Flaking Abyssalite for fun and profit

[muzambi]

Have you ever wanted to do something usefull with all that abyssalite lying around your colony? How about turnins it all into tungsten at a rate of 1.5 kg per second? Sounds too good to be true? Well it is not even too hard (once you melted tungsten and got some insulation)

It transform around 900Kg of abyssalite into tungsten per cycle (it depends on what you refine). You can power it with most refinables, exept gold.

It works by making hot molten tungsten flow underneath a tile of clorine gas (i used 1.4kg, which is close to the minimun you need). The clorine then flakes the abyssalite tile and the additional tungsten convines with the pool. The 2 liquid tiles besides the clorine are liquid niobium (if you use insulated insulation tiles your reaction chamber will be limited to 3600 degrees celcius, or you'll flake them as well). The abyssalite natural tile gets refilled by the automatic dispenser periodically. Then the tungsten gets pumped out (there is an invisible tile of viscogel on the bottom right tile of the pump) 

The liquid filter filters the visccogel (that gets chilled down thanks to a radiant pipe right in the middle of the filter) and the tungsten goes throught several sensors into the first refinery(or if the refinery is full, to be chilled down in the steam chamber). This refinery can be set to do everything but gold. Then goes throught a pipe temperature sensor that checks if its cold enough (<4800ºC) to be send to the second refinery (that can be set to anything but steel or gold). Then the tungsten of this refinery merges with the output of the other refinery that was too hot(giving priority to the secon refinery) and goes to a liquid tank, and gets tossed back in the pool.

Automation...

The issue with this machine is that, while it is dumping hot tungsten and flaking it's getting around 15Kg of tungsten per second, while the pump can only remove 5Kg/s. This means that while you are flaking(sounds so bad...) the reactor is getting full of tungsten. And there is no easy way to measure how much is there in the pool since sensors would melt. What i did instead is run the process in batches. So there is a memory toggle controlling the liquid vent. To get it started i used a liquid element sensor after the liquid filter output, then a buffer gate (2 seconds) and a not gate, so when the pump finishes pumping all the tungsten the process starts again. The reset of this memory toggle goes to the liquid tank, so when the tank gets empty it stops.

To control the automatic dispenser(i setted it to 100Kg of abyssalite), and load it, i used another memory toggle. This one gets toggled on by another pipe temp sensor (>3700ºC) and reset by yet another pipe temp sensor (<3550ºC). The output of the memory goes to one of the inputs of an and gate. A timer sensor (10s on,10s off) is connected to an auto sweeper and a not gate, and the not gate output goes to the other input of the and gate, And finally the output of the and gate goes to the dispenser. This way, while the memory toggle is active(when the pool of tungsten is at the right temp) the dispenser and the swepper cicle on and off every 20 seconds.

And that should do it.... exept. There are 2 additional issues with this device. The first one is that even when abyssalite has very low termal conductivity, it will exchange heat with the clorine and eventually melt if you dont refill it every few cicles. So there is a timer sensor(50s on,50s off) connected to the input of a signal counter(counts to 10). The reset of the counter conects to the dispenser, and the output to a buffer gate (3s), and the buffer gate to the dispenser. this way if the dispenser didn't trigger in 1000s, the counter will do it. The other issue is that the pool of tungsten can get too cold when you are not letting more tungsten in. I solved that by adding another pipe temp sensor connecter directly to the liquid vent. So it overrides the memory toggle in  case of need.

Anyhow, i hope you enjoyed it and let me know if there is anythig that requires further explaining.

Cheers!