Abyssalite to tungsten transition. Is it possible in survival?

[mathmanican]

5 minutes ago, OxCD said:

By the way, maybe because of my misunderstanding of the mechanic, I don't see how to use it in this melting process.

When I write a summary of abuses I'll keep writing till you're happy.

[OxCD]

25 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

When I write a summary of abuses I'll keep writing till you're happy.

The hardest thing will not be making me happy, (or not, if it was sarcastic) but making me understanding what the heck are you doing with game mechanics and how are you able to extract such complex things from such muddled things.

No matter how much, but I think you're overestimating my intelligence. Or my knowledges. Or both.

Still, I don't get how flaking, without exploiting the faulty maths quoted before, can help to melt aby debris... :-/

[Zarquan]

26 minutes ago, OxCD said:

Still, I don't get how flaking, without exploiting the faulty maths quoted before, can help to melt aby debris... :-/

All you need is heat.  If the heat equations were correct, the abyssalite would still flake and we could still get tungsten.  The difference is that energy would be conserved, so we would need to use more energy to pump more heat in to the system.  The only way to get that much heat is to run steel or tungsten in a metal refinery and essentially pour it on a heat sink, where it would transfer heat to the gas tile and cause flaking.  The difference is that we would actually need to apply the right amount of heat to the gas to get the flaking to occur, and we would also have to deal with the 3500 C tungsten before we could use it.

[Prince Mandor]

8 hours ago, OxCD said:

Without using any glitch...

 

Well, flaking is not glitch by itself. It just have a bug in temperature calculation, and one day this bug will be fixed. Until then we can calculate proper numbers by hand.

Use 10kg of steam per tile and we will have more or less realistic amount of heat (if you want it pure, you can take a formulas and calculate exact amount of steam, but as long as we talk about temperature differences measured in thousands, 10 kg of steam is close enough). Game have a lot of other temperature glitches stealing or adding warmth every tick, so adding or loosing some dozens kDTU on a scale of hundreds of thousands is acceptable

[OxCD]

7 hours ago, Zarquan said:

All you need is heat. 

 

7 hours ago, Zarquan said:

we would need to use more energy to pump more heat in to the system.

 

7 hours ago, Zarquan said:

The difference is that we would actually need to apply the right amount of heat to the gas to get the flaking to occur, and we would also have to deal with the 3500 C tungsten before we could use it.

Ok I get those points and I think I can deal with that. I was thinking about a setup last days but was unable to transfer heat to the aby due to really low TC it has.

My question is sincere, I could convince myself to use flaking to help transfering heat into aby, especially if we're sure it's wanted by devs, but I need to be sure to get the mechanic right (and how to force it), because I need to be sure it'll not abuse this mechanic. For the gameplay I use, but also for the setup durability (if devs fix a mechanic abuse I'm using, I will hate having to setting this up again, doing without this abuse ^^).

As I did for the 3-PONG, in my head I really would like to aim for a plug-&-play setup. 

So yes, those questions I have here (mainly THIS question, how can I transfer heat to aby efficiently) is very personnal as I've already some thoughts behind. I could open a new topic but I think this heat transfer issue I still have fits well into OP' subject...

 

[Prince Mandor]

9 hours ago, OxCD said:

Still, I don't get how flaking, without exploiting the faulty maths quoted before, can help to melt aby debris... :-/

Okey, we cannot directly flake debris.

But, game have a mechanic to refill natural tiles with same element. This mechanic has it's own glitches, but as long as you not abuse it, everything is fine. There are maximum allowed size of natural tile, you can found it by experiment, by looking in game files or by visiting wiki.

For abyssalite tile we read:

Mass per Tile   3200 kg

So, as long as we not exceed this number it is "perfectly legal" and don't cause any additional glitches.

Put dispenser in such way, so it drop its content inside abyssalite tile, limit it to 5 kg and allow it to work only after we successfully take away 5 kg of tungsten -- and this part solved -- we put debris back in tile, without causing any wrongness

 

Next step. Flaking.

Look in a saucepan or pot with water before it boils. You will see a small baubles of steam appearing near bottom. This happens when really hot metal touch water, but water not yet hot enough to boil. To emulate this process game have flaking mechanics -- if tile of something hot enough is touching another tile, not hot enough to boil, melt or change phase,  then small portion of it change phase anyway. For example, if you have an ice tile and hot oxygen is next to it, small portion of ice melt and became water. But ice itself don't heat up much. Like in real life, icicles dripping water, but don't became any warmer.

If we click on abyssalite tile and read information carefully, we will found it's melting temperature. It is 3421C, so it is meltable and this is not glitch. To make it flake we just need to put some very hot gas near it. If we put a steam, heated to 3500 in a neighbor tile with abyssalite tile, flaking happens, and abyssalite tile loose 5kg mass and produce 5 kg of liquid tungsten. You can try it in debug or sandbox mode. It works. Next task is creation of very hot steam in survival game. NB! We are talking about temperatures able to melt abyssalite, and even obsidian turns to gas at such heat. so we need to vacuum entire room to work and possibly another protection layer of vacuum around it, in case something go wrong Diamond can survive such high temperatures, and, of course, insulated Insulation just ignore any temperature around it. so lets build small capsule surrounded by insulation or diamond. We need at least one diamond tile to transfer heat later, and, of course, at least one of wall tiles is our natural abyssalite. Put some water inside (10 kg per tile for 'honest' system, or 4.7kg per tile to abuse temperature bug). This capsule must be at least 2 cells in size, becasuse we need space for new liquid tungsten. And better to build it as a column, so abyssalite flake some tungsten at top, and this tungsten just fall down, away from working zone.

Now we just need to put some hot melted steel on top of a diamond cell.

Simplest way to create melted steel is put two steel ice makers in vacuum on mesh tiles and let them work until they melt. We need mesh tiles, so at the moment ice makers melt, liquid steel just fall down and ice or water bottles stay on mesh.

This liquid steel we pump into metal refinery, as coolant. And run refinery for some time, making steel in it. Refinery heat up coolant more and more, so we soon will have a steel at 3200C. After that we no longer produce steel (or else steel used as coolant will boil) and start to produce some iron. this make our steel coolant hotter than 3500C. put a liquid vent over our daimond tiles from previous step, and pour hot steel out.

That's all. Pump steel back into refinery, heat it up back to 3500+, pour on diamond tile. Repeat until steam inside our capsule reach 3500 temperature. At some point abyssalite flake out 5 kg of liquid tungsten. If you use 4.7 kg per tile, you use bug and steam keep it's temperature, if you use 10 kg per tile, steam honestly fall back to about 1700C and you must heat it again.

This way is mostly honest way to convert abyssalite into tungsten. Of course "glitches is in the eye of the beholder", but if you see any glitches in this process, tell me. We can try to found more "honest" way

[Prince Mandor]

BTW, this technology can be used to flake tungsten out of wolframite. just use less hot steam, and rebuild entire contraption around each patch of ore.

Digging cost us half mass, so melting is preferable. But if we just melt wolframite it instantly became a tile of tungsten with a lot higher melting temperature, so best result theoretically may be to cool wolframite from one side, to keep it below melting, but put hot steam on another side to flake it out.

Well, calculating exact numbers, to keep such monstrosity thermally honest, is beyond my enthusiasm, I just melt them old way

[OxCD]

@Prince Mandor Thanks for your time and additionnal informations you brought here about flaking. It light me up a bit more. i'll explore more of this mechanism. I already succeed to force flaking in some case and was able to observe result you and mathmanican mentionned.

However, I feel the natural tile refilling mechanic could be solved at some point. I don't feel like it's wanted by devs, but I could be wrong.

[Prince Mandor]

2 minutes ago, OxCD said:

@Prince Mandor Thanks for your time and additionnal informations you brought here about flaking. It light me up a bit more. i'll explore more of this mechanism. I already succeed to force flaking in some case and was able to observe result you and mathmanican mentionned.

However, I feel the natural tile refilling mechanic could be solved at some point. I don't feel like it's wanted by devs, but I could be wrong.

So far there are no tiles with a lot of abyssalite in them, but there are a parameter in game files specifying  maximum mass per tile. and for abyssalite this is more than 3 tonne. If developers doesn't mean to add debris to natural tile, than why write code doing it and specify in game files limits for each material? I don't think such things can appears unintentionally

Well, if you don't want to add debris into natural tile, than there are no options to use abyssalite debris. Even fully covered by liquid steel (maximum possible thermal conductivity for such temperature range, 80) they take eternity to heat up last hundred kelvins.

You can still  use flaking on all existing natural tiles, and there are lot of them. But this is not mechanical task -- you need to rebuild system from place to place.

Only other way is to create Insulation, make normal (not insulated) pipes from it and melt this pipes with liquid niobium. Also, rebuilding cannot be fully automatized

[nakomaru]

16 hours ago, OxCD said:

Without using any glitch, I don't think it's doable, especially when Abyssalite has already been dug out.

Does it count if you need to add reed fiber and isoresin? calibayzone shows how to do it with normal pipes made from insulation, which is made in part from abyssalite.

[OxCD]

3 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Does it count if you need to add reed fiber and isoresin?

It depends what do you mean by "count" ^^ it counts as it's doable, indeed. But honestly, in my mind over this subject we're all talking about, not as interseting as melting abyssalite (the sweat/reward ratio isn't encouraging. And wasting insluation, which is rather precious and cannot be heavily produced, isn't attractive).

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Does it count if you need to add reed fiber and isoresin?

This was the post I was gonna link. Great stuff in it. Thank you for pointing to it.

[TheMule]

On 6/17/2020 at 4:33 PM, OxCD said:

And wasting insluation, which is rather precious and cannot be heavily produced, isn't attractive).

Isoresin is more likely to be renewable than wolframite. Some maps maybe be scarce, to the point I'm thinking of smelting it in place w/o digging it. It should be easier than abyssalite.

[sheaker]

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

Isoresin is more likely to be renewable than wolframite. Some maps maybe be scarce, to the point I'm thinking of smelting it in place w/o digging it. It should be easier than abyssalite.

It would be great to see any progress. So far i dropped 800kg of really hot molten steal on 1kg abyssalite natural tile. It took ages to melt and in the end I did not found any tungsten. Probably mass was too small and it disappeared under the steal.

I am looking for any updates.

[mathmanican]

The updated partial melting mechanics will let you flake tungsten off abysallite at around 3.4% of the required heat. You can use a dispenser to reload the abysallite tile. You must have gas next to the abysallite tile though, so just dumping hot steel is insufficient. 

On 6/16/2020 at 5:31 PM, OxCD said:

Let's say that if devs solve this, I'll begin using flaking

After the update hits, I'm pretty sure we can start using the mechanic as the devs intend it to be used. 

[bobe17]

I build a melter based on the example given by HeatEngine

What amount of gas should i have into the capsule ? i currently plan for 2kg chlorine (worst gas for conductivity) on upper tile and 2kg CO2 for the bottom layer. Is there any benefit to have more chlorine ? (flaking more frequent ?) With 2kg, chlorine temperature would drop to 1000-1100°C after flaking (tested in debug mode).

[0xFADE]

Very neat way to build up a tile.  Though you are losing half of the material when you mine it.  Still again...  You can put all that useless abyssalite from off world to use.

[SkunkMaster]

I always see that machine posted, based on pipes getting destroyed. - it's so wasteful..

 

Here is what i've once build. it's a bit old so i don't have better pictures, sorry.

 

 

Pipes:

Power:

Automation:

 

And the reed farm needed to keep it running:

 

Spoiler

 

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, bobe17 said:

What amount of gas should i have into the capsule ?

Since the total mass of gas is irrelevant in total amount of heat transferred (provided clamping is not the issue), you don't risk loosing any additional heat via conduction with a larger mass. As for flaking, a larger mass will prevent rapid drops in temp which could enable flaking more often, but also means you have a large mass to reheat.  If you get drops in temp of >1000C, then the temp clamping in heat transfer will limit your flaking rate if you have too little mass. 

Conclusion: Put enough chlorine mass in that flaking won't drop your chlorine temp so much that reheating is clamped by the temperature difference.

Let us know what mass you choose, and why. Sounds like a fun problem. 

[bobe17]

Do you refer to "Heat transfer is clamped by total heat/temperature difference" on this page?

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Thermal_Conductivity#Heat_transfer_is_clamped_by_total_heat_difference

I'm going to study this concept. Crazy game.

I chose 2kg for now (couldn't wait for a bunch of tungsten on this aridio asteroid :D). Will be fun to find a way to open the capsule and add more gas without ruining everything ^^' (i think of a molten steel liquid lock)

[mathmanican]

Just now, bobe17 said:

on this page

Yep, that is the page. As long as your transfer rates are not clamped, then the mass of material is irrelevant in conduction.  That realization (which I only made recently) has changed the way I think about and design builds.  This fact has been known for years, but I've focused almost exclusively on flow, rather than conduction.

[bobe17]

got an equilibrium between 1000kg of abyssalite 80.7°C and 800kg of chlorine 3415.2°C. Interesting mechanism.

After i put steel at 3719°C, flaking occurs frequently and i get 185kg of  liquid tungsten. The co2 layer just can't cool anything. I would need much more co2 and a lower temperature of equilibrium.

+ the temperature of the abyssalite may vary as we replenish the tile

[bobe17]

Much better with those numbers:

abyssalite 200kg ~ 81°C

chlorine 165kg, carbon dioxyde 10kg 2-5kg

equilibrium between abyssalite and chlorine around 3300°C

When i tried with 100kg of co2, chlorine goes 1k above the temperature of the diamond tile and started to giving back some heat to the tile, breaking the equilibrium with the abyssalite.

We can prevent abyssalite from going above ~81°C by flaking some ethanol on the opposite side.

 

[langas6]

Hey guys, New to posting but have a good 500-600 hours in the game so far. Single build/base with around 4500 cycles.

Have been reading through this and have come up with my own weird way to get a tonne of Tungsten from the Abyssalite.

It's very dodgy but the way it works is flawless. The automation helps to make sure the tile doesn't hit 5kg which then won't take the energy/heat from the "coolant" (being liquid steel) and will quickly get higher than it's boiling point. Keeping the tile filled up between 500-1500kg seems to be a perfect mix. I've only used one mod which can convert refined metals back to raw metals. Currently have it on a constant aluminium cycle since this seems to be the safe point of keeping the thing running forever.

Have taken a lot of inspiration from a tonne of different posts around here and the flaking seems to be the perfect option to get heaps of Tungsten very quickly.

No need to worry about the tile heating up as by the time the tile gets warm, more Abyssalite gets added and keeps the tile temp down around the 45deg mark (maybe i'm just lucky that what i've been putting in so far has been all cool stuff).

Couple of screenshots of the setup.

Can try to get some gameplay video to show how it works for a cycle or so if you're interested. (yes my base is in no way optimized but for a single base with only 7 dead dupes throughout the build (usually from getting suck with falling regolith/sand).

But back to topic, this does work perfectly. Steam works very well and is extremely easy to get setup and working.Since you can get through the gaps diagonally, can pump in some water into the "hot" section at the start.

The conveyor rails are to take the tungsten to the molecular forge to get me more Thermium where needed. Great thing about Tungsten is that because it has such a low thermal mass, it's very simple to cool down from 3400deg to 50-60deg without heating anything else up too much.

Also purposefully built it near edge of space, just incase there was something that got hot that wasn't meant to, the gas would just dissapear after a couple of cycles and be all good again.

The large amount of random viscogel is there in very specific places (roughly hahah) to keep the equipment cool that needs to be kept cool.

Hope you enjoy and this helps anyone that doesn't have any glittering planets and can't get anymore tungsten another way.

EDIT: Uploaded a quick vid to youtube to see it running and how quickly it gets tungsten: 

Automation is to count each 5kg block that flakes off the Abbysalite so when it's taken off 500kg, the automatic dispenser adds it's 500kg back into the block, allowing more to be flaked off. Dupes only need to come in for 2 reasons. To fill the dispenser and to work the metal refinery.

Piping is a nightmare, but once you get it right, it's great.

All piping where possible is made from insulation to stop any heat transfer into the pipes melting them down.

 

[langas6]

Also, to get it all started, that's where the extra pipes at the top of it come in. That's to melt thermo aquatuners, pipe some super coolant through one and you'll get 1200kg of molten steel in about 1-2 minutes, very quick process (much quicker than ice makers). I melted 2 of them to get 2400kg of molten steel, hence the liquid storage tank between the "melter" part and the refinery. This tank also helps to smooth the heating process so it's not too sudden and you can slowly come up to the vaporisation temp of steel (3860ish) without going over it (have done this before, lots of clean up and starting again when you get it wrong and go over temp on the liquid steel)

Main reason to use steel is that it melts at 2400ish deg, but then doesn't go solid again till 1200 or so. So you can pump it around through the pipes and it won't go solid before you can stick it into a Metal Refinery and keep it hot.

When first getting the steel up to 3000-3200deg or so, only refine steel as this will give the highest heat output for the molten steel and get you up to temp quickly. Then only refine Iron Ore or Aluminium Ore if you can get enough from space. You can't keep refining steel as it adds 606deg to the molten steel and since it goes back into the refinery at 3400 or so, this puts it above it's vaporising temp. Gold is "ok" but it's not a high enough increase in temp. Iron is boarder line as it gets it close/over the 3800deg mark, which gets risky. Ali seems to be the sweet spot.