Lava for Foundation

Has anyone else heard of this?

No. Not even as an April fools day prank. Soil doesn't melt and resistance heating using electricity won't produce a hot enough or uniform enough heat even if the soil is some weird type that would melt into a form that could pass replacing concrete.

What jogged your memory now after 35 years? Can you provide a link and give us some more 'concrete' information to look at, otherwise we will think you are just pulling our leg.

Are you sure you didn't dream it?

I don't know what jogged it,but there it was,unbidden,nibbling at me.

I distinctly remember the article details.

It required a consederable high voltage,provided buy a transformer,and several repositioning of the electrodes.

If it was truly viable,and lucrative,I am sure it would be in common usage by now.

(Maybe in Hawaii?)

Just curious if anyone else had seen it.

I agree it would be very hard to get uniformity in structure and strength.

I just can't think of any practical way to melt dirt with electricity.

Yep. Works, but not very practical. If one puts a LARGE substation transformer in the path of the bolt, though, the resulting metal slag field is solid for a LONG time, at least if it occurs over a sand (primarlily Silica) base, such as in the high desert of Eastern Oregon (That's where I saw it happen, as a 6 year old kid. I'll never forget the glory of THAT arc!).

It left a solid, pebbled-looking base for years after.

Um, yeah, 1.21 Gigawatts might do the trick, although it usually only fuses silica sand into glass, and just scorches soil.

Uhmm, you just missed the right turn. But wait, yeah this is a NASCAR- they only make left turns.

Nothing springs to mind. Anyone found anything online yet?

If no one can find anything online perhaps we could discuss what type of soil composition, compressed rock dust or whatever naturally occurring building material surface (possibly with limited additional additives) would be the best and could in theory possibly work to best replicate what you mention and replace a concrete foundation.

Concrete and 3D printing excluded of course.

Maybe he was making his own floor tile....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VrdUYbHvyo

Nooo way!

I have doubts simply due to the sheer energy requirements involved even under ideal conditions.

Consider the amount of thermal energy and time it takes just to turn a single clay blob into a finished brick. Now try and do that to a sizable volume of common soil with no thermal insulation whatsoever over the area the size of the foundation of even a small house.

My off the top of my head math suggests needing to provide megawatts of electrical power for days at a time to melt that much soil into a lava like state and even if that were possible the in soil cool down period would be months and months long.

That said if a person dug up a few pounds of soil and stuck it in a electric furnace cooked it until it glazed into a basic brick or it was in a molten state a poured into a brick like form I can see it as being doable.

A very time and energy consuming process but still that would be technically doable.

I'd say it's unlikely to work and likely to injure or kill someone.

Here's an example of electricity melting soil.

It's called a Fulgurite

Let me saddle up my flying pig.

I'll go look for some more.

Yep, with lightning, and even then it follows a path and doesn't distribute itself uniformly across the soil.

I am reminded of the movie Back to the Future, but less exciting when replacing the speeding car with an empty plot of land.

I remember one example when they did successfully do something like this, but you needed a hand phaser on approximately setting 3.

Ride the lightning, Metallica. Cool

Silicon Oxide and all other oxides in the soil are good insulator. There melting point surpass that of a metal and so definitely need ΔT to hit the melting point.

I found "doping" a humor, sorry

What are you eating these days?

I can see if this was clay and he was making bricks...at a high enough temperature it becomes porcelain which is considered a glass....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of3FWlMXFqI

If you collect dried lava from Hawai and crush them in stone crusher they can be used for block or concrete making in buildings or for road laying. In this way valuable land destroyed by lavaflow could be recovered all over the world.

Around here you don't need to melt the ground to make a lava foundation. Just pick a spot where the bedrock is on the surface. I've toured old homes where there was rock intruding into the basement.

The golf course on American Samoa has an unusual rule that if your ball lands on lava, you can move it to the nearest piece of grass, so long as it is farther from the hole than where the ball presently lies.

Um, that's just a subset of the standard 'unplayable' rule: If the ball lands in an unplayable area, it can be moved to the nearest playable area NO CLOSER TO THE HOLE than where the ball currently lies. That also covers things like the ball landing in the scoop of a backhoe the landscaping crew parked next to the course, or the ball falling into a ravine that was kept as part of the 'natural features' of the land, or landing in the entree of someone dining at the club's restaurant patio...

I'm assuming this is 'cold' lava, aka Igneous Rock, not actual flowing lava, which I suspect would probably be hot enough to damage the ball before it could be retrieved. So the area is 'unplayable' because the surface is to hard and unyielding, and would damage clubs if shots were attempted, much like trying to take a shot from a parking lot or other paved surface.

Exactly. Lots of little solidified lava outcrops.

So it's no different than a ball landing on a signature outcropping of Granite.

Although, the idea of playing golf on a course that has active, slow moving lava flows, would make the Opens more interesting to watch:

(The following is all said in the typical golf announcer's "excited hush.")

"Tiger really needs to step faster if he wants to reach his ball before the ah-ah flow does."

"That's right, Tom, if he lets his ball be overtaken by the lava he'll have to drop a new one a club length back from the edge of the flow. It won't cost him a penalty stroke, but he'll still be losing distance."

"And on this course, Mark, even just losing the time it takes to measure out and drop a new ball can cost you. Oh, we just got word that the bunkers around hole nine have just been consumed by pahoehoe. The good news is that now the hole has no sand traps left, the bad news is that the green may be overtaken within the hour, making the hole Unplayable."

"And as we near the next commercial break, let us remind you that the US Open is being sponsored by Lava brand soap. Get that deep cleaning with the power of real pumice, Lava soap."

I did not think it would work either,I just wondered if anyone else had seen the article.

It was probably in a Popular Mechanics magazine of that time period,and sometimes they publish some really far fetched stuff.

I have some Really old ones,from the 1940's.

You ought to see the UPS they had for a factory back then:

It was a steam shovel,and the boiler for it was used for plant power back up.

Everything back then ran off of steam,and a large main shaft ran through the plant,with everything driven by flat belts.

To stop a machine,the fixer flipped the belt off of the pulley with a special stick.

He could flip them off and on as effortlessly as we do a light switch.

I tried it once in an old sawmill,and it is much harder than it looks.

There are still some old farmer-owned saw mills with flat belt drive in operation.

Wow, 1940's I bet that is worth some money now.

Based on the amount of SWER (single wire earth return) systems in use in the far northern areas in Canada and in the vast stretches of the Australian interior, I guarantee you this does not happen.

In a SWER system power is delivered over a single conductor and returned to the source via the ground. If what you suggested actually happened, there would be pools of the stuff all over the place.

Wikipedia Article

Soil vitrification has been explored. Carbon electrode is use with a large current to produce about 3000°C. Forms a magma pool around the electrode.

Too costly.

I'm no expert but what about "induction heating" where the soil or rock has a large percentage of iron ore in it.

I still think it would probably explode the rock before it was molten!

If you will allow soil additives, there are ways to solidify the ground....depending on what type ground you have. Additives such as lime, Portland cement, or sodium silicate might be used. You could even hook up a large transformer and put some electrodes in the ground and rope off the area....to impress the neighbors.