An Industrial Slime Digestor

[Occam Blazer]

Presenting my mid-game slime digestor

This machine takes slime and turns it into oxygen and clay. It uses a small amount of refined metal and needs Solid Transport research, but does not require steel or plastic. It works in vanilla and SO without modification.

It scales to support just about any number of dupes or simply process slime as fast as you can pitch it in. This one supports 14 dupes. I build it at the beginning of mid-game as I am finalizing my dupe habitat location and setting up atmo-suits. It acts as a bridge between using diffusers for O2 and the final end-game oxygen solution.

This produces 95.5kg of ceramic per cycle per dupe. On a typical vanilla-game map you can expect to produce around 440 tons of ceramic from all the slime biomes. To achieve that it consumes ~400t filtration media and 100t of coal. Spaced-out might average about half of that.

It can also handle polluted dirt with equal aplomb, but I feed that to pokeshells instead. When you are out of slime and/or polluted dirt you can easily convert it to produce oxygen with renewable polluted water.

A Tour

Let's follow the slime on its journey to become clean breathable oxygen.

Collection

Dupes load slime into a conveyor loader. Allow manual use and un-check sweep only. Suggest that a few of your dupes prioritize Storing so all the slime on the map gets promptly collected there. Slime hangs out in a sealed-off collecting pit waiting to enter the decontamination area.

Spoiler

Chiller

The machine cools slime before it sublimates, taking advantage of specific heat capacity differences between slime and polluted oxygen. A thermo-aquatuner moves heat from the slime into resulting polluted oxygen, which can absorb five times as much heat energy contained in the slime. Use any material for the aquatuner - no steel required. Input slime temperature doesn't matter much. It takes forty or fifty cycles to get down to temperature, but it eventually stabilizes.

The lower temperature limit is governed by the freeze point of the coolant. This one uses polluted water at 0°C to produce 28°C oxygen. Ethanol could get it much lower.

Spoiler

The AT sits in a little crude oil between the sublimation rail and the deodorizer bank. It is cooled by the polluted oxygen moving through the system.

Sanitization and Dosing

After chilling, the slime is decontaminated in chlorine. The sanitizer chamber holds a dose of slime in chlorine gas for one cycle to reliably remove all germs. This is where you control the throughput of the system by adjusting weight plates to keep a whole cycle's worth of slime in the chamber. You need 66.7 kilos of slime per dupe per cycle.

Spoiler

This system has two decontamination chambers so one batch of slime is sitting in chlorine while clean slime gets loaded into the sublimator.

Automation. One door is open per cycle. Weight plates control how much slime sits in the chambers and only open them when their chamber door is closed. Because doors create a vacuum when they open some polluted oxygen will accumulate in the chamber. That's normal. Chlorine is heavier than polluted oxygen so slime will still be decontaminated.

Sublimation

When the decontamination chamber is done with a day's dose of slime it releases into a big room where it completely off-gasses on rails. It takes 5.3 rail segments per dupe to produce enough polluted oxygen. This is also where the system kicks out anything that is not slime if you accidentally put the wrong material in there.

Spoiler

Collection & Heating

I use bypass pumps to move polluted oxygen from the sublimation chamber. This isn't strictly necessary when you are moving only enough material to supply dupes on demand. If you want to run the machine as fast as you can load it you'll need this step to keep pressure in the sublimation chamber low enough. This is where the aquatuner discharges its heat into the polluted oxygen. Use any material for the aquatuner.

Spoiler

Set the liquid valve flow to 0.1 g/s. A few segments of pipe will run the machine until all the slime is gone. Adjust if you plan to process renewable polluted dirt or polluted water.

Conversion and Introduction

Pretty typical modern polluted oxygen processing set up. Deodorizers can reach two tiles below them, even through a liquid. Salt water sits in the mesh tiles to separate the pO2 from O2. A bank of nine deodorizers supported by an auto-sweeper will provide eight dupes with oxygen. Pumps fill atmo-suit docks and mechanized doors introduce oxygen into the base. I situate this machine at the bottom of the dupe habitat.

Spoiler

Automation opens the doors when the base is low on oxygen and there is enough clean supply to push it in. The memory toggle controlling the deodorizers keeps the polluted oxygen pressure in hysteresis. I've been getting over-pressure in the base with this so I think I need to only open one door to throttle the rush of air.

That's it

Materials

• I used gold radiant pipes behind granite tiles, but you can probably get away with granite for both since the thing takes a long time to stabilize temperature
• This particular aquatuner is made with iron ore because that's what I had the most of
• Insulation is igneous
• I used crude oil to create the corner liquid locks. Any reasonable liquid except polluted oxygen will do. Naphtha is better, but I hadn't set up a plastic melter yet.

Sizing

I build the digestor to support the number of dupes I expect to have by the time all the slime runs out. (Usually 14-16.) An overview of requirements:

• -66.67 kg slime per cycle per dupe
• -80 kg/cyc/dupe filtration media
• -21.5 kg/cyc/dupe coal
• 95.5 kg/cyc/dupe ceramic
• 1.11 deodorizers per dupe
• 5.3 rail segments per dupe in the sublimation chamber
• -37.6 kj/cyc/dupe energy input (based off this 14 dupe install YMMV)

Control Pionts

Weight plates control the rate of oxygen and two thermo sensors control the output temperature.

• Set both weight plates to a full cycle's worth of slime. For, say, ten dupes set them to 667kg. It ends up over-producing a little because the slime comes out in increments of 20kg.
• Set the liquid pipe thermo sensor to the lowest tolerable temperature the coolant can handle. For polluted water, that's 0°C.
• Set the thermo sensor to the expected temperature of the polluted oxygen. For this particular coolant 20°C works well. Fiddle with it if you are using a different coolant. (I derived a formula, but I think it doesn't work in practice.)

Power and heat economy

I've been running this particular version for about a hundred cycles now. It is supporting ten dupes and consumes 376 kj / cycle. Max draw is just over 3 kw, but three coal generators can manage the demand. It is not heat-negative because the deodorizers produce 10kDTU/s, however you can feed it almost any temperature slime and the system will eat up 5.9kDTU/s of that heat. Using super coolant might make it cooling instead of heating. The aquatuner runs at a whopping 1% uptime once stable.

If you convert the machine to produce oxygen from polluted water when the slime runs out you should invert the cooling because pW has four times the heat capacity as pO2. Put heat into the polluted water and chill the resulting oxygen for a magic SHC boost.

Build Plan

This takes a few dozen cycles to get operational. I put it together as I'm developing atmo-suits and heading down to the oil biome to transition into mid-game.

1. Excavate the location, build the insulated perimeter, and set up the outer corner airlock
2. Vacuum out the area
3. As the pumps clear unwanted gasses build the shelves for the aquatuner and the deodorizers. Do not put the liquid separation in yet.
4. Put the chilling pipes and rails in. Cover them with tiles.
5. Build the decontamination room, but don't seal it up until the area is vacuumed out
6. Once in vacuum, build the internal separations. Set up corner locks to keep oxygen and polluted oxygen out of the access shaft.
7. Turn on the slime input to begin collecting slime in the holding room. Do not let it pass to the decontam room yet.
8. Seal up the decontam room and pump it full of chlorine. 2kg/tile is sufficient. I used an external water lock to access the room to remove the gas vent and install the sweeper in its place.
9. Use crude oil (30kg/tile worked for me) to distribute heat from the aquatuner. Fill the cooling loop and power up the aquatuner
10. Run the aquatuner until the system comes to minimum temperature including the granite tiles and chlorine. This will decrease the startup time. Use ice tempshift plates to keep the crude oil bath cold.
11. Fill in the rest of the machinery and rails
12. Mop up the mess made keeping the oil cool and set up the bypass pumps
13. Set the control points
14. Make sure the filtration media is full
15. Seal up the clean oxygen room to prevent dupes from stealing supply tasks. Optionally seal the sublimation room.
16. Reset the timer sensor and enable the conveyor loaders to start slime flowing through the system

Overlays

Spoiler

[Gurgel]

Any reason you are not using the Sublimation Station? It takes 60W and can supply 6 dupes if the pOxygen is cleaned.

[biopon]

5 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Any reason you are not using the Sublimation Station? It takes 60W and can supply 6 dupes if the pOxygen is cleaned.

I can only guess but:

1) Worse conversion rate

2) No clay output

I see the reasons for something like this.

[Occam Blazer]

24 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Any reason you are not using the Sublimation Station? It takes 60W and can supply 6 dupes if the pOxygen is cleaned.

The sublimation station does not consume slime.

[Gurgel]

26 minutes ago, Occam Blazer said:

The sublimation station does not consume slime.

Ah, sorry. You are right of course.

[Yobbo]

6 hours ago, Occam Blazer said:

It can also handle polluted dirt with equal aplomb

You may be rather disappointed if you try this out - p-dirt offgassing is not what it once was.

For p-dirt i estimate... 1120 rail segments per duplicant.

[Gurgel]

5 hours ago, Yobbo said:

You may be rather disappointed if you try this out - p-dirt offgassing is not what it once was.

For p-dirt i estimate... 1120 rail segments per duplicant.

On the plus-side, the Sublimation Station does handle pdirt.

[Occam Blazer]

On 1/23/2022 at 3:14 PM, Occam Blazer said:

Because doors create a vacuum when they open some polluted oxygen will accumulate in the chamber. That's normal. Chlorine is heavier than polluted oxygen so slime will still be decontaminated.

Noticed that all the chlorine in the decontamination chamber had been deleted and it was full of polluted oxygen. However, the temperature of the chamber is -2°C which effectively kills slimelung. I'm gonna rework it next time and just store the collected slime in >2kg chlorine and dose cold slime into the sublimation chamber some other way.

[Unfawkable]

This is a very nice setup, would never have thought of it. But I prefer to use up my slime on Mushrooms to save water I would have used on Bristles instead. Still that water is used by my Diffusers, so I guess it evens out. 

I'm slightly uncomfortable with the amount of sand this would use though, although it's almost infinite it's not really infinite. Then again you'd have to give sand for clay anyway, so good stuff overall. 

[degr]

Look like hell, why not just drop all slime in one large pile? And as I know there is no way how to restore slime (except rocket missions), so why you need so robust setup for non-constant routine?

Spoiler

On this picture I deconstruct tank with polluted water when it become full, and 5 tons of polluted water fall down into PO chamber. There are 1 kg of water on bottom, which allow water from bottle vaporize constantly. Think slime work same way.

 

On picture it almost not work, but first 200-500 cycles there were around 50tons of polluted water and around 600kg PO per tile

 

[Occam Blazer]

16 hours ago, Unfawkable said:

I'm slightly uncomfortable with the amount of sand this would use though, although it's almost infinite it's not really infinite.

I just checked six random vanilla terra maps on ToolsNotIncluded and they all contained over 3,000 tons of sand. On those maps you only need around 400 tons - about 13% 26% (because digging) of the naturally-occurring filtration media. 

11 hours ago, degr said:

Look like hell, why not just drop all slime in one large pile? And as I know there is no way how to restore slime (except rocket missions), so why you need so robust setup for non-constant routine?

Dropping slime in a large pile does not work fast enough. This build is not intended to be sustainable, just a bridge to the endgame. I like having robust systems for oxygenating the dupe habitat.

Really what I wanted was a machine to turn all the slime into ceramic and this just happened to be a nice way to produce cool oxygen for a couple hundred cycles. It gives you some breathing room to go explore the map.

[Unfawkable]

2 hours ago, Occam Blazer said:

It gives you some breathing room to go explore the map.

Get out

[Occam Blazer]

569,800 kg of ceramic (-: