Do we have a design can melt sand by using lava or melted metal?

[Deltic]

Current glass forge can get only 25 kg of glass from 100 kg of sand, and consume much electricity. But melt the sand with some extreme heat source (rocket exhaust, magma, melted metal from metal volcanoes) will get glass with no mass loss. So can we design a module to make glass with those heat source? 

BTW, this module may also able to melt rust and get refined iron.

[Saturnus]

Magma is ruled out becasue there's too little temperature delta to make it work. Unless you have magma as coolant in a metal refinery. And that is the best method for such a build, ie. using the metal refinery coolant, be it magma or even better, a liquid metal.

[wachunga]

Can you make glass with a volcano? Sure.

Should you? Well that depends on why you would want to. Is it practical? Not really. Is it fun and interesting? I think so.

Principle is the same as regolith melters. Counterflow your incoming sand against your outgoing glass/magma. Your outgoing materials have greater heat capacity than your incoming materials. Therefore you'll get really close to sand melting temps and won't need much of a final heating. The rest is just engineering and deciding whether the effort is worth what you get out of it.

Here is a quick and dirty example. It needs further refinement, but should illustrate what is possible and maybe give an idea or two. It abuses pump range and small pipe packets for ease of the build. You could do without, but the build would be harder and even less practical.

 

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

The exchanger hasn't reached steady state yet, but currently 1 kg/s of volcano magma is making 1.25 kg/s of glass. As the exchanger further heats that number should go up a bit. The outgoing materials will also be hot enough to run a steam turbine. It'll eventually get too hot to freeze the molten glass, so that part needs some adjustment. But again this is quick and dirty, develop your own build in sandbox/debug. 

 

Do some searches on regolith melters, there is about a bazillion of them. @ghkbrewhas a neat glass boiler that takes these principles to 11.