Building a 1000°C Electric Furnace From a Toaster!
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- In today's episode of The Plutonium Bunny I show how I turned a regular boring household toaster into a powerful temperature-controlled electric furnace capable of reaching over 1000°C. What started as a meme project during COVID turned out to be a quality tool for metal melting, high-temperature chemistry, ceramics, and heat treatment of metals.
Through the video I show how I disassembled the toaster to recover useful parts and made use of items I had lying around to construct the furnace. I demonstrate how I built nichrome wire coils for the furnace heating elements and detail some of the planning considerations that went into building this. I also talk about the refractory insulation mixture I made to build my custom refractory bricks. Finally, I show the furnace melting aluminum casting alloy for an upcoming project. The best thing about using this for metal-melting is that it is completely quiet, makes no fumes, needs no fuel, and can be safely run in the warm, dry confines of a garage.
This furnace uses the nichrome resistance heating coils (or wire) from the toaster as its heating coils, as well as some of the other toaster components like the insulating mica sheets. The steel furnace shell is build from sheet metal off an old kitchen microwave, and the insulating bricks are a custom mixture of fireclay, play sand, and perlite from the gardening store. I used a PID controller and thermocouple for temperature control. Currently, my PID controller only ever gets to a temperature about 100°C below where you set it, so if you know how to adjust PID to fix this, please enlighten me.
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Happy to hear about you're progress with school! I'd like to see what this evil toaster does to bread.
Thank you! Actually I'd also love to test some bread in this furnace - I'm really interested in seeing if it can make those "DIY space shuttle tile" types of ablative carbon foam insulation from white bread or something basic like that.
The humour and creativity is strong in this Jedi 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Dude this deserves more recognition
Dude this is a fantastic project! The only thing I'm missing is some more information on the electrical setup. If nothing else it might prevent some inexperienced laymen (like myself) from killing themselves.
As for the PID, it might be because the thermocouple is installed at the very bottom of the furnace, and the PID has some cap on the current for a given temperature. Like the PID is pumping X power through the coils (some sort of preset for the selected temperature), but because the thermocouple is in the "coldest" place in the furnace it needs way more power than the PID thinks is reasonable and it caps out.
Great project! The 100 degrees issue, have you check the type of thermokoppel is right configured in the controller (K,J, S etc) evenso the DIN or ANSI norm. Do you have used the right compensation cable in agreement with the used thermocouple type. You can easily check the the 0 and 100 points for linearity due to freezing and boiling points of water. Think also about the aging of the element. Long term used K elements will have an error and must be replaced. Succes with your projects!
The temperature within the furnace probably varies based on the view factor to the coils (since they mostly transfer heat via radiation). The thermocouple might be positioned out of direct view, preventing it from reading the correct coil temperature. Moving the thermocouple to direct radiant exposure to the coils might help.
You also *might* be able to calculate the temperature by monitoring the power flow + coil resistance, like temperature control vapes.
Amazing instructions. Thanks
If your PID controller has an AutoTune function, i would recommend getting your furnace up to a desired temperature, then run the autotune function on your pid controller. Then it should be as easy as set it and forget it.
Fun stuff! For running below set point, check output. If at 100%, your toaster does not have enough element to attain set point
“Motorcycle” battery 😁
My PID controller for my injection molding machine did the same thing. It got more and more accurate, very quickly, the more I used it.
Ah, good to know. Do you know if we have the same (or similar) model PID controller? Mine is just switching a solid state relay (SSR) on and off; I believe it was a package deal from China on eBay or something like that.
@@ThePlutoniumBunny I've gotten a bunch of stuff from China recently. I'm not saying that proudly - it's just the only way I can stretch my dollar as far as it needs to go. One thing I've noticed is that someone will copy something that has been useful on the market, then everyone else copies the first guy. Then you have a bunch of sellers that sell the same copies as everyone else. In other words, everything seems to be the same thing with different labels. Your PID controller is probably the same as the three that I have. They do have a learning function, so it's not strange that they will get more accurate over time. The one for the injection molding would overshoot/undershoot quite a bit for the first few days. After a while, it just got better and I forgot that there was ever a problem.
it does depend on the pid controller. Some have pretty advanced functions, i had a similar issue on one of my blow mold machines. When the original controller went out which was a more expensive but obsolete Allen Bradley model, the managers bought another brand at a medium price, there were timers for the on off functions that the electrician didn't know to set, so the on off cycles weren't giving it enough on time. I had to study the manual for a bit to figure it out, some units have auto calibration but not all of them. Also, its necessary to use an ssr or other type of relay because those heat controllers can't handle the amperage/wattage of the heaters.
My suggestion to you is instead of fiberglass use stone wool . You can get it at home depot under the name Mineral wool. Yes it's made out of stone. When you do a little research on it you'll understand.
Thank you for the neat video
nice job - once school kicks in you might not have as much time. The calculations / homework can get intense.
i really love this furnace good job my friend
10:20 you scare me !! ahahah good video
Stretch the coiled elements all at once, not an inch at a time. You'll get a much more even spacing of the turns.
Congrads bro for you school and talent
Okay that title is hilarious but awesome
Would be interested to know where you can get a thermocouple that can read high temperatures.
Increasing the I term of the PID should help compensate for any global losses in the system and help it slowly reach the target. Keep it low though - high values will create overshoot.
OK, thank you for the advice on the PID. I'll have to try that once I get some time to play with the furnace again.
NERD! Lol, love it. I might steal this. Its so simple even someone like me can do it.
Yeah pretty sure that insulation is only rated to a couple hundred celsius, like 250. Great vid.
I'd love to see a vid about your PhD work and the lab. Obviously, we wouldn't want you to jeopardize your work, but it'd still be cool to hear about what you're working on.
I dont like the kiln brick recipe. The good recipe is Mullite/ball clay/ talc then filler like styrofoam pellets to create burn out material to make air pockets to provide insulated brick property. Here the insulated brick property is the perlite. But you need a kiln to make a kiln since you need to fire those bricks at cone 10. I bet the more people that know you can make those bricks the cheaper they get from China tho.
Would you be better off using plaster of aris and a wax coating on your coils ? Then burn off the wax once you set the coils in the plaster? Allowing it to dry around the coils
Plaster of Paris is not ideal for high temperature applications - it will crack, at the very least. I know it is also risky to get things like wax on coils, as electric coils are not meant to be fired under reducing conditions - this will eliminate the protective oxide coating on the coils, causing the coil to thin and break. I suspect that wax on the coils might create these reducing conditions.
What values did you use for your PID? Since this is simple on/off power control for temperature you don't want to overshoot the temperature or force it in a gradient too steep. It's probably why it never reached the desired temperature, it's probably oscillating the output to much, I would set in as a PD controller only. Add a fuse or breaker before your relay and use a simulator to find a closer value to use for you proportional and derivative gains.
Dang. An hour to heat a soupcan sized crucible of aluminum? Guess thats the price of propane. Made one with random pipes and odds and ends for free thatll melt a few lbs of aluminum in ~10-15 minutes from a room temperature cold foundry😂 i thought THAT was slow and inneficient. The temp control would be super nice to have though. Instead of 'no heat/ALL the heat'
لماذا لم تستخدم شريط ال تدفئه الكهرباء
So can you also use the coil from an old heater ?
Do you have links where you ordered the PID and thermocouple?
good luck with your PHD!
Thank you! Certainly a big undertaking but it has been educational so far.
Are you sure that the wire is nichrome? According to the Wirecutter’s collaboration with Ohio State University, modern toasters do not use nickel on their heating elements to save money. This makes the heating elements brittle and causes failures such as the one you experienced.
Nah look at that toaster things from the 1990s or earlier
looks at my old toaster
@ThePlutoniumBunny Wow, I can't find any way to contact you. The contact form on your blog is broken. I just wanted to know where to source the xenon tubes from your Experiment 40 on your blog.
Hmmm, interesting - the contact form worked when I tried it yesterday. Anyhow, the Xe tubes were all from camera flashes. Especially disposable cameras - those have the small tubes. Sometimes you can ask stores like CVS or Walgreens for the disposable cameras people have turned in to have the film processed and they will let you have them for free. I believe the larger Xe tube was from an older camera.
Gl on ur Phd