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Lampblack


psyco_1322

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Is there a way to make your own lampblack, like charcoal? I know they are related some how.
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well according to wikipedia you can make it by taking a noncombustable material like metal and holding it over a candle or flame. I've seen people do this before by taking a soda can and holding it closely over a flame. It leaves this black residue on the bottom of the can which is lampblack. I guess it would be difficult to make a lot of this but if you held the can over the flame then you could just scrape it off.
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Im gonna look more into how its commercial produced. The can and can-dle would be extremely slow.

 

Update: Found this while searching. I thought carbon black and lampblack was the same but I guess I was wrong.

 

carbon black, mixture of partially burned hydrocarbons. Carbon black is produced by partial combustion of natural gas. It is used as a black pigment for inks and paints, and is used in large amounts by the tire industry in the production of vulcanized rubber. Lampblack resembles carbon black, but is produced by burning liquid hydrocarbons, e.g., kerosene; it is often somewhat oily, is duller than carbon black, and may have a bluish undertone. It is sometimes used in making contact brushes for electrical apparatus.

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Kind of unrelated, and probably not that helpful. Conductive lampblack is made by burning Acetylene in an oxygen poor flame to get a sooty flame. The heat is so high, it gets a graphitic type of structure that gives it conductivity.

 

All in all, I'd say it's rather uneconomical to make your own lampblack.

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That's not what I remember from the prices I've seen for the stuff ...

 

 

Considering the low cost of liquid hydrocarbons (waste oil for example) and how easy it is to create a low oxygen atmosfere to burn it in, homemade lampblack can probably be made for less then 2-3€/kg.

 

 

The hardest thing is probably the capture of the fine lampblack.

I would suggest a vertical setup; a pipe containing an oil container with a wick of which the bottom can be partially closed to regulate air flow. Leave room for a good flame to develop freely, probably 3-4 times the pipe diameter, also depending on the fuel used, and then let the pipe make a 90° turn followed by a T-piece.

The going up end of the T-piece needs an extension probably (to keep the heat down) and finally a filter. The going down piece would extend below the initial beginning of the pipe below the burner (a physics thing) and has a container to receive the lampblack as it falls out of the rising air and gets tapped off the filter from time to time.

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Commercially the "black" is collected through electrostatic forces across some plates. Kinda like those air ionizers work... The particles are sucked to the collection grid. Well... Atleast now... they used to let it collect on cooled plates and scrape it off.

 

Citing: Industrial Chemicals 2nd ed. by Faith, Keyes, and Clark.

3-5% Yield of carbon black. 1 ton requires approximately 1,600,000 cu ft of natural gas... 1 to 1.5lb yield per 1,000 cu ft of gas containing 31lb C.

 

So no, its not really worth it.

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