Magma Volcano mining

[Craigjw]

I have a magma volcano, which I'm trying to make work but having difficulty.

When the magma cools, it forms sold tiles of igneous, which requires mining out, currently my volcano is next to space, so I have a curated a vacuum and placed some ladders into the magma pit, where a dupe climbs down and mines the area manually.

I can't find a way to remove the igneous rock automatically, as I don't know how to keep the robo-miner from overheating.

I also can't seem to find a post on how to do this without massive complexity.

Here's what I have, I'm using the volcano to heat up a heatsink that is kept at temperature for heating oil as part of a oil->petrol & steam generator setup.:

[Decius]

You might be able to get away with some kind of liquid-cooled solution for a miner, but it's going to be hard to implement in vacuum. What I would do is instead of venting the entire volcano to space, put it in a themos: Tile-vacuum-tile instead of double-insulation, except for metal tile-tempshift-metal tile where you want to conduct heat through. Run ceramic pipes with cold liquid to cool the equipment that has to be inside, like the mining laser.

[Hellshound38]

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out an automated system....

The best I have gotten is to increase the width and height of the tank, and decrease the amount of heat I am extracting (preheating crude with outgoing petro in my case). My idea was I would just manually dig it out every few hundred cycles.

However, this causes new lava to melt the solid rock before the tank fully solidifies. Eventually this overfills with magma somehow, I suspect the state changes of the solid igneous being re-melted by new lava is actually increasing the amount of energy in the tank.

You could probably design it with an overflow that vents into space when it is too full.

Unfortunately my volcano is not near space, however with your location it might work.

[Coolthulhu]

You could also try spreading the magma so that it never forms blocks.

If you drip the magma over tiles with no neighbors instead of collecting it in a tank, it won't reach the necessary mass to solidify into a tile. You can then collect it with sweepers or dupes.

This has an added bonus of doubling the generated mass.

[Craigjw]

I've just noticed that the 3 tungsten doors between the two heatsinks have stopped conducting any heat, the left side is 950c, while the right side is 350c with the doors closed.

 

2 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

You could also try spreading the magma so that it never forms blocks.

If you drip the magma over tiles with no neighbors instead of collecting it in a tank, it won't reach the necessary mass to solidify into a tile. You can then collect it with sweepers or dupes.

This has an added bonus of doubling the generated mass.

How do you keep the loaders and sweepers from melting when the volcano is active?

[Coolthulhu]

7 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

How do you keep the loaders and sweepers from melting when the volcano is active?

Keep them in vacuum. Unless something changed, they don't actually exchange heat with their contents.

[Craigjw]

However over time they do generate their own heat, meaning that they will overheat from just using them.

Both produce 2KDTU/s

[leoroy]

You could probably put a robot miner in thermium  below the volcano with a door below the robot. When you want to cool it (which will take forever probably if made in thermium and kept in vacuum), just close the door below the robot and send some gas and then have a cold liquid/gas running behind the robot. When cold enough, just vacuum the small place, open the door and voilà!

[Coolthulhu]

1 hour ago, Craigjw said:

However over time they do generate their own heat, meaning that they will overheat from just using them.

Both produce 2KDTU/s

I was pretty sure it was only the miner.

In this case, you can build them in a tiny puddle of petroleum that contacts them at one point and exchanges heat with a tile below it. The tile can then be cooled with pipes or contact with a wall.

[The Flying Fox]

@Craigjw

In my previous bases for taming various volcanoes, I created molten droppers.  This seems to be about what you're looking for, I think.  They're not too complex, I would think, and don't require a robo-miner to function.  This idea came from the many threads for natural gas cookers.  It will work with any volcano type.  I've used it with copper and gold volcanoes before too.  How it works is the doors only open for 1 second (They need to be powered), only letting out a small amount of molten product.  (Smaller then what produces a solid tile.)  That's what the top automation does, it takes a constant ON signal and turns it into a one second pulse.  The bottom buffer gate is set to 1 second, the top can be whatever.

 

 

This drops the molten product onto the bottom door and hydro sensor.  Now that we can make doors out of steel, I'd use that as it conducts heat faster then a wolframite and can handle the temperatures of magma.  The hydro sensor is just set to 'Below' 0 KGs which then feeds into two filter gates and a memory toggle.  The hydro sensor is usually ON when there's nothing on the door but then turns OFF when the molten product lands on it, then turns back ON when the product as cooled into a chunk.  The first filter gate starts a count-down when then eventually flips the memory toggle to open the door and further drop the cooled chunk.  The second filter gate is set for 2 seconds and just resets the memory toggle.  You can then just use an auto-sweeper to pick up the chunk and send it where-ever.

 

 

The auto-sweeper itself can be liquid-cooled in a vacuum with a drop of liquid touching only one of its edge tiles as the sweeper only briefly holds objects it picks up in its center tile.  I believe this could also work with the robo-miner, but have not actually tried it.  Of course you need to cool that drop of liquid, but that can either be done from the wall itself, or some kind of fluid pipe.  Using the dropper setup means you don't loose half of the product by digging it up, so there is an advantage doing it the more complex way.

 

[Craigjw]

I'm attempting a dropper method as we speak.  I am trying to stack them at the side of the volcano,  while being liquid cooled against some metal tiles with petrol resting on.