Ceramic supplies can withstand the heat, but they're just brittle—and many researchers felt they couldn’t be utilized in mechanical applications like pumps.

The researchers used an external items pump, which uses rotating gear teeth to suck within the liquid tin and push it outside an outlet. Asegun Henry,

a good assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff Institution of Mechanical Engineering, and graduate student Caleb Amy—the paper’s primary author—decided to challenge that assumption by attempting to make a ceramic pump.Energy energy, fundamental to power generation several industrial processes, is most valuable at high temperatures because entropy—which tends to make thermal energy unavailable for conversion—declines from higher temperatures..

Liquid metals such as molten tin and molten silicon may be useful in thermal storage plus transfer, but until now, engineers didn’t have pumps and pipes which may withstand such extreme temperatures. Seals are normally made out of flexible polymers, but they is unable to withstand high temperatures.

The pump operates from a nitrogen environment to prevent oxidation in the extreme temperatures. Henry in addition to Amy used the special properties of graphite—flexibility and strength—to help make the seals.