Not all of my blood, just enough to test the hematocrit level which is the percentage of red blood cells.
Unless your enemies are plants, they don’t have cell walls. No human cell has a wall.
Cell membranes.
Thank God you cleared that up!
If you’re unwilling to slaughter enough human beings to make a sword, you can always go and collect waste blood from the local pork slaughterhouse.
Then you can have a sword made from pig iron.
Hemoglobin is already 96% of the dry weight of your blood cells according to Wikipedia, so I’m guessing centrifuging would be redundant for this application.
Looks like you get two atoms of iron for each heme group in hemoglobin. It’s bonded with nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in various ways. I’m not sure that smelting it isn’t just going to produce iron fumes. Smelting reduces hematite and magnetite which are simple oxides of iron. There are some weird compounds of nitrogen and iron and the iron in hemoglobin is already bonded with the nitrogen. I’m not sure how you end up with pure iron from this reaction and the literature I’ve been consulting is somewhat lacking in the subject.
I didn’t think it was that necessary to centrifuge it anyway, but it could be done wet, possibly simplifying the process. I don’t know of any way that iron is lost in fumes, I suppose it’s possible for some compounds but doesn’t seem to have affected any iron smelting process which works on all sorts of iron compounds. Magnetite is ideal for smelting and chosen for steel making in ye olden days, but plenty of other iron sources were used. Nitrogen does get in the way of steel production sometimes such as in the Bessemer process, but that’s due to the nitrogen in air not reacting well with other compounds in the iron ore originally. The basic elements of iron smelting are heat, iron, oxygen, and time. I don’t see any reason blood with that high iron content would be different from other ores which may even have lower concentrations. On the other hand I have to guess because I don’t have any source to turn to on the subject of smelting blood.
I found a cite that talked about the iron content of welding fumes on OSHA. I, too have heard that Nitrogen can be a problem, and the fact that the iron is already bonded with nitrogen in hemoglobin makes the iron compound in blood very different than the simple oxides in ore.
I guess at this point we need a chemist, unless somebody wants to boil down some blood, smelt it, and see what they get.
I would suspect that a way forward would be by heating the dried blood in air to form iron oxide which can then be smelted with carbon to give iron.
Usual traditional forging techniques will turn the impure iron into clean steel for shaping.
Welding is done at much higher temperatures. But yes, let’s see what a chemist says. I don’t know of any ores that have a high concentration of nitrogen. However, another approach might be to use the bacteria that form bog iron nodules to convert the blood. No idea if that would work, so we may need a biochemist to step in as well.
So, if you cut out their liver as well as draining their blood, you can slaughter even fewer? How many fewer?
Also I like the idea of “My sword is tempered in blood.”
This would probably work. The roasting process would replace most sulfur with oxygen. Phosphorus might still be present though, so you would have to use some cleansing process.
Another method would be to dump the dried blood in sulfuric acid, and then recover the iron from the iron sulfate by electrolysis.
Blood counts which include measurements of hemoglobin and hematocrit are done on whole blood typically run though a flow cytometer. Chemistry panels are done on the serum after centrifuge.
I haven’t found a good source for the phosphorus content of blood but it seems to be negligible. It might be a problem trying to extract blood from bones. It really shouldn’t matter for making a wrought iron broadsword, but you’d have to add silicates to get useful metal for a sword anyway. If you wanted to turn iron into steel phosphorus could be a problem.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘typically’, but hematocrit is probably measured far more often by centrifugal separation than using a cytometer because it is simple, fast, and inexpensive. I’m sure the major testing labs don’t like that idea, but hematocrit is mainly used to look for percentage of red blood cells in blood. Further hemoglobin tests that examine blood content in more detail are needed to refine a diagnosis but not for regular monitoring of anemia and polycythemia or erythrocytosis.
Are you sure you’re really a 'Doper?
Of *course *a sword made from the blood of your enemies is cooler than just a regular sword swished around in some guy’s blood. Duh.
I thought of that (sulphate)
You could just oxidize the sulphate rather than needing electrolysis like smelting sulphide iron ore.
So just why not just oxidize the dried blood.
Impurities can be managed by a traditional forging process like making wrought iron.
The ultimate comparison is forging a Japanese sword from tamehagene iron.
As an aside, Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, was rumored to have such a blade. Of course, being Vetinari, he probably started the rumor himself.
I think the point that is likely being missed is this: You read about smelting, and it seems pretty simple. From the very limited reading I’ve just done, it looks to be exactly the opposite in practice. It took thousands of years to perfect and it’s a pretty finicky process, susceptible to all kinds of variables. Learning how to smelt just one type of ore requires years of learning. Though the principles remain the same, different types of ores and even variations in the same ores can require different setups, temperatures, durations, additives, etc etc etc.
I think the idea that you are going to walk up to any kind of smelting apparatus with a quantity of blood and produce anything but acrid smoke and greasy smears of ash is wildly unrealistic.
Need answer fast.
Sorry to continue the hijack, but Hct is very rarely measured in isolation. An automated cell count machine can measure, WBC, RBC, Hgb, Hct, Plt plus all kinds of measurements of red cell size, as well as differentiating all the different subtypes of WBC on whole blood in about 5 minutes. Granted I only work in a hospital setting, but this is standard for hospital labs.