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By helsinkiandrew 2025-11-209:192 reply Basalt Fibre (bonded with recycled PET) is also being used in yacht construction inplace of glass fibre
https://www.windelo-catamaran.com/en/recycled-and-biosourced...
By euroderf 2025-11-2017:14 It's the Basaltic, see?
By CrimsonCape 2025-11-2016:593 reply Looking at the web page is kinda ironic. A yacht builder proclaiming how much better the materials are for the environment. We could just build less yachts, for example. Nobody needs a yacht.
There has to be an interesting commentary here regarding the necessity of productive endeavours that pay taxes and fund local governments and drive investors portfolios into the black, all funded by useless largesse.
Yachts are not just rich-kid toys. They're useful in supporting ocean research, tourism, transfer vessels, security, etc.
It's super cool to find an alternative to fiberglass.
Maybe they could be used in wind turbines as well.
By conorcleary 2025-11-2020:40 Well, 'research vessels' don't need to have gold-plated luxuries, etc.
Many people live on sail yachts. They are a very economical way to live.
By clort 2025-11-2019:44 So technically, a yacht is any leisure vessel. ie not a working boat. In the UK, a yacht is usually a sailing boat though we also increasingly have motor yachts. In the USA though, a yacht is a large motor powered vessel. So, when an American says 'nobody needs a yacht' they generally mean one of those, rather than a sailboat. Not sure what context CrimsonCape was using.
By shaky-carrousel 2025-11-2111:57 Nobody needs Netflix either. Think of all the electricity we could save if we shut it down.
Wikipedia says yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt_fiber
> The basalt fibers typically have a filament diameter of between 10 and 20 μm which is far enough above the respiratory limit of 5 μm to make basalt fiber a suitable replacement for asbestos.
The source mentioned is a basalt fiber brand website, so not sure if that's enough for confidence.
So does fiberglass. I would dislike working with the aforementioned basalt fiber, I suspect it's like fiberglass or carbon fibers in that you'll end up itchy later, unless you do a really good job with your PPE e.g. taping gloves to your sleeves.
By ahartmetz 2025-11-2012:29 This still seems iffy, but... broken fibers usually become shorter, not thinner.
This is the exact way of behaving that facilitate conspiratorial thinking. You could have looked into it. Found sources that covers harmful effects of stone wool. Instead this 'just pointing out' that it might be problematic is lazy, dumb, and potentially destructive.
You want people to be curious and investigate? Then don't snap at them when they ask a question or express confusion. Respond and show your work and they'll learn by example. Snap at them and you'll raise the temperature of the discussion and make it more polarized and reflexive, exactly the opposite of your stated preference.
And they aren't wrong, inhaling basalt fibers is dangerous and long term exposure could injure or kill you. It's just a different mechanism than asbestos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis
See for example this MSDS for basalt. https://mcdn.martinmarietta.com/assets/safety-data-sheets/ba...
> The major concern is silicosis (lung disease), caused by the inhalation and retention of respirable crystalline silica dust.
(NB: I do not know if or claim that basalt fibers are more dangerous than alternatives.)
By exmadscientist 2025-11-2116:20 > (NB: I do not know if or claim that basalt fibers are more dangerous than alternatives.)
For what it's worth, the ex-composite-shop guys I used to work with said that basically everything you can make a composite out of is horribly nasty: carbon fiber, fiberglass, basalt fiber, probably anything period. After repeated exposure you develop contact dermatitis to that type of fiber and the shop moves you on to working with something else, until it happens again. Contact dermatitis is just the first visible sign, it gets worse from there. Eventually you're probably going to want to get out of the shop entirely.
By noduerme 2025-11-215:08 It doesn't seem outlandish to wonder. Pele's Hair is a volcanic glass, and you certainly wouldn't want to inhale it.
By vpribish 2025-11-2015:55 The behavior was lazy and dumb, not the person.
The problem with asbestos is that, due to its structure, it keeps breaking in the longitudinal direction, making thinner and thinner until it is the size of chromosomes. Physical interference with DNA is how it causes cancer.
My understanding is that basalt fibers seem to be glassy, not crystalline, so the breaking does not happen.
The source material is crystalline, but it becomes somewhat glassy during the fiber manufacture, when it is cooled too fast to crystallize completely.
Asbestos is made from some silicates (pyroxenes or amphiboles) which contain long covalent chains of silicon and oxygen atoms, which are more likely to separate than to break transversally.
Basalt also contains pyroxenes and amphiboles, but they are mixed with other kinds of silicates and they also have a different chemical composition than those of asbestos, so as far as it is known for now the probability of breaking into very thin fibers is very low for basalt fibers.
It is plausible that basalt fibers should be safer, because unlike with asbestos, which is made from rather rare minerals, basalt covers a large fraction of the surface of the Earth, so if basalt were dangerous erosion should have made harmful basalt fragments abundant in the environment.
Is it correct so think that the least crystalline it ends up being, the more tensile strength it has ?
By adrian_b 2025-11-2017:01 No, the greater tensile strength of basalt fiber versus glass fiber is due to it being partly crystallized, similarly to the greater strength of glass-ceramic vessels (i.e. which are made from a glass for easier formability, but then they are crystallized by a heat treatment) versus glass vessels.
While there are glasses much stronger than ordinary glass, there are a lot of even stronger ceramics, which are (poly-)crystalline.
Glasses have many advantages vs. other materials, e.g. easy processing for making any shapes, including fibers, no porosity, chemical resistance, optical transparency and so on, but strength is not one of them.
The glass content of the basalt fibers is useful for allowing them to be drawn into fibers, by being soft enough for this even at a temperature under the melting point of the basalt.
By jjtheblunt 2025-11-2118:181 reply > Physical interference with DNA is how it causes cancer.
Is there a reference for that, because it's curious. (As in I really hope you have a reference to read.)
I'd thought I had seen that repeated scarring (from being not broken down) upregulates cellular replacement rate, or concomitant inflammation were suspect.
By jcarrano 2025-11-2414:13 "Long asbestos fibers have been shown to interfere physically with the mitotic spindle and cause chromosomal damage"
[1] https://archive.cdc.gov/www_atsdr_cdc_gov/csem/asbestos/how_...
By gsf_emergency_6 2025-11-2023:32 Basalt also interacts with DNA, hence some origin of life theories try to feature it
By noduerme 2025-11-2010:55 My bartender told me the other night that as long as I have 2 cups of black coffee and some red meat before drinking, it will coat my liver and prevent cirrhosis. I'm wondering if I should have him check out the mole on my arm, just to put my mind at ease. He would probably volunteer to be an experimental subject to prove this glass theory.
By webstrand 2025-11-2015:26 This one <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1567289/> seems to show that it is at least _safer_. But inhaling large amounts any form of particulate is ultimately dangerous.
By aitchnyu 2025-11-208:59 If I become a king, my tablecloth will be basalt instead of asbestos and the flames from acetylene for brightest blue color.
I sure hope so, as it's one of the go-to insulation materials in NL at the moment next to glass fiber wool.
All over the world really, AFAIU. And why not, it's non-flammable, rot-resistant, affordable and made from abundant raw materials.
And yes, you should probably use gloves and a mask when working with it, but it's not carcinogenic like asbestos.
I hate so much working with glass/rock wool that I just straight up refuse the work now if the client is not ready to pay a bit extra for hemp or wood insulating wool.
It doesn't hurt that the treatment to make them non-flammable and rot-resistant is quite benine and that the demand much less energy to manufacture.
> First the basalt is melted at a temperature of 1,400 °C (2550 °F). The molten rock is then extruded through small nozzles for the production of filaments of basalt fibers.
As a 3D-printer user, I flinched.
By Gravityloss 2025-11-209:302 reply One could probably add some other minerals to lower the melting temperature. Like is done for regular glass. I am not a chemist but I would assume most likely still way too high for plastic-like temperatures.
By jaggederest 2025-11-2010:153 reply As a ceramicist it'd be difficult to 3d print with because the kinds of temperatures you can reach even with heavily fluxed silica is still extremely high. I fire bisque at cone 04 which is approximately 1060C / 1940F and that's considered low fire, only extremely heavily fluxed glazes (usually pure frit or equivalent) melt at that level.
Putting 3d printing concepts on the table, though, you could definitely see something like a sintered bed printer using a laser to print it, but then you wouldn't get anything close to the standard FDM style print.
By positron26 2025-11-2014:081 reply Fundamentally, if the nozzle temperatures can't possibly withstand what they are extruding without eroding, we can either:
- balance an exothermic reaction (self-propagating high-temperature synthesis) to occur just after leaving the nozzle
- externally apply the heat with laser or plasma arc etc
The limit of externally applying heating is when the heat flux has to be so high that some material vaporizes and pops. An exothermic reaction within the material overcomes this limitation.
By jaggederest 2025-11-2018:091 reply The other alternative is like current state of the art 3d printing ceramics - you either replace some high percentage of the filament with clay and fire it as a post processing step and it burns off the plastic, or print a clay/water slurry directly and fire it after drying.
But I don't think we'd end up with the basalt being very filamentous.
By positron26 2025-11-2019:35 If the binder that gives you something printable at low temperature doesn't integrate into the final result through chemical reaction, you are almost assuredly going to get a high porosity mess where the binder had to vaporize out.
If instead the binder and precursor can melt, react, and expand into a solid that precipitates out because of a super high melting point, the expansion will ensure that you get a fully dense part that can be machined back down.
Felsic lavas can melt at 750° and even below, and prehistoric terra cotta ceramic is often fired at such low temperatures.
That's still quite a bit cozier than nylon or PET, of course.
By jaggederest 2025-11-2018:071 reply Yes, but I think for 3d printing purposes you'd probably have insufficient fusion even at those temperatures. I print well above the melting point or you get layer separation. It'd definitely be a fun experiment to try though!
"Well above the melting point" usually means 60° or less, which is more significant going from 195° to 245° than going from 650° than to 710°.
These temperatures make it a significantly trickier engineering problem; ideally, your nozzle would retain its shape at those temperatures despite containing a lot of pressure, not be corroded by the lava you're squeezing through it, not be abraded by any zircon grains that snuck into your melt, and not oxidize on the outside from the temperature when it's exposed to air. I'm pretty sure you could make a zirconia nozzle work if it was thick enough, but I don't think ruby, sapphire, or diamond would last very long. Probably something like inconel would also work, but I don't think 304 or 316 would.
By jaggederest 2025-11-2019:172 reply It'd be a lot more than 60C - the goal is to keep the material from cooling past the melting point by the time it's been deposited, and thus the important factor is the rate of energy loss, which is dramatically accelerated in a temperature differential of, say, 650C instead of say 145C - so I'd guess you'd want about 150C - 300C difference.
I'd bet inconel and other high temperature alloys would be eroded very quickly, anything that's fluxed enough to melt below 1000C is going to be extremely corrosive. Hot molten sodium hydroxide levels of corrosive. Fun to think about though, a serious materials challenge for sure.
By kragen 2025-11-2019:43 I'd guess that it's a lot easier to maintain the whole build chamber at 500° than to maintain the hotend at 850°, but I haven't tried it.
Felsic lavas (and magmas) which melt at those temperatures do not typically contain a lot of alkali oxides, but they do contain some. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calc-alkaline_magma_series#/me... However, ferrous and quasi-ferrous alloys like inconel are among the best choices for alkali corrosion. For example, table 4 in Birgitte Stofferson's dissertation https://orbit.dtu.dk/en/publications/containment-of-molten-n... gives an inconel corrosion rate of 1.06 mm per year in molten NaOH at 600°, which happens through oxidation from oxygen dissolved in the melt. Monel 500 corroded only 5.06 mm per year at 700°.
If you were trying to keep a 100μm hotend aperture within a ±10% tolerance, you could start with a 95μm aperture and replace the hotend when the aperture had expanded to 110μm. At 1mm/year those 15μm would be 5 days of printing time, which seems like a usable hotend lifetime. Presumably printing in lava rather than 100% NaOH would extend the lifetime further.
By benlivengood 2025-11-2023:211 reply It sounds like printing in a vacuum chamber with reflective walls for IR might work?
By kragen 2025-11-2023:30 I think that if most of the things in the vacuum chamber are at room temperature, while the lava filament is at 700°, that won't substantially reduce the radiative heat loss. If almost everything inside the vacuum chamber that isn't mirror-coated is at something like 500° or 600°, I think it would work. Maybe that could save you from having to keep the walls themselves at 500° or 600°.
By Gravityloss 2025-11-2010:56 I also assume directional solidification is really important for basalt, like for glass fibers and others. That's hard to achieve for bulk objects but easy for fibers.
By kragen 2025-11-2016:48 Yes, you could convert the basalt into glass. But basalt fibers have some real advantages over glass fibers, mentioned in the linked page:
> Basalt Woven Textile has high corrosive and chemical resistance to the influence of a corrosive media: salt solutions, acid solutions and particularly alkali liquids. The specific strength of basalt fiber exceeds the strength of alloyed steel by a factor of 2,5 and the strength of glass fiber by a factor of 1,5. Heat-insulating items made from basalt fiber combined with inorganic binding agents may be used by temperatures up to 700°С. In addition there is a range of compositions consisting of basalt rocks that have a higher thermal stability – up to 800°С.
By endymion-light 2025-11-209:292 reply couldn't imagine what the spaghetti looks like
