A Little Mid-Game Plastic Melter

[Occam Blazer]

I'd like to present a little mid-game plastic melter for making naphtha. Nothing fancy, but naphtha is pretty useful. This uses a gold amalgam aquatuner to produce heat and keeps you topped off with as much naphtha as you want. I'll occasionally build another one to melt phosphorite for making natural tiles.

Let's take a tour.

The entire room is in vacuum. Dupes enter on the right (the build can be mirrored too) and drop off plastic in the storage bin. I set it to hold 50kg of plastic and switch off sweep only. Keep this number reasonably low or it will take a long time to melt a batch. The aquatuner kicks on when the bath is below 170°C and heats up the plastic until it melts out of the bin and flows into the collection pool. Beneath the entrance liquid lock is a mechanized airlock which saps heat out of the naphtha to keep the coolant around 70°C and ready to heat more plastic. There is a small blob of crude below the airlock to assist in heat transfer when the door is closed. This is a heat-multiplying process so the aquatuner will not cool the naphtha much.

When the collecting pool fills up to your specification a hydro sensor locks access to the bin and stops accumulating naphtha until you pull some out.

Automation

Spoiler

Not too complicated. The filter gate leaves the mechanized airlock closed for a second allowing the coolant absorb more heat. Set the hydro sensor to whatever buffer of naphtha you want to keep in reserve.

Power

Spoiler

Gold bridges for heat transfer

Plumbing

Spoiler

During start-up this coolant loop needs to extend outside to gather more heat from the environment.

Materials:

• The liquid bath for the aquatuner isn't terribly picky. I have crude and petroleum here. Crude and water (steam), or just steam works fine. Keep the mass low for quick heating.
• Gold amalgam aquatuner. If you want to melt phosphorite you'll need to use steel.
• The pitcher pump should be made from obsidian.
• Heat transfer tiles can be diamond or metal or granite
• Copper ore for the mechanized airlock
• Granite is a good choice for the storage bin
• Gold for radiant pipes and heat transfer bridges
• This thing generates a good amount of heat. Insulate it with the best stuff you have. (Perhaps you built my slime digestor and have more ceramic than you know what to do with.)
• The pneumatic door will break unless you make it out of steel. No big deal since they work when broken. Disable auto-repair on it to save dupe labor.

Build plan:

1. Build the shell.
2. Build the corner liquid locks. I use crude, and some of it spills into the bottom of the coolant heater. That's great.
3. Build the coolant heater. Pop in the plumbing, power, automation and mechanized airlock.
4. Vacuum out the area.
5. This machine needs to take heat out of the environment on startup. Extend the coolant loop through a convenient pool of warm water until some naphtha collects under the pitcher pump. Then the heat multiplying effects of the SHC difference between plastic and naphtha takes over.
6. Build the heater. Don't forget a good tempshift plate behind the aquatuner. Turn it on.
7. Build the rest.
8. Put a tempshift plate made of plastic behind the storage bin (touching the diamond tiles) for your first batch of naphtha. It will take forever to heat up plastic in the bin without a medium.
9. Turn it on and go. Don't forget to disable sweep only.

[Zarquan]

Naphtha is an underrated resource.

[MinhPham]

In early oil boiler I used Naphtha as a coolant for Metal Refinery, since they have larger heat capacity than petroleum, the output temperature won't go above 538C when you need to maintenance ~410C pool without the risk of breaking pipes (yup i was refining steel while cooking oil).