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A practical insulation melter for renewable tungsten


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Want 500 kg/cycle of tungsten? Well if you can make that much insulation (we are talking over 9000 kg/cycle of pwater to grow all those reeds, even with farmers touch), here is an outline of the design (ok you probably won't be running this at all times, but if you had built up a lot of extra insulation and need a use for it...):

The first image shows the "core" component. The second image shows everything, including some other pipes that are used for unrelated things (ignore the 4 liquid reservoirs in the top right). All pipes are made out of insulation or tungsten. Despite the low conductivity of insulation the niobium quickly releases it's heat to it, eventually melting the pipes and leaving tungsten debris at the bottom of the bath. The bath is around 2700C, and two metal refineries set to smelt steel heat it to over 4300C, which heats up and melts the insulation pipe.

Basic use:

This requires two manual steps per 1000kg: first to have dupes rebuild the melted pipes, but leave them unconnected. Then connect them up and down and cancel any ghosts (no dupes needed for this step). These steps can't be combined (I think) because the regular pipes would be built over the insulated pipes. The entire process takes about 2 cycles to generate 1000 kg tungsten, depending on dupe availability. The per-kg player work could be reduced by using less flow on the valves and a longer chain of pipes. About 5400 kg of steel are needed to be smelted for 1000kg tungsten.

 

Practical considerations:

No pump exploit is needed, niobium melts at 2477C and thermium melts at 2676C. Thermium pumps submerged in niobium that is i.e. at 2600C will slowly take damage over time but can still pump enough to fill well more than one reservoir before breaking. Since you only lose 9kg of niobium as the pipes melt, each fill lasts a very long time.

 

To melt niobium, first use the heat from a glass forge to melt iron, then heat the iron in a metal refinery enough to melt niobium. I actually used magma as another intermediate step, because of regolith's low heat capacity making it easy to make a large pool. Beware of boiling points! Also, the heat capacities of metals ae low so freezing is an issue when adding any cold stuff to your baths.

 

An efficient metal refinery work setup as well as two liquid reservoirs, one before the metal refineries and one after, are vital for rapid performance. There is enough niobium to approximately fill one of these reservoirs. This maximizes the amount of buffer.

 

The valves are set to 900 g/s, but they emit a bolus of 10kg when the pipes are rebuilt. A cold non-insulated insulation pipe will leave the 10kg bolus with just enough heat to not freeze, but will instantly cool the 900 g packets to it's own temperature. This requires a few extra pipes at the bath temperature to buffer the temporary surge without causing freeze damage.

 

In a vacuum liquid in a reservoir only exchanges heat with the tile on it's lower left. Liquid valves and shutoffs also don't exchange heat. The refineries in a vacuum can be cooled with a little liquid on their left, or an occasional burst of gas (assuming the gas can't reach the bath), this doesn't seem to steal much if any heat from their liquid. Mesh tiles don't exchange heat with reservoirs, I believe.

 

There will be a modest net heat loss from the bath due to the fact that stuff when built is at most 45C. A shunting pipe allows the bath to be heated directly when it drops below 2700C. Due to the very high heat capacity of insulation vs tungsten, there is a massive heat deletion and thus not much room to improve the efficiency of this design. But hey, it's nice that steel smelting only generates about 6% of the heat.

 

Insulated stuff made out of insulation has zero or otherwise negligible heat exchange with anything, thus pipes and tiles can hold liquid hotter than their melting points.

 

Don't let anything fall into the bath, 2700C will cause many different substances to turn into a cloud of superheated vapor and overheat everything!

 

When used properly there should be no heat or cold damage to any of the pipes (apart from the intentional melting), but of course I wasn't perfect...

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On 3/2/2019 at 12:47 PM, calibayzone said:

The bath is around 2700C, and two metal refineries set to smelt steel heat it to over 4300C, which heats up and melts the insulation pipe.

Awesome work. Love the build. Now back to that El Dorado search. This will help.  Time to bath in gold.

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what those metal tile made of?would not those thing melt?

The bath is only 2700C, but two steel smelters heat the niobium to 4350C before passing it though those poor, helpless pipes. The niobium returns to the reservoir at the bath temperature before heating no matter what pipe temperature, which stabilizes the temperature that it come out of the smelters.

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Abyssalite melts to tungsten as well. Why not using abyssalite directly? Is there some problem with heating it up?

1. Most buildings, including pipes, have 1/5 of the heat capacity that they "should" have. This is an obscure mechanic indeed, Klei! But natural and artificial tiles don't have this happen to them, so it would take 5 times more heat and thus steel. In my base lime, not insulation, is the rate-limiting ingredient (maybe ~4 iron smelters and rockets to metal asteroids would be better?). Also, non-insulated insulation pipes still exchange heat quite quickly with their contents (might as well be a radiant pipe for those 900 g packets), but both pipes and tiles made out of insulation exchange heat much more slowly with their environment.

2. This would spill much more fluid back into the bath, which would be a hassle. We only lose 9kg each 1000kg tungsten with this build, so we very rarely need to pump more fluid back into the system.

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Awesome work. Love the build. Now back to that El Dorado search. This will help.  Time to bath in gold.

It's a mess, as typical of survival figure-out-as-you-go builds. Plenty of room to make it neat and tidy, and minimize the insulation needed in the piping.

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