Real Minecraft Furnace turns coal into electricity!

this video is sponsored by skillshare the furnace in minecraft is pretty special it's one of the first things you need in the game and this coal burning cube can accomplish many simple tasks after all heat is useful but if all it ever did was cook food and melt stuff i don't think it would have captured my imagination with the same intensity that it did when i first realized you could power a mine cart with it now my real life minecart videos should be a pretty clear indication of just how much i love the mine cart which is why building a furnace cart has been my obsession ever since but before i build that i need a furnace and not just a hot stone oven this furnace needs to take the energy of burning coal and somehow use it to steadily move the mine cart across the tracks this design is another big step in that direction an experimental prototype powered by technology that's used by nasa now it's not the only way to build a minecraft furnace but i think you'll find it just might be one of the coolest so here's how i did it as you might guess building the original minecart was a lot of work but the powerful electric motor was able to propel it up to the maximum in-game minecart diagonal speed of just over 25 miles per hour a truly thrilling experience so it seemed a shame to have to hack it to pieces either that or build an entirely new one let me explain the most obvious choice for a coal-powered rail car is of course a steam engine which is why i dedicated an entire video to building a prototype and exploring this as an option for a furnace cart but hooking it up to the drivetrain of my current minecart would likely require a substantial amount of modification or require me to build an entirely new minecart around the furnace and would the motor be inside of the furnace or just the boiler would the furnace have a rotating shaft sticking out of it [Music] where exactly did the two meet plus a boiler system was just plain intimidating the more comments i read the more i realized just how dangerous they can be when improperly designed or operated i was starting to consider other options particularly because a steam engine needs water but the furnace cart doesn't many comments suggested sterling engines which are basically steam engines without the water but without digging into the complexity of those i quickly began to gravitate towards a third option based on the following logic what if i was able to create a furnace that takes coal and turns it into electricity and what if it was able to do this without any big or complicated moving parts by making it into an electric generator not only could it be used to power a variety of different items in my base but i could also connect it to the existing minecart drivetrain with minimal modification but how do you convert heat into electricity with minimal moving parts well it turns out that all you need are some very expensive squares now this is the nasa part but the technology is actually pretty simple imagine that this thermoelectric cell is a tiny windmill without the motion of the wind passing through the blades it wouldn't be able to spin and generate electricity and it's the same with heat and this cell it's not enough to just get one side of the cell hot we have to dissipate that heat from the other side as quickly as possible in effect we're passing the heat through the cell kind of like the wind is passing through a windmill and we do that by sucking the heat away with giant heat sinks the core of my design is a 12-inch aluminum cube and this is where the coal burns and it's also where we're going to get our heat from our heat windmills or teg cells will be mounted to either side of the furnace but not directly we have to make a special sandwich of specific materials in order to create the ideal thermal transfer from the cube wall to the heatsink and the two main ingredients are anodized plates and thermal grease the anodized plates electrically insulate the teg cells because otherwise they'll short circuit on the raw aluminum and the thermal grease fills the tiny gaps in the imperfect surfaces and helps ensure that the heat will flow evenly between them so basically we have heatsink then grease then anodized plate then grease then cells then grease then anodized plate then more grease then furnace wall then support braces then titanium screws which are expensive but necessary titanium can handle a lot of heat but it does not transfer that heat very well we want the heat to pass through the hot furnace to the cold heat sinks but only through the teg cells not through the screws simple right looking at this heater core it's crazy to think that there was a time when i couldn't even take a part of vcr without breaking it new skills are always available to those with a little time and determination and thankfully there's an easier way to acquire them with today's sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes to choose from now i've always struggled with choosing fonts for my youtube thumbnails it was so bad that i couldn't even articulate what i liked about the fonts that i liked but the class typography that works by ellen lipton was a revelation in just over 30 minutes of lessons i finally felt that i had a set of concrete tools for better thumbnail composition and as a bonus i actually found font design history to be absolutely fascinating if you love learning and creating skillshare places exceptional educators and resources right at your fingertips and the first 1 000 viewers to sign up through my link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so that you can start exploring your creativity today so go check out their community and help support my channel in the process thanks skillshare let's just pause this sputnik looking furnace core for a minute to talk about the minecraft looking part the outer cube i chose aluminum because it's lightweight strong and naturally a similar color to the stone of the furnace now if this cube were true to scale it would be a one cube meter just over three feet however if it's going to fit inside the mine cart and heck through a doorway it needs to be smaller plus aluminum is crazy expensive right now so i decided to work with standard sizes and make it a slightly smaller two foot square but trust me this thing is not small i ordered three eight inch thick two by four foot sheets of aluminum and cut them down the middle to make the six squares necessary for the cube and assembled them with aluminum l brackets and stainless hardware this is all fairly straightforward but getting the right finish was not i wanted to work with the natural color of the material not cover with paint so i decided to engrave some of the darker pixels to give it the look of the furnace without using such a large grayscale once they were engraved i sanded them with an abrasive scrubber material to dull the finish then attempted various color fill techniques it was difficult to get enough contrast with the finely engraved lines then i had an idea did you know that they make high temperature sharpies by mounting the sharpies to a sliding stage i was able to make a basic line drawer out of my giant cnc machine and carefully trace the lines in permanent ink onto the aluminum i may want to change this finish in the future maybe with thin layers of various metals to achieve the greater color palette of the actual minecraft furnace naturally leave me a comment below tell me how you would do it now we all know that the front of the furnace has two openings the bottom where the coal burns and the top where food or materials are heated here's how my furnace uses them the top is where two fans blow air out this causes air to get pulled in the bottom opening once inside the air is forced to pass through the heat sinks on either side of the furnace cooling them down then it has to pass up to the second floor through the back corners and then out the front there is however a second air duct system back inside the inner cube you see coal needs a lot of airflow in order to burn efficiently and with the two big fans creating suction and airflow in the outer cube smoke could very easily get pulled out of the inner chamber and then blown out the front so i needed to create even greater suction inside the inner cube and i did this by putting a fan inside the exhaust pipe of the furnace now it's very difficult to find fans designed for this kind of heat so i built it myself a motor is attached to a titanium plate underneath the exhaust elbow and a long shaft runs up into the pipe where it's attached to an aluminum fan blade which i made on my cnc machine this solution is good enough for now it generates a lot of suction inside the chamber and as long as the pressure inside the inner chamber is lower than the pressure inside the outer chamber the smoke will all flow out the exhaust that runs through the top keeping the heatsink exhaust clear and feeding the coals plenty of oxygen for optimal combustion now theoretically this whole system should work great but reality has a way of ensuring that all creative endeavors are optimally challenging first there were the problems with my cnc machine i don't know what's going on my machine is behaving strangely but not in a way that's consistent i mean i've got 700 plus dollars worth of aluminum here and i'm not in the mood to have an unpredictable machine cutting into it and of course once i solved that problem then i realized that my two giant used heatsinks had different mounting holes you know when they say measure twice what they mean is that if you have two different pieces measure both of them because they're probably different this is to basically ignore the issues that i had with the buck converters that were supposed to control my fans or the problems i had with the thermocouples that were supposed to monitor the temperatures of the exhaust pipe in the heatsink now to be fair these kinds of issues are to be expected when taking on a massive project i really pushed myself to design fabricate test and make a video about this beast of a prototype in a pretty small window of time so i shouldn't be too surprised but each mistake and setback is especially painful when you're spending a lot of money on specialty materials thankfully i have you guys when you subscribe to my channel and like and share and all that good stuff it gives me both the budget and the confidence i need to try something like this so thank you i literally could not do this without you difficulties or not progress had to be made which meant early testing with an electric heating element instead of coal and that's why i discovered a few more issues while we're at over 300 degrees fahrenheit inside this chamber now you know why why are we generating enough to even turn on a fan come on buddy basically i wasn't getting anywhere near the power output that i thought i would get the energy output is not good yeah we're up to like almost 400 degrees fahrenheit inside that chamber why are you so wildly inefficient and i'm getting like six volts it's got to be a mistake on my part so i hopped on the phone with the manufacturer of these cells to try and figure out what i was doing wrong these um resistance numbers like above one lego i'm not using uh the ceramic wafers i'm using anodized plates we think it's just some kind of capacitance how flat is that with some fresh perspective i was tired but determined to make things better gotta see it through gotta see it through i decided to improve the clamp system and increase the internal thermal mass i started by cutting strong quarter inch plates to ensure that the clamping pressure was flat and evenly distributed across the cells i then attached heatsinks to increase the thermal mass and surface area inside the chamber to pull more heat more quickly off the burning coals the coals themselves sit inside of a special basket that slides into the chamber the bottom of the basket is cast iron and the top is aluminum with steel screws creating the walls thankfully i found a bunch of them for cheap at a building materials thrift store now in order to access the inside of the furnace the face plate snaps on and off using some cabinet latches i considered hinges but one day this furnace may be running in the mine cart and there's very little space for a swinging door after putting some finishing touches on the second floor of the chamber my cameraman quincy came over to help me with the first coal powered test now this is the point where i discovered some of the issues with the thermocouples and converters so i hastily ran the wires out the front of the chamber so that i could switch between external and internal power without the converters we started with it open because i would need to get the coal fire going before i could close it up and begin the active cooling process did i mention that i've never made a coal fire before apparently it's not that easy to get them burning an anthracite coal forge once you get past the learning curve and that's what it is with all the forged fuels thankfully the furnace in minecraft can burn on multiple other fuel sources including wood and charcoal but ultimately i still wanted to burn anthracite coal so we hit the store and grabbed some charcoal and fire starters i layered these under the coal so that i could get them burning more easily and then as they got hotter and hotter they would eventually get the actual coal burning and that made all the difference this has the weirdest effect do you see that yeah it burns after a bit of torching it quickly became evident that the furnace fan was feeding plenty of oxygen to the burning fuel sustaining combustion even though it was currently running off of an external power supply it's sustaining the red glow now which is a really good sign took advantage of the lack of heat buildup to quickly adjust the brass fan stabilizer since it was running a bit wonky it's one of the fan blades like i said good enough for now that's that's one of the fan blades with basic combustion happening i wasn't expecting to see much when i did my first voltage check we're eight volts holy cow with it already exceeding my indoor tests i got the heatsink fans running on the external power supply to ensure that the thermal cells would not be damaged by the excess heat buildup man this this thing's staying this is nice though feel this i'm sorry that's i tried to run the fans through the inefficient buck converters but they just couldn't muster the strength nope then i decided to just run the fans directly off the cells and it's running itself it's generating its own power it's self-sustaining well the coal is what's sustaining it but it's just burning coal these fans are going and this fan's going all just off the power that this is generating and there's a short circuit somewhere so there's definitely things that need improvement but it's running three fans that's a lot of air that's a lot plus this so it's at 8.4 but it's climbing this was a massive victory but just running itself isn't quite enough for this first test i had to run at least one external device so i hooked up a buck converter usb module it's struggling it's charging but it's pulled our voltage down to six let's give it a chance to gain a little more momentum let's make sure it's loaded up properly that burning your hand you know i was like titanium that'll insulate real well not quite as well as i would have hoped oh yeah the front sliding plate was titanium too so that it would be easier to handle and dissipate less heat into the air coming into the intake after a little more time and tweaking it ran my phone and the fans though they still bogged down a fair amount the top is getting warm it's toasty in some spots so i think i need to insulate the furnace so that the air moving over it is not cooling because right now we're cooling the furnace which we don't want to do we want to cool just the heatsink with no load on the cells we were able to achieve an output of almost 18 volts at its highest but this is only around 20 percent of what these cells should be able to do in an optimal environment there are several clear things that i can do to improve the efficiency of this furnace like insulating the core checking the clamp flatness and pressure tracking down possible voltage leaks and short circuits finding more efficient converters and better temperature monitors and optimizing thermal mass distribution but if i do all of these and any other tweaks that i haven't thought of yet will it be enough to power the mine cart up to furnace cart top speed honestly i don't know worst case scenario this outer cube can easily be repurposed to hold a different coal power plant but i know that i've found thermoelectric power to be fascinating ever since i first learned that it's used to harness the waste heat from radioactive materials in order to power some satellites and other remote equipment but maybe it's not worth the effort and uncertainty maybe your vision for the furnace cart is totally different please let me know in the comments exactly what you think thank you for being a part of this journey and for your patience and my learning process the best lessons in life often aren't easy and let's just say i've been learning a lot lately i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Joel Creates

Views: 700,282

Keywords: Skillshare, minecraft, furnace, minecraft furnace, minecraft blast furnace, minecraft furnace array, minecraft furnace tutorial, furnace minecart, furnaces, minecraft pc, furnace minecraft, minecraft furnaces, make minecraft furnace, furnace in minecraft, minecraft furnace facts, how to minecraft furnace, Louis weisz, tyler oliveira, mr beast, ryan trahan, thermoelectric generator, peltier

Id: jtQ1QRNyuBQ

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022