, parts, and stories. A group from St. Louis called Arch Reactor have managed to secure a new location, and are having their grand opening this Saturday. From 4-10pm on the 30th, they will be hosting an open house, and showing off both the area as well as some personal projects. We plan on being there to cover it, as well as support a hackerspace that is close to home for a couple of us.

They are located on the second floor of:

904 Cherokee St.
St Louis, MO 63118

and feel free to check out their location page, as well as their main web site.

Edit: Thanks to [kamikazejoe] from the Arch Reactor forums for pointing out the logo issue. Whoops.

The TMSR-LF1 building seen from the sky. (Credit: SINAP)

China’s TMSR-LF1 Molten Salt Thorium Reactor Begins Live Refueling Operations

Although uranium-235 is the typical fuel for commercial fission reactors on account of it being fissile, it’s relatively rare relative to the fertile U-238 and thorium (Th-232). Using either of these fertile isotopes to breed new fuel from is thus an attractive proposition. Despite this, only India and China have a strong focus on using Th-232 for reactors, the former using breeders (Th-232 to U-233) to create fertile uranium fuel. China has demonstrated its approach — including refueling a live reactor — using a fourth-generation molten salt reactor.

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Building A Fully Automatic Birkeland-Eyde Reactor

Ever wanted to produce nitrogen fertilizer like they did in the 1900s? In that case, you’re probably looking at the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was the first industrial-scale atmospheric nitrogen fixation process. It was eventually replaced by the Haber-Bosch and Ostwald processes. [Markus Bindhammer] covers the construction of a hobbyist-sized, fully automated reactor in this video.

It uses tungsten electrodes to produce the requisite arc, with a copper rod brazed onto both. The frame is made of aluminium profiles mounted on a polypropylene board, supporting the reaction vessel. Powering the whole contraption is a 24 VDC, 20 A power supply, which powers the flyback transformer for the high-voltage arc, as well as an air pump and smaller electronics, including the Arduino Uno board controlling the system.

The air is dried by silica gel before entering the reactor, with the airflow measured by a mass air flow sensor and the reaction temperature by a temperature sensor. This should give the MCU a full picture of the state of the reaction, with the airflow having to be sufficiently high relative to the arc to extract the maximum yield for this already very low-yield (single-digit %) process.

Usually, we are more interested in getting our nitrogen in liquid form. We’ve also looked at the Haber-Bosch method in the past.

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Swiss Researchers May Have Solved Hydrogen Storage

If you follow the world of clean energy, you will probably have read all about the so-called hydrogen future and the hydrogen economy. The gas can easily be made from water by electrolysis from green solar electricity, contains a lot of stored energy which is clean to recover, and seems like the solution to many of our green energy woes. Sadly the reality doesn’t quite match up as hydrogen is difficult to store and transport, so thus far our hydrogen cars haven’t quite arrived. That hasn’t stopped researchers looking at hydrogen solutions though, and a team from ETH Zurich might just have found a solution to storing hydrogen. They’re using it to reduce iron oxide to iron, which can easily release the hydrogen by oxidation with water.

Their reactor is simplicity itself, a large stainless steel tank filled with powdered iron ore. Pump hydrogen into it and the iron oxide in the ore becomes water and iron which forms the storage medium, and retrieve the hydrogen later by piping steam through the mixture. Hydrogen generated in the summer using solar power can then be released in the winter months. Of course it’s not perfectly efficient, and a significant quantity of energy is lost in heat, but if the heat is recovered and used elsewhere that effect can be mitigated. The hope is that their university might be benefiting from a pilot plant in the coming years, and then perhaps elsewhere those hydrogen grids and cars might become a reality. We can hope.

Meanwhile, in the past we’ve looked at a not quite so green plan for a hydrogen grid.