Cutting steel with steam

Kragen Javier Sitaker, 02020-11-11 (1 minute)

In my note on cold plasma I wrote about the possibilities of using cold plasma to slowly reduce metal, dissolve away epoxy, and so on. But it's also very useful to be able to oxidize metal, especially iron, for example to cut it. And, as I found there, hydrogen can reduce iron from FeO at almost any temperature as long as there's about 10× as much hydrogen as steam. But that also means that steam can oxidize iron to FeO at almost any temperature until 90% of the steam has been reduced by the iron.

This suggests the use of steam as a substitute for oxygen in an oxy-acetylene cutting torch.

That's probably a dumb idea because probably you lose more than 79% of the heat of oxidizing the iron to splitting up the water. FeO's melting point is 1377°, its enthalpy of formation is XXX ????, and water's enthalpy of formation is -285 kJ/mol.

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