Plastic manufacturing in Frozen biome

[Flatulent Yokel]

Hello everyone !

I'm still in the early phases of learning the game and I'm enjoying the challenge so far ! 

I'm currently at 90ish cycles with a fully insulated auto-sufficient base of 7 dupes and I want to move forward to my 
setup of plastic manufacturing.
I'd like to put everything in a cold biome near my base as the heat being the major question, and I have a natural 
gas geyser close to get the all thing started, also currently digging my way to crude oil.

This is the setup I've been thinking of so far.

I guess wheezworts everywhere goes without saying, also insulating the all thing, but its not going to be enough for 
the 100+ degrees this is going to generate ?

So I still have to learn thermal conductivity and buffering, my main question being what materials should I 
specifically use and for what purpose ?

Should I bathe the polymer press room in hydrogen ? Pooring liquid on it seems like a bore.

I should also start to calculate how many generators for how many refineries and presses, but I'll see that later.
Natural gas emissions from the fertilizer synthetizer and oil refinery seem to be plenty already.

Also what to do with the steam and carbon dioxide emissions ?

And finally at what paste the cold biome will heat up and be maybe irrelevant ?

Thank you for reading me !

[Ersir]

If I may make a proposition : you should definitely use the carbon outputs with a carbon skimmer to produce additional PW (if you have access to a geyser/renawable water source).

As for cooling it, I personally have my polymer press/oil refinery submerged in high density hydrogen, you should probably use the first plastic batch to build a high pressure vent and fill the insulated place with tons of hydrogen to get better use of your wheezworts.

If you use your cold biome as a starting area, you'll only probably need to be concerned with your entry point/door/"water"lock (petroleum will resist until you reach -57 Celsius)  lock, as everything else should be surrounded by abysallite.

[Neotuck]

I recommend dripping a cooling liquid on top of the polymer press while it's running.  They overheat fast and drip cooling is an easy way to dissipate the heat

[fredhp]

The concept is nice, but i thinks it is better to ranch Glossy Dreckos for plastic. 

[Craigjw]

The press has direct thermal transmission with one of it's base tiles ( I don't know which tile), if you place metal tiles on it's base and cool these tiles, everything will be fine and dandy.  You can cool this tile by dripping something on it, or by running radiant pipes.

The standard approach is to cool the base metal tile with the input oil.  Here, I have cooled it using waste PW at 40c-ish.  The pipes also are to condense the steam.  The steam just drains away into an abyss, which I probably collect and recycle, or I just don't give a proverbial about.

 

4 minutes ago, fredhp said:

The concept is nice, but i thinks it is better to ranch Glossy Dreckos for plastic. 

My current playthough, I'm on cycle 2200-ish and haven't built a single refinery or press yet.  All my petrol is made from a boiler and all my plastic, which I have too much of has been collected via drecko's.

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, fredhp said:

The concept is nice, but i thinks it is better to ranch Glossy Dreckos for plastic. 

While personally I agree with you, it depends on the player's playstyle.

For example if the OP is planning to build a transit tube system then a glossy ranch might not produce plastic fast enough to keep up with demands

[Flatulent Yokel]

28 minutes ago, Ersir said:

If I may make a proposition : you should definitely use the carbon outputs with a carbon skimmer to produce additional PW (if you have access to a geyser/renawable water source).

As for cooling it, I personally have my polymer press/oil refinery submerged in high density hydrogen, you should probably use the first plastic batch to build a high pressure vent and fill the insulated place with tons of hydrogen to get better use of your wheezworts.

If you use your cold biome as a starting area, you'll only probably need to be concerned with your entry point/door/"water"lock (petroleum will resist until you reach -57 Celsius)  lock, as everything else should be surrounded by abysallite.

Thanks for your valuable input ! 

I have a cool steam geyser I'm about to setup for the water source, and I'll follow your advice for the hydrogen room.

I was gonna dig the abysallite without looking at it and put sandstone insulation tiles ahah, thanks again !

 

15 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

I recommend dripping a cooling liquid on top of the polymer press while it's running.  They overheat fast and drip cooling is an easy way to dissipate the heat

I'll do that if need be thanks !

9 minutes ago, fredhp said:

The concept is nice, but i thinks it is better to ranch Glossy Dreckos for plastic. 

 Ranching will be for another base theme but thanks I'll look into that for later ! 

[Craigjw]

I agree.  I tend to build a press early (cycle 50-100-ish) and just break it a few times making enough plastic that I can choke a few dolphins with.

The High pressure Hydrogen is way OTT, you just need to cool the base tiles somehow.  Cooling the press any other way is REALLY difficult.  With the build above, I tried to cool using wheezes, while running -10c PW from slush geyser through radiant pipes and it just kept breaking.  Then I found out about the base tile, I built those pipes you see that cool the tiles and it's never broken since.

Trust me on this, cool the base tiles.

[Flatulent Yokel]

8 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

 

Trust me on this, cool the base tiles.

I will !!

[Angpaur]

The one of the asiest way to cool down polymer press is to build it over a pool of water or pwater. You build it on metal tiles that are touching or are submerged partialy in the water. You can add some tempshift plates to increase heat transfer. When press starts to work it will drip some condensed steam on it's base and most of its heat will be transfered to the pool of liquid and the press will never overheat, unless liquid in the pool is too hot. But depending on how big the pool is it can take many hundreds or even thousands of cycles to reach critical heat level. Much sooner you will have enough plastic to just stop producing it so heat is not a real problem.

It can look like this:

Spoiler

No automation nor wheezworts needed, just a simple ONI physics

[fishoutofwater]

I tend to keep my frozen biome frozen so this is how I keep my press from overheating,

nothing fancy, I just use petroleum as the heat sink before it go into the press, also I have a sealed base so my dupes are almost always in their suit and I use signal from smart storage to limit plastic production.

[Mr.Trueba]

@Flatulent Yokel

This is all you need!

The only cooling things are the AETN and 4 WW.

If you keep high pressure of CO2 and NG you can keep the machines cool with only their PW.

With this you can produce plastic 24/7 and a lot of energy. 

Edit. I don't really like Glossy Deckos because I like build with a lot of plastic and to produce massive amounts of plastic with deckos, in my experience, you need a lot of dupe-time in the ranch.

With this build you only need one dupe full time to produce plastic and a lot of energy.

You can produce oil from oil wells and from slickers. I don't use slickers because my CPU are not too powerful to run a lot of critters.

And in this building all my pipes are insulated. I don't use metal pipes or normal pipes most of the time.

Edit 2. In the plastic presses I use a thermo sensor only in case of emergency, but really the temperature never reach more than 90°C.

All are build with golden amalgam and igneous rock pipes.

[Sebastiangperez]

I think fertilizers is a waste of resources , becaouse needs lot of stuffs, beside pollute water , now need dirt and phosphorite.. 

 

[yoakenashi]

10 minutes ago, Sebastiangperez said:

I think fertilizers is a waste of resources , becaouse needs lot of stuffs, beside pollute water , now need dirt and phosphorite.. 

 

Fertilizer is a great use of resources. Instead of doubling the production rate, you can think of greenhouses as halving the resource cost for crops.

The cost of making the fertilizer is less than half of crops cost, meaning a net benefit.

This of course all depends on what resources you have available and may personally consider difficult to obtain, such as the phosphorite from a drecko farm. I personally view phosphorite as a free resource, others may not.

[Flatulent Yokel]

@Mr.Trueba

That's a nice looking setup !!

The tempshift plates near the press WWs are in gold amalgam too ? Why this material specifically ?

[KittenIsAGeek]

I've written about polymer presses before.  One thing that helps a LOT when using them is to build with a high thermal capacity element rather than a highly conductive one.  For example, use iron rather than copper or wolframite.  The reason for this is that the little bit of steam it kicks out at the end of a cycle is HOT.  Water has a very high thermal capacity, so even though it is only 8.33g/s it contains a lot of thermal energy.  Copper has a SHC of 0.386 and a thermal conductivity of 4.5.  Iron has a SHC of 0.449 with a conductivity of 4.0.  This may not appear to be a lot, but it means that your polymer press will not spike as much in temperature when the steam is produced.  Instead, some of the steam's heat will go into the atmosphere and disperse.

You do not want to build your polymer press out of steel, niobium, or thermium unless you have a very good method of keeping the system cool.  Because their thermal conductivities are so high, much more of the steam's energy will go directly into heating the polymer press.  This is in addition to the 32.5k DTUs produced during its operating process and it adds up quick.

[Lawnmower Man]

I mostly agree with @fishoutofwater in that the petroleum going to your press is a perfect heat sink, because inputs consumed by a production building usually delete the heat contained in the inputs (but then, produce a fixed-heat output, which may be a net increase if your inputs are too cold).  So while Wheezeworts are good for low-rate cooling like your main base and electrolyzers, they can get easily overwhelmed by high-rate buildings.  If you are going to build a petro gen, then you have enough power to run an AquaTuner, at least part time.

So, I would suggest going with the metal floor for the immediate thermal conductivity, but then running a PWater loop through the floor and an AT to keep your press well under 90 C.  The benefit is that you want the steam it emits to condense to water, rather than floating around everywhere being annoying.  If you let the temp float high, you can easily end up with the steam everywhere.  Now, the AT is going to heat up from cooling the PWater loop, so you can dump the heat into the petroleum going into your press by running it past the AT in radiant pipes.  You can actually dump heat into the petro up to 540 C, but don't worry about that level of efficiency for now.  Just getting your fossil fuel room thermally neutral (or even heat negative) is a good start, and avoids the need to either trash one of your cold biomes, or spam wheezeworts.

If you just rely on a pool beneath the floor, that pool will eventually heat up and boil, or the heat will need to escape your room into the surroundings.

If you're feeling really ambitious, you can use all that spare heat capacity in the petro by using it as a coolant for a metal refinery.  This will let you get pretty close to 540 C while dumping most of the heat generated by refining.  You will want to loop the petro around the refinery several times until it gets very hot, and this will add complexity to your build, but you may want to leave some space for it later.

[Mr.Trueba]

29 minutes ago, Flatulent Yokel said:

@Mr.Trueba

That's a nice looking setup !!

The tempshift plates near the press WWs are in gold amalgam too ? Why this material specifically ?

The tempshifts near presses are made of diamond. The rest of it are made of obsidian.

The diamond is because its high thermal conductivity and the obsidian because I don't use it in other kind of build, haha.

All the machinery are build of gold amalgam because it increases in 50°C the temperature of the buildings before they broke.

Sorry my bad English, In speak Spanish, haha.

[Flatulent Yokel]

@Lawnmower Man@fishoutofwater

I didn't quite get the heat sink and heat dumping subtilites before, indeed it changes everything and adds a rather more simple and affordable solution for a beginner setup, thanks to you both for explaining that to me ! Time for the firsts try  

[chemie]

You do not need to make plastic in a cold place.  Runs fine in 50C areas, made out of gold, 100% on time.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

17 minutes ago, chemie said:

You do not need to make plastic in a cold place.  Runs fine in 50C areas, made out of gold, 100% on time.

Your setup is directly under a large pool of polluted water that is likely helping to stabilize your temperatures.  I see that your press is at 72c.  What is the temperature of the produced plastic?  It could be that your setup ends up working just fine, but the last time I ran a setup like this, the temperature slowly rose until one of the production cycles melted to naptha.  Once that happened, I had to turn the presses off and mop everything up in order to get plastics again.

The problem with polymer presses isn't the press itself overheating.  Its with the plastic coming out too hot to use, or even hot enough to melt.

[chemie]

4 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Your setup is directly under a large pool of polluted water that is likely helping to stabilize your temperatures.  I see that your press is at 72c.  What is the temperature of the produced plastic?  It could be that your setup ends up working just fine, but the last time I ran a setup like this, the temperature slowly rose until one of the production cycles melted to naptha.  Once that happened, I had to turn the presses off and mop everything up in order to get plastics again.

The problem with polymer presses isn't the press itself overheating.  Its with the plastic coming out too hot to use, or even hot enough to melt.

No. the air around it is 50-60C.  The PW is around that too.  Plastic comes out at 75C (and when you build things, 40C).  Petroleum comes in at 72C so I think that sets the polymer temp.

Yes, I used to have to put a automation to run only part time and in the ice biomes but changes now allow them in the wild.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, chemie said:

No. the air around it is 50-60C.  The PW is around that too.  Plastic comes out at 75C (and when you build things, 40C).

Yes, I used to have to put a automation to run only part time and in the ice biomes but changes now allow them int he wild.

Hmm. I hadn't played around with them since the temperature clamping was introduced.  That's good to know.  Lately I've been farming Drekkos for plastic.

[chemie]

1 minute ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Hmm. I hadn't played around with them since the temperature clamping was introduced.  That's good to know.  Lately I've been farming Drekkos for plastic.

I honestly do not know which changes fixed this.  Maybe I just ran hotter petroleum in the past.  I built this out of steel thinking it would be like a aquatuner which needs no liquid when steel is used....but this runs fine out of gold.

[Lawnmower Man]

1 hour ago, chemie said:

I honestly do not know which changes fixed this.  Maybe I just ran hotter petroleum in the past.  I built this out of steel thinking it would be like a aquatuner which needs no liquid when steel is used....but this runs fine out of gold.

Basically, you are exporting your heat to everywhere your CO2 touches.  That means your slime biome is slowly heating up, as you're using it as a heatsink.  That's fine for now, but unless your CO2 can expand to a very large area, or there's another heatsink at a lower temp nearby, I'd guess that your presses will heat up to 100 C pretty soon and vaporize the steam they are emitting.  How many cycles have they been running?  Slime biomes start out around 20-30 C, so I'd be interested in seeing the thermal overlay for this area.  My guess is that you have a ticking time bomb.