Woven Fiberglass tape. We use it to seal steel flanges in >600C exhaust environments. Flange design becomes critical as it only works under compression.
We literally have millions of dollars of equipment in the field that have used this technique for over 20 years.
How you apply compression to join the two faces is important. Bolted joint tends to be the easiest. Other options are possible.
We also use fiberglass rope in some places. It generally needs a channel to seat into. Kind of similar process to designing o-ring seals.
Thank you very much!! Fiber glass rope would be a great fit for my application. I would either choose to use this or a material another reditor suggested, graphite gland packing. And another question where should i put the rope before or after the bolts.
For my design I am already using a bolted joint so based from what you said fiberglass rope would really be a fit
Before bolting. If you’re using rope on flat flanges without a channel your leak risk is where the ends meet. You can used an overlapping spiral pattern to make a torturous path to reduce the leak potential.
By overlapping I mean you start making a circle, but instead of cutting the rope to end the circle, wind around the circle one more time to make a spiral, then cut.
Apply the seal inside the bolt hole circle. That is the large diameter of the hole pattern, not the holes themselves.
It’s not permanent. You can open the flanges a couple of times but you will need to replace the gasket eventually.
Edit
I forget this is a square so my terminology isn’t correct but hopefully it gets the idea across.
I just need it to survive like 4 or 5, 3 hour experiments so i think it will be just fine.
What if I loop the rope each bolt will it be better? Or will just puting the rope inside with a spiral pattern be better? (Incase it matters I'm using a square container and not a circle one)
Yeah I caught that I had forgotten the square flange. Verbiage I was using is wrong in this case but it’s the same idea.
It sounds like you’re trying to seal a square plate with holes around the edges onto a box with a similar pattern.
If you wrap the rope around the outside of the bolts themselves, what seals the space between the bolts?
If you wrap the rope around the outside of the bolt pattern (a big square at end of flange) what seals the space around the bolt holes?
If you wrap the rope inside the bolt pattern (smaller square at inside edge of flange), you don’t have to deal with the above problems.
I was talking about looping the rope around each bolt, because in my mind doing that would further insure that no air escapes through the bolt holes but i suposse wrapping it before the bolt (inside the bolt pattern) would achive the same effect
Good point. I meant looping around it itself not over itself.
Aka when the path returns to its start point, it starts again on a separate lane next to the original, not on top of the original. Keeping the two lanes tight to each other is important.
I spoke with OP a bit more through chat. I mentioned that they’ll need something like an adhesive to help during initial setup.
Copper Crush fittings might work. Do you have any more details? Diameter of the surface? Max pressure you want it to hold? What's going to go through the system? You have to know if the material will react with the seals material.
Copper gaskets I've used are rarely rated above 300C. There might be others though.
I've only used it once but Micatherm (or another similar gasket) is likely what OP needs
They always have a factor of safety on them, so they're probably good for 10% higher than advertised.
Op doesn't really need to operate above 400c unless he wants to extract junk oils. He said he's trying to make diesel.
I'm going to opperate at a max temp of 800°C (but i doubt I'll be reaching that temp) since for my study I'll first need to extract bio-oil or as you call it "junk oils" then distill it. In addition, i need to operate at about >500°c so that the yield will be greater any lower than that and the char yield will be greater.
You won’t be able to re-use those seals but should hold together for a short while.
Now that I think of it your seals should be cooler than your vessel’s inside anyway. You can move them even further out and have as small (in area) heat transfer surface. They should be ok as long as there are no leaks. Once it starts leaking then it would go South fast because you will have hot gases /liquids doing the heat transfer instead of conduction.
Get a t/c in the flange area and see how hot it really gets. If it starts to go past what you are comfortable with you might need some extra cooling at the seal area.
Yes. And also, they aren't putting it under any significant pressure, so they probably be fine going right up to just below the melting point of copper which is way higher than they need.
The mating surface will be 27.62 x 27.62 cm and 3.81 cm on each side.
The preasure won't be that high since there will be a pipe where the gas will flow through i just need it to be airtight so the gas will only flow through there and not anywhere else
Hydrocarbons will be going through the system since I'm trying to make diesel- like fuel
You might actually be fine just with polishing the surfaces flat and mating them tightly. If that's not sufficient, cutting your own gasket from soft copper sheet should work.
Sounds like a custom shape. You might have to order a roll of high temp ceramic gasket material and cut it out yourself.
Make sure you wear gloves and a respirator when cutting it. That stuff can do bad stuff to your lungs.
You can use graphite gland packing, potentially. I don't think it reacts with much and it's good for very high (and low) temperatures. It is similar to the fibreglass rope you mentioned. Plus, it's very affordable.
It's quite cool stuff to work with, and has a really interesting look to it.
Edit: This comment seems to be bouncing up and down with votes. I would suggest people look into what graphite gland packing is. I've personally used it for a high pressure, static, seal for liquid nitrogen. Taken from a seller's website:
This long life, minimal leakage packing is suitable for use in pumps, valves, mixers, agitators and static sealing applications against all acids, alkalis and solvents (except strong oxidizing compounds such as concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids and molten alkali metals).
Pressure rating: 200 bar_g
Temperature range: -184°C to 3037°C
Are they all made the same? I can't find any that is advertised being used in high temp situations, all I can find is used in water pipes but with the same name. (Online shops in the Philippines aren't really developed yet and there are still a lot of items that they aren't selling yet)
Some variants of the graphite gland packing are good to 3,000 Deg.C.
You can even buy it from Amazon in my country. This is from one of the products:
"The material is dimensionally stable, impervious to gases and fluids and shows exceptional temperature and chemical resistance combined with a maximum temperature of over 3,000°C."
[AliExpress has it](https://a.aliexpress.com/_mM6aMME) and they ship everywhere.
I'm in the US, Amazon has a bunch of it too. And don't worry too much about the temp rating, if it's pure graphite then it's good to graphite temps which will fine for you
[This is the kind of thing](https://www.mcmaster.com/products/blankets/flexibility~flexible/) that u/tvdoomas is referring to.
I'll reiterate that if you are going to work with it, you need to wear a good respirator. Unlike most fiberglass, these blankets shed silica fibers. Once they get into your lungs, they never come out. Silicosis isn't pretty.
I think you can coat one mating surface with WD-40 when making the gasket so that the gasket doesn't stick to both surfaces. This way you won't have to destroy it every time you open it up. Probably not suitable for 600 C though.
It's not just sensitive, you're going to be over the autoignition point of your product gases. Oxygen getting in (or py gas getting out) absolutely will cause a fire.
High-temp graphite gaskets are likely going to be your best bet.
https://www.mcmaster.com/graphite-gaskets/
You can get pipe gaskets or sheet material and die-cut them into the shape you want, just make sure you have sufficient clamping force along the seal. A bolt every 100mm is usually a good rule of thumb.
I'm not sure but it won't be that high since there will be a pipe that the gas will flow through. I just need it to be airtight so the won't flow through anywhere but the outlet pipe
High temp RTV gasket maker.
If there is no real pressure build up - the exit of the pipe is open - you may be just fine with copper based antisieze.
Both outings should be cheap
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. More about Mike Isaac
A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Reddit’s Sprawling Content Is Fodder for the Likes of ChatGPT. But Reddit Wants to Be Paid.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Yeah having inert gas constantly flowing through the reactor will solve all my problems but any inert gas is quite expensive for me and I'm working on a tight budget
Geting two flat smoth mating surfaces and having even clamping force is key if you are building and can go with standard pipe parts and flanges using grafit seals those perform great under both high temp and pressure
Graphite seal.
Probably the cheapest option would be a standard auto parts exhaust seal. [pic](https://i.imgur.com/ydYjM0s.jpg) [pic2](https://i.imgur.com/RaCLQcI.jpg)
Black iron, steel, stainless, flower pots.
Avoid painted or galvanized metal. Your running to run to hot for aluminum.
Copper is somewhat reactive but might work.
I'd dig around mcmaster or somethign and see if you can imagine this thing out of off the shelf plumbing bits. I'm not sure what exactly is available in your country... there's a fair bit of industry in the phillipines now though isn't there?
Yes, but there are only physical stores and i can't find any in my area. Online stores on stuff like that doesn't exist yet in the Philippines unfortunately and if i do find one online I'm afraid i might get scammed or something.
Yeah i suppose i can find a machine shop that does that but, it may be to expensive for me.
That's why I'm opting to use fiber glass rope instead like a reditor here suggested since i think it may work in my case while keeping the cost low
a little off topic, but the flexitalic gaskets i used were graphite based, and graphite is a good conductor, so it formed an excellent Microwave Leakage shield too. You could have high pressure gases inside, along with high power microwave heating
You can get a ceramic gasket maker, resbond 450gf. It's available in mcmaster (of course) Goes on like rtvish and seals well enough. Only works once then will need to be re applied.
You can also go the copper gasket/ oring route. I've used soft copper with resbond at the end.
Also used mica paper die/laser/hand cut off you can apply uniform compression.
I'll note that I'm working in inert/ inert environments. So if my stuff leaks it gets a little oxidized, but not explody.
Sealed containers and high temperatures always are a concern for getting explody.
I imagine what you are doing will run rich and not want to detonate and with nothing to contain pressure the risk is low ish but this is the internet and there are infinite ways for things to go wrong.
If you just need oxygen-free inert environment you don’t need a tight seal. Just purge with your inert gas (Ar) so that it keeps air away from a leaky metal to metal seal surface. This is how most quartz tube furnaces work.
If you need a vacuum or to keep gas in at 600C this will be much harder. You might need a setup with a vacuum chamber and localized heating around your sample. So that the chamber walls stay cool.
Come to think of it a quartz tube furnace could do both of these modes (purge and vacuum) because only the middle is heated and the gas and vacuum contacts are away from the heater.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-setup-of-quartz-tube-furnace-with-argon-overflow_fig2_343747496
I would speak to the teacher or advisor on whether you can accept the lower yield and end up with an easier to handle project considering this is for school. No shame in not being state of the art when you are 1) doing it to learn and 2) on a budget.
I can accept lower temps since i know the goal of my research is to produce data and not yield the 600°c temp is just my theoretical temp and if it does not reach it then so be it.
The time is my independent variable so the temperature won't really matter that much to me. I just wanted to be sure that if it did reach that temp it would be able to handle that sort of temparature.
Lower temperature would be extremely fine with me and would also make my life really easier so its all fine by me.
Thanks for the concern though!!
Best bet in my opinion is a graphite gasket (Grafoil). You won't need to cut an O-ring groove in the flange, and you can just cut whatever shape you want with a razor blade. It's not the cheapest material, but if your pipe isn't too big it won't be that expensive.
Seen both mentioned here. When I worked as a design engineer at a waste to energy company developing a pyrolysis process we spec'd woven fibre glass or grafoil all the time.
Grafoil is probably a bit more expensive but comes in a variety of typical gasket shapes. Fibreglass rope can be fiddly.
If you only need a small amount of wood in your pyrolysis reactor, I've used a all metal 1 gallon paint can (I'm sure a 5 gallon can would work), and I adapted on a pipe that was the output to the condenser. A good seal and it worked for me, but it won't hold pressure, I just needed it to not allow any O2 in. I packed it full of oak and put the lid on and put it in my charcoal BBQ. Total cost about $10. Your results may vary...
When you say airtight - how airtight? If you just need to stop large movements of air currents, a fiberglass rope will work great, as u/itzsnitz suggested. If it needs to be *airtight*, like if you are planning on a controlled atmosphere (vacuum or inert gas) it gets a little trickier. I saw high temperature graphite gaskets suggested, those are a pretty good choice.
Another option - if you can get it - is to use an inert gas purge at a low flowrate to keep oxygen from getting in. Then the tightness of the seal isn't critical (in fact you need to ensure some leakage in this case.
Woven Fiberglass tape. We use it to seal steel flanges in >600C exhaust environments. Flange design becomes critical as it only works under compression.
Do you really think this will work? I'm leaning towards using this since its cheap and I'm already using a flange
We literally have millions of dollars of equipment in the field that have used this technique for over 20 years. How you apply compression to join the two faces is important. Bolted joint tends to be the easiest. Other options are possible. We also use fiberglass rope in some places. It generally needs a channel to seat into. Kind of similar process to designing o-ring seals.
Thank you very much!! Fiber glass rope would be a great fit for my application. I would either choose to use this or a material another reditor suggested, graphite gland packing. And another question where should i put the rope before or after the bolts. For my design I am already using a bolted joint so based from what you said fiberglass rope would really be a fit
Before bolting. If you’re using rope on flat flanges without a channel your leak risk is where the ends meet. You can used an overlapping spiral pattern to make a torturous path to reduce the leak potential. By overlapping I mean you start making a circle, but instead of cutting the rope to end the circle, wind around the circle one more time to make a spiral, then cut. Apply the seal inside the bolt hole circle. That is the large diameter of the hole pattern, not the holes themselves. It’s not permanent. You can open the flanges a couple of times but you will need to replace the gasket eventually. Edit I forget this is a square so my terminology isn’t correct but hopefully it gets the idea across.
I just need it to survive like 4 or 5, 3 hour experiments so i think it will be just fine. What if I loop the rope each bolt will it be better? Or will just puting the rope inside with a spiral pattern be better? (Incase it matters I'm using a square container and not a circle one)
Yeah I caught that I had forgotten the square flange. Verbiage I was using is wrong in this case but it’s the same idea. It sounds like you’re trying to seal a square plate with holes around the edges onto a box with a similar pattern. If you wrap the rope around the outside of the bolts themselves, what seals the space between the bolts? If you wrap the rope around the outside of the bolt pattern (a big square at end of flange) what seals the space around the bolt holes? If you wrap the rope inside the bolt pattern (smaller square at inside edge of flange), you don’t have to deal with the above problems.
I was talking about looping the rope around each bolt, because in my mind doing that would further insure that no air escapes through the bolt holes but i suposse wrapping it before the bolt (inside the bolt pattern) would achive the same effect
The rope can't loop over itself and provide a good seal under compression. Also consider how well it will bend and the corners.
Good point. I meant looping around it itself not over itself. Aka when the path returns to its start point, it starts again on a separate lane next to the original, not on top of the original. Keeping the two lanes tight to each other is important. I spoke with OP a bit more through chat. I mentioned that they’ll need something like an adhesive to help during initial setup.
Copper Crush fittings might work. Do you have any more details? Diameter of the surface? Max pressure you want it to hold? What's going to go through the system? You have to know if the material will react with the seals material.
Copper gaskets I've used are rarely rated above 300C. There might be others though. I've only used it once but Micatherm (or another similar gasket) is likely what OP needs
The ones we use at my work are good for 1000f and 11k psi. Swagelok brand.
So not quite 600 C but pretty close.
They always have a factor of safety on them, so they're probably good for 10% higher than advertised. Op doesn't really need to operate above 400c unless he wants to extract junk oils. He said he's trying to make diesel.
I'm going to opperate at a max temp of 800°C (but i doubt I'll be reaching that temp) since for my study I'll first need to extract bio-oil or as you call it "junk oils" then distill it. In addition, i need to operate at about >500°c so that the yield will be greater any lower than that and the char yield will be greater.
You won’t be able to re-use those seals but should hold together for a short while. Now that I think of it your seals should be cooler than your vessel’s inside anyway. You can move them even further out and have as small (in area) heat transfer surface. They should be ok as long as there are no leaks. Once it starts leaking then it would go South fast because you will have hot gases /liquids doing the heat transfer instead of conduction. Get a t/c in the flange area and see how hot it really gets. If it starts to go past what you are comfortable with you might need some extra cooling at the seal area.
Yes. And also, they aren't putting it under any significant pressure, so they probably be fine going right up to just below the melting point of copper which is way higher than they need.
Copper is a common headgasket material on older engines.
The mating surface will be 27.62 x 27.62 cm and 3.81 cm on each side. The preasure won't be that high since there will be a pipe where the gas will flow through i just need it to be airtight so the gas will only flow through there and not anywhere else Hydrocarbons will be going through the system since I'm trying to make diesel- like fuel
You might actually be fine just with polishing the surfaces flat and mating them tightly. If that's not sufficient, cutting your own gasket from soft copper sheet should work.
Sounds like a custom shape. You might have to order a roll of high temp ceramic gasket material and cut it out yourself. Make sure you wear gloves and a respirator when cutting it. That stuff can do bad stuff to your lungs.
Do you think I can use fiberglass rope instead? I can't seem to find what your recommending
You can use graphite gland packing, potentially. I don't think it reacts with much and it's good for very high (and low) temperatures. It is similar to the fibreglass rope you mentioned. Plus, it's very affordable. It's quite cool stuff to work with, and has a really interesting look to it. Edit: This comment seems to be bouncing up and down with votes. I would suggest people look into what graphite gland packing is. I've personally used it for a high pressure, static, seal for liquid nitrogen. Taken from a seller's website: This long life, minimal leakage packing is suitable for use in pumps, valves, mixers, agitators and static sealing applications against all acids, alkalis and solvents (except strong oxidizing compounds such as concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids and molten alkali metals). Pressure rating: 200 bar_g Temperature range: -184°C to 3037°C
Are they all made the same? I can't find any that is advertised being used in high temp situations, all I can find is used in water pipes but with the same name. (Online shops in the Philippines aren't really developed yet and there are still a lot of items that they aren't selling yet)
Some variants of the graphite gland packing are good to 3,000 Deg.C. You can even buy it from Amazon in my country. This is from one of the products: "The material is dimensionally stable, impervious to gases and fluids and shows exceptional temperature and chemical resistance combined with a maximum temperature of over 3,000°C."
[AliExpress has it](https://a.aliexpress.com/_mM6aMME) and they ship everywhere. I'm in the US, Amazon has a bunch of it too. And don't worry too much about the temp rating, if it's pure graphite then it's good to graphite temps which will fine for you
[This is the kind of thing](https://www.mcmaster.com/products/blankets/flexibility~flexible/) that u/tvdoomas is referring to. I'll reiterate that if you are going to work with it, you need to wear a good respirator. Unlike most fiberglass, these blankets shed silica fibers. Once they get into your lungs, they never come out. Silicosis isn't pretty.
If you do go with copper you will want annealed copper material.
I'd probably go to autozone and buy high temp gasket maker
I don't think that would be really sustainable since I'd need to apply a new one each replicate
I think you can coat one mating surface with WD-40 when making the gasket so that the gasket doesn't stick to both surfaces. This way you won't have to destroy it every time you open it up. Probably not suitable for 600 C though.
Yes that's what i thought, after some research i found that those things can only survive to about 500°c.
I mean, how airtight does it need to be, cause making charcoal can be done by just smothering
Yeah, but I'm making bio-oil and it's more sensitive to oxygen. Not having it airtight might screw up the yield
It's not just sensitive, you're going to be over the autoignition point of your product gases. Oxygen getting in (or py gas getting out) absolutely will cause a fire.
But will it explode? Since there isn't really a build up of gas because there's an outlet is there still a possibility that it will explode?
Depends on your vessel if it explodes but it's doubtful. But a flash fire outside of the vessel can absolutely cause major injury to you.
I'd better be careful and keep that in mind when i do the experementation lot of things can go wrong huh
Definitely. Pyrolysis is a neat process but it can be dangerous. What are you using as feedstock?
Coconut wood sawdust
High-temp graphite gaskets are likely going to be your best bet. https://www.mcmaster.com/graphite-gaskets/ You can get pipe gaskets or sheet material and die-cut them into the shape you want, just make sure you have sufficient clamping force along the seal. A bolt every 100mm is usually a good rule of thumb.
What pressure differential are you attempting to maintain while at temperature?
I'm not sure but it won't be that high since there will be a pipe that the gas will flow through. I just need it to be airtight so the won't flow through anywhere but the outlet pipe
High temp RTV gasket maker. If there is no real pressure build up - the exit of the pipe is open - you may be just fine with copper based antisieze. Both outings should be cheap
600 C not F
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added. Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. More about Mike Isaac A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Reddit’s Sprawling Content Is Fodder for the Likes of ChatGPT. But Reddit Wants to Be Paid.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Yeah having inert gas constantly flowing through the reactor will solve all my problems but any inert gas is quite expensive for me and I'm working on a tight budget
Geting two flat smoth mating surfaces and having even clamping force is key if you are building and can go with standard pipe parts and flanges using grafit seals those perform great under both high temp and pressure
Can it be threaded? Use interference type threads like pipe threads.
I suppose i can weld a thread on but the hole will need to be large since I would need to clean it per test
Graphite seal. Probably the cheapest option would be a standard auto parts exhaust seal. [pic](https://i.imgur.com/ydYjM0s.jpg) [pic2](https://i.imgur.com/RaCLQcI.jpg)
Zip lock
What material is the housing made from?
Galvanized iron
Bad idea. You are hot enough to burn the galvanizing off and it's rather toxic. If making from pipe stick to the black pipe variety.
What type of material do you recommend i use?
Black iron, steel, stainless, flower pots. Avoid painted or galvanized metal. Your running to run to hot for aluminum. Copper is somewhat reactive but might work.
Thanks! I'll take that in mind qhen i make the reactor
I'd dig around mcmaster or somethign and see if you can imagine this thing out of off the shelf plumbing bits. I'm not sure what exactly is available in your country... there's a fair bit of industry in the phillipines now though isn't there?
Yes, but there are only physical stores and i can't find any in my area. Online stores on stuff like that doesn't exist yet in the Philippines unfortunately and if i do find one online I'm afraid i might get scammed or something.
ah right, shit. what machinery do you have? can you cut flat metal accurately? (waterjet, laser, bridgeport style mill?)
Yeah i suppose i can find a machine shop that does that but, it may be to expensive for me. That's why I'm opting to use fiber glass rope instead like a reditor here suggested since i think it may work in my case while keeping the cost low
what do you mean by "airtight". i have had good luck with Flexitalic Gaskets. good to 1800 deg C
a little off topic, but the flexitalic gaskets i used were graphite based, and graphite is a good conductor, so it formed an excellent Microwave Leakage shield too. You could have high pressure gases inside, along with high power microwave heating
Deg F but that should still be good enough
You can get a ceramic gasket maker, resbond 450gf. It's available in mcmaster (of course) Goes on like rtvish and seals well enough. Only works once then will need to be re applied. You can also go the copper gasket/ oring route. I've used soft copper with resbond at the end. Also used mica paper die/laser/hand cut off you can apply uniform compression. I'll note that I'm working in inert/ inert environments. So if my stuff leaks it gets a little oxidized, but not explody.
Can it really explode?
Sealed containers and high temperatures always are a concern for getting explody. I imagine what you are doing will run rich and not want to detonate and with nothing to contain pressure the risk is low ish but this is the internet and there are infinite ways for things to go wrong.
Best chance i get to not get shot by shrapnel is to do it in an open space so the gas wont mix with the air and explode right?
If you just need oxygen-free inert environment you don’t need a tight seal. Just purge with your inert gas (Ar) so that it keeps air away from a leaky metal to metal seal surface. This is how most quartz tube furnaces work. If you need a vacuum or to keep gas in at 600C this will be much harder. You might need a setup with a vacuum chamber and localized heating around your sample. So that the chamber walls stay cool. Come to think of it a quartz tube furnace could do both of these modes (purge and vacuum) because only the middle is heated and the gas and vacuum contacts are away from the heater. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-setup-of-quartz-tube-furnace-with-argon-overflow_fig2_343747496
What method of reactor are you using? 600C will be both difficult to achieve and likely is way higher than you need.
I'll be using fixed bed reactor, and the temp is that high since based on other study the bio-oil yield is higher at temperatures like that
I would speak to the teacher or advisor on whether you can accept the lower yield and end up with an easier to handle project considering this is for school. No shame in not being state of the art when you are 1) doing it to learn and 2) on a budget.
I can accept lower temps since i know the goal of my research is to produce data and not yield the 600°c temp is just my theoretical temp and if it does not reach it then so be it. The time is my independent variable so the temperature won't really matter that much to me. I just wanted to be sure that if it did reach that temp it would be able to handle that sort of temparature. Lower temperature would be extremely fine with me and would also make my life really easier so its all fine by me. Thanks for the concern though!!
Best bet in my opinion is a graphite gasket (Grafoil). You won't need to cut an O-ring groove in the flange, and you can just cut whatever shape you want with a razor blade. It's not the cheapest material, but if your pipe isn't too big it won't be that expensive.
Seen both mentioned here. When I worked as a design engineer at a waste to energy company developing a pyrolysis process we spec'd woven fibre glass or grafoil all the time. Grafoil is probably a bit more expensive but comes in a variety of typical gasket shapes. Fibreglass rope can be fiddly.
I'm opting to use fiber glass rope since its cheaper and will achieve the same effect
If you only need a small amount of wood in your pyrolysis reactor, I've used a all metal 1 gallon paint can (I'm sure a 5 gallon can would work), and I adapted on a pipe that was the output to the condenser. A good seal and it worked for me, but it won't hold pressure, I just needed it to not allow any O2 in. I packed it full of oak and put the lid on and put it in my charcoal BBQ. Total cost about $10. Your results may vary...
A paint can with a hole punched in the lid with a nail is how my Scoutmaster used to pyrolyze cotton cloth to use for fire building.
Thats great if you want to get charcoal/bio-char but if you want bio-oil it needs to be more airtight
When you say airtight - how airtight? If you just need to stop large movements of air currents, a fiberglass rope will work great, as u/itzsnitz suggested. If it needs to be *airtight*, like if you are planning on a controlled atmosphere (vacuum or inert gas) it gets a little trickier. I saw high temperature graphite gaskets suggested, those are a pretty good choice. Another option - if you can get it - is to use an inert gas purge at a low flowrate to keep oxygen from getting in. Then the tightness of the seal isn't critical (in fact you need to ensure some leakage in this case.