What is the best way to melt natural Wolframite?

[Tranoze]

I present to you the only chunk of Wolframite my map has:

As you know, digging them only return half of the mass, so best way to extract them out is to melt all of them into liquid tungsten (they turn into solid tungsten at 2926, but liquid tungsten turn into liquid at 3421)

Right now im using glass to increase the temperature up, but as the reward is equal to 22.8 trip to Glimmering planet, what the best way you can think of to melt all of them and pump them slowly to get the max tungsten output possible?

[Prince Mandor]

14 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

I present to you the only chunk of Wolframite my map has:

As you know, digging them only return half of the mass, so best way to extract them out is to melt all of them into liquid tungsten (they turn into solid tungsten at 2926, but liquid tungsten turn into liquid at 3421)

Right now im using glass to increase the temperature up, but as the reward is equal to 22.8 trip to Glimmering planet, what the best way you can think of to melt all of them and pump them slowly to get the max tungsten output possible?

Are you sure about temperatures? Wolframite became liquid tungsten at 2926, but liquid tungsten became solid at this temperature, so if you just heat it, it liquefy, but instantly solidify back and turns into tungsten tile, without any profit.

As far as I can remember, you must flake it, to save most material.

Simplest way or most efficient?

Simplest way, make a room around it, fill it with steam and increase temperature of steam by liquid steel.

Efficient -- build small capsule with about 10kg of steam per cell and flake it carefully, rebuilding capsule multiple times.

If you ask more exact questions, it will be easier to provide good answers. So far it is "just flake it", but I don't know what exactly you don't know

[blakemw]

I don't know how fast it would be, but one option is building a Liquid Reservoir on the tungsten and then looping extremely hot coolant through the Reservoir, heat slowly conducts from the left tile of the reservoir (actually the "bottle" inside the reservoir) into the tile under it. The rate of heating is mostly independent of how much coolant is in the reservoir (i.e. 100 kg causes as much heat as 5000 kg) as long as it's above 0, and enough to not cause insta-freezing.

I believe only steel, niobium and tungsten can get hot enough to melt tungsten and steel would be by far the easiest to work with as you can just melt a Steel Aquatuner to get the liquid steel to work with.

[Tranoze]

15 minutes ago, Prince Mandor said:

Are you sure about temperatures? Wolframite became liquid tungsten at 2926, but liquid tungsten became solid at this temperature, so if you just heat it, it liquefy, but instantly solidify back and turns into tungsten tile, without any profit.

Yes, they turn into tungsten tile at 2926, that why you need to increase heat until it reach 3k4 and turn into liquid tungsten, that where you get the profit tungsten if you cool them by droplet.

[Prince Mandor]

29 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Yes, they turn into tungsten tile at 2926, that why you need to increase heat until it reach 3k4 and turn into liquid tungsten, that where you get the profit tungsten if you cool them by droplet.

Do you know and understand "flaking"? Or, officially speaking, "partial melting"?

You can test it in sandbox by surrounding ice cell with hot chlorine, for example

[Tranoze]

2 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

Do you know and understand "flaking"? Or, officially speaking, "partial melting"?

You can test it in sandbox by surrounding ice cell with hot chlorine, for example

partial melting is only good when you melt small quantity, for this chunk which i need to melt them all anyway, that is not a good solution.

Also if it take too much time melting them one by one, it better to just dig it and do 22 trip to glimmering planet.

[Prince Mandor]

1 hour ago, Tranoze said:

partial melting is only good when you melt small quantity, for this chunk which i need to melt them all anyway, that is not a good solution.

Also if it take too much time melting them one by one, it better to just dig it and do 22 trip to glimmering planet.

That is why I said about simple solution.

You can create a small room around this chunk of wolframite, fill it with steam, and heat this steam up with molten steel.

Hot steam flake big part of external layer, and do it at much lower temperature.Yes, at some point flaking stops (if you have 5 or less kg of wolframite in cell), but digging them you just loose 2.5 kg per cell

After this just dig external layer, reduce room and repeat. You do not need to do anything special, just keep steam hot enough to flake wolframite.

Also, you do not need to flake entire chunk -- you may need some wolframite in ore form

[Tranoze]

18 minutes ago, Prince Mandor said:

That is why I said about simple solution.

You can create a small room around this chunk of wolframite, fill it with steam, and heat this steam up with molten steel.

Hot steam flake big part of external layer, and do it at much lower temperature.Yes, at some point flaking stops (if you have 5 or less kg of wolframite in cell), but digging them you just loose 2.5 kg per cell

After this just dig external layer, reduce room and repeat. You do not need to do anything special, just keep steam hot enough to flake wolframite.

Also, you do not need to flake entire chunk -- you may need some wolframite in ore form

Using steam is a terrible idea, you cant pump liquid out or make liquid lock to process already melted wolframite.
Remember, heating it up is not the only thing to get on those tungsten, you have to cool them down by droplet to get maximum tungsten possible.

My solution right now is to get all of them into molten steel temperature and use pump and drop steel to keep heating it up. Steel wont turn back to solid when the heat is above 1k1 so pumping loop should work fine.

[Prince Mandor]

Do you need this tungsten right now?

If not -- just create some area with steam, without any access. No airlocks, no doors, just diamond window tiles one cell away from wolframite. After that put inside some water, and close this area until you finish. After tungsten drips off, you just destroy this steam by diagonal building, or create something to put it throw steam turbine or cool it back -- it doesn't matter, 200 kg not worth much

[Saturnus]

28 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Using steam is a terrible idea, you cant pump liquid out or make liquid lock to process already melted wolframite.

You can easily pump it though.

Use the new magma pump set up as proposed initially by @Hjoyn and refined by myself on discord, and just modify to suit molten tungsten.

This pumps 10kg/s and has zero chance of failure as long as you get the molten tungsten blade the correct length. Petrol reflow pump to make the waterfall is set to 625g/s.

 

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

You can easily pump it though.

Use the new magma pump set up as proposed initially by @Hjoyn and refined by myself on discord, and just modify to suit molten tungsten.

This pumps 10kg/s and has zero chance of failure as long as you get the molten tungsten blade the correct length. Petrol reflow pump to make the waterfall is set to 625g/s.

It only work if this is steady supply amount of tungsten. Pumping like that wont clean remove all existing tungsten, but only part of it. The point is after melting the tungsten, you can cleanly pump all of them, not make pump that work for a while and you have to reconstruct the whole thing again just to pump the rest of the tungsten.
Best pumping method to clean out tungsten is manual pump which you can carry 200 kg out each time, which require liquid lock for duplicant to travel into, which wont work if you melt them using steam. There are no such liquid lock can withstand 3k5C steam.

[Saturnus]

5 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Pumping like that wont clean remove all existing tungsten, but only part of it.

It's incredible easy to pump out all the tungsten with that set up I showed 

Once there's only a single layer left you push the remaining toward the pump by corner building.

[Tranoze]

Just now, Saturnus said:

It's incredible easy to pump out all the tungsten with that set up

Once there's only a single layer left you push the remaining toward the pump by corner building.

how can dupe travel into a room with 3k5C steam to build corner?

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

how can dupe travel into a room with 3k5C steam to build corner?

Are you asking me to show you?

Tip: do the dupe have to be in the steam room to corner build?

[Tranoze]

18 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Are you asking me to show you?

Tip: do the dupe have to be in the steam room to corner build?

Fair. I can build it, but what radiant metal pipe you use to transfer heat from liquid steel to steam that wont melt? Cuz my point is still the same now, using liquid steel to transfer heat via steam still a terrible idea. Just droplet steel into 1k2 C wolframite is better since droplet wont turnback into solid at that point, and vacuum room is much easier for dupe to travel into and pump those wolframite out than spend the whole day reconstruct the room to corner build tungsten.

Please show me how to melt tungsten using steam room first.

[Tranoze]

7 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

Do you know and understand "flaking"? Or, officially speaking, "partial melting"?

Wait, didnt flaking only work on insulated material like abyssalite? For pure wolframite ore, gas and liquid just straight transfer heat to them.

[Saturnus]

47 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Please show me how to melt tungsten using steam room first.

Come on, you know how to do that

It's fine if you don't want to do it but it's really not a problem, it'll just take a bit of time.

47 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Fair. I can build it, but what radiant metal pipe you use to transfer heat from liquid steel to steam that wont melt? 

Do the pipes have to be radiant?

[Tranoze]

16 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Do the pipes have to be radiant?

yes and no. You can use normal pipe, but it length will need to increase as soon as it hit a certain temperature because if the length too short to exchange heat, steel will vaporize before it melt tungsten. And i wonder if you can make pipe using refined carbon or diamond?
If not then how are you suppose to melt tungsten?
https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Plumbable
Now tell me what material you can use for that pipe.

If you use liquid steel + isolated tile + pump then it just better to connect them stright to wolframite via diamond tile than using steam as heat transfer.

[he77789]

22 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Use the new magma pump set up as proposed initially by @Hjoyn 

Actually, Zarquan first discovered it 2 years ago (but went mostly unnoticed at https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/111351-full-sized-magma-pump/), then I independently rediscovered it. Hjoyn only built an example.

But still he provided some good feedback, I guess you could say he contributed to the final broken waterfall + blade design

[ghkbrew]

I suggest you look into techniques for melting abyssalite.  They should work with some adaptation.

I like using the fact that the contents of liquid reservoirs exchanges heat with the tile under the building, but not the building itself (if built in a vacuum).  It let's you avoid dropping the very not molten steel into the world and then having to pump it again.

[Prince Mandor]

20 hours ago, Tranoze said:

yes and no. You can use normal pipe, but it length will need to increase as soon as it hit a certain temperature because if the length too short to exchange heat, steel will vaporize before it melt tungsten. And i wonder if you can make pipe using refined carbon or diamond?
If not then how are you suppose to melt tungsten?
https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Plumbable
Now tell me what material you can use for that pipe.

If you use liquid steel + isolated tile + pump then it just better to connect them stright to wolframite via diamond tile than using steam as heat transfer.

Again, to melt tungsten you need 3421 C, but to melt wolframite you need just 2926 C. Thats 500 C difference

You cannot melt wolframite directly -- it became chunk of tungsten, but if you flake it it creates 5kg droplets, and they solidify to debrises, not cells

Simplest way -- something filled with steam and a diamond cell basin, Use insulated ceramic pipes to drop melted steel into basin, and pump melted steel back into refinery before it solidify. Of course, if you have access to Insulation (material) you can use it for pipes

[Tranoze]

56 minutes ago, Prince Mandor said:

, but if you flake it it creates 5kg droplets, and they solidify to debrises, not cells

You can flake wolframite ore? I know you can flake abyssalite because it is very insolation, but wolframite ore transfer heat very well so any gas contact to it will transfer 100% of the heat to wolframite.

And for this chunk of wolframite, you cant flake one tile because all of the heat will transfer together.

Dont treat wolframite like abyssalite

[Hjoyn]

16 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

You can flake wolframite ore? I know you can flake abbysalite because it is very insolation, but wolframite ore transfer heat very well so any gas contact to it will transfer 100% of the heat to wolframite.

You can flake anything, although wolframite will be a tad more challenging to avoid melting.
I'd say use chlorine, heat with steel waterfalls on the sides using diamond tempshifts, use vacuum gaps, airflow tiles, insulation, and refined carbon tiles where needed. Use contactless pumps to heat the steel to the right temp via metal refinery after preheating the entire chunk of ore with magma. Flake most of it, melt the last bits with tempshifts. Just make sure to go bottom up, to avoid liquid tungsten building up enough to form tiles. If any tungsten tiles do form, finish flaking and melting the ore, then submerge in steel and heat as before to melt. 

[Tranoze]

3 minutes ago, Hjoyn said:

You can flake anything, although wolframite will be a tad more challenging to avoid melting.

Doable, yes, worth it to reconstruct the entire system for each dug tile? I mean melting all of them at 3k4 by connect diamond window tile and liquid steel pump would be much faster than flake at this point. Why everyone keep suggesting flake when it best when use for abyssalite, not wolframite.

Wolframite is not that hard to increase temp like abbysalite.

[Hjoyn]

10 hours ago, Tranoze said:

Doable, yes, worth it to reconstruct the entire system for each dug tile? I mean melting all of them at 3k4 by connect diamond window tile and liquid steel pump would be much faster than flake at this point. Why everyone keep suggesting flake when it best when use for abyssalite, not wolframite.

Wolframite is not that hard to increase temp like abbysalite.

Why would you reconstruct the system per tile? As long as it flakes generally bottom up, it's fine. Flaking is far faster than melting and takes less heat, which at these temps translates to less resources spent. The primary reason to flake here is to avoid needing to go to 3400 by allowing small drips of tungsten at a time. The high conductivity is potentially somewhat troublesome, but that can be handled by proper directional heating. I'd recommend using refined carbon tiles to direct the chlorine so it heats bottom up, which should be very easy after the magma preheating.