You have a literal outside water coolant as an advantage, you can utilize that by flowing water through pipes to carry off any heat, probably infusing it into your design.
The water around the pipe would heat up rather quickly if it was just standing, and if it was being moved through pipes it would require even more power to operate
Heat differences could do some of the the work, the hotest water goes up, and upward is a current of cool water, but once I cools down the only way out is down a pipe, that happens to feed into the bottom of the- thing.
The only reason why fire doesn’t happen underwater is because water takes the heat away too quickly (ignoring chemical fires). You just have to literally insulate a fire away from any water, ignite, and then it will sustain. Bubbles filled with flammable chemicals and oxygen however will continuously combust and sustain until water pressures condense them, which is why you put the chemical bubbles in a shell.
Fire alone is not enough to smelt metals well. You would need a tuyere, and therefore some method to let out excess air, to add extra oxygen, which would be far more important in an isolated bubble
When i read about the underwater fire i think about fluorine as alternative for oxygen in burning.
Yes, it has many disadvantages as deficiency because of chemical activity, deficiency in the deep, but if will be the underwater well of it…
Water will fire near to it and maybe (just maybe, I don’t know exactly) it will be enough warm to melt some metal. So, hydrogen will swim up, oxygen difluoride too and will happen enough temperature…
If i tell something wrong, give me to know.
P.s. I know, on Earth fluorine as simple matter(?) is rare, and wells of fluorine are only in theory, but Thrive can do them. Because why not
Fire is to sustain the smelting process and you probably get what I mean by any form of combustion in a case like this. As for the flow of air, it’s as easy as letting the pressure of hot air bubble outwards, pushing water out of the way. Of course, this a less safe version of what you can do to filter air underwater. Still viable and possible.
I can find no examples of even modern technology keeping out water with air-flow alone, which indicates to me that it is difficult and likely requires far too much power for a pre-metallurgical society. And using a filter would require some sort of cooling of the output, which also requires extra power
To this method’s defense, why would this ever have to be made *by humans? Also, it’d depend on pressure given off of air, depending on heat and buoyancy. Again, less feasible and reasonable to do so.
A lot of our technology is not operated by humans, but instead by machines, which currently are far more inhuman than any natural alien could possibly be. And on pressure, the pressure of an output pipe on a bloomery seems to be roughly 4.5x the pressure it would be without heat, meaning that at a certain depth n, it should take roughly n/45 atm to equal the pressure of surrounding water. This means that a creature living at the base of the epipelagic would need to produce enough pressure to kill a human being in order to power this smelter
It is pretty easy to kill a human with pressure, or seriously deform them and cause very big problems that’ll kill them anyways. If the problem you have is with flowing out air, let buoyancy do the job. Air will spew out of some pipes, and while water leaks in, it will have holes spots to sink back out of since it will fall through the air produced in the container.
If the water is not kept out completely, it will enter through every available opening, and will build up and fill the entire smelter
What about underwater caves? A burn could last awhile, and a creature could be capable of lasting long enough there to light a fire, and oxygen diffused back into the cave from the water between burns.
Air-filled underwater caves would be extremely rare, and would likely be small and awkward to build in
A metal-less still civ has stone tools, make it bigger.
There is also the problem of oxygen, as there would need to be a huge surface area to supply a simple smelter with enough oxygen to smelt. While they could increase the size of the surface, there would be no point until the smelter is functional, which would be quite a while from the begining of the project
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Eusocial organisms have permanent homes and could spare the critterpower.
But how would they know to do so?
They see a fire abouve water and it kills a fishing predaror and they say “cool!”. They can’t keep fire underwater so they go to a cave, but the fire only stays around for ten seconds. A smart member of their group says “the land-forest fire was in a open space.” So they make it bigger.
They might also come to the conclusion that the land-fire was supplied by an outside force that couldn’t be replicated underwater