Simple Metal Volcano Cooling

[malloc]

I have an iron volcano just outside of my starter biome so I came up with this as a late-early, early-mid game solution.  Build was complete before cycle 100.  It requires no plastic and modest exotic materials (850kg of Tungsten for metal tiles and vent and a fair bit of Obsidian for the unnecessary ladders and temp shift plates) so a single cold biome should be enough.

I wasn't ready to setup a fertilizer maker/NG generator setup so I'm dumping the hot water into a sieve which goes to my ice-filled reservoir feeding the plants but I'll switch that once my power setup is complete.

It has now reached equilibrium with the iron sitting at 1100C, metal tiles/door high 300s at the bottom, low 300s at the water.  Water is pumped out and replaced at 110C but there is only a fraction of a degree of increase before the new water hits so this could be pushed closer to the 125C limit of the pump.

Volcano produces 7.6kg/s for 64s every 656s but the water temp rise is so slow this could be used on a larger heat generator.

 

 

The only issue is I have no way to get the refined Iron until the next dormant cycle when it can cool another thousand degrees.

 

[avc15]

3 minutes ago, malloc said:

The only issue is I have no way to get the refined Iron until the next dormant cycle when it can cool another thousand degrees.

Yeah this is an issue I've worked on quite a bit as well. The best solution I have so far is to enter the hot room through a vacuum chamber designed to purge hot gas without breaking my gas pumps.

It'd be quite challenging to make a sweeper work inside the hot chamber, you'd need to circulate a very cool liquid rapidly through a bath. Still haven't tried this one yet.

Some hot gas will get through any vacuum door you make since there's really nothing in the game with the right thermal properties to liquid-lock hydrogen at molten metal temps. You kinda just have to send dupes in atmo suits and then clean up the heat they dump everywhere.

 

[malloc]

That's what I was thinking as well.  A double vacuum chamber -- two small rooms 3x4 each with a door connector.  Pump in the room not connected to the volcano.  Open the door between them and empty them; micro the doors/dupes to allow entry after closing the central door.

So far it's more work than I'm willing to do so I'm waiting for the volcano to go dormant and I'll just come in through the bottom, rapid sweep the iron into a submerged pool and seal the volcano back up again.

[BlueLance]

You could probably set up a three door series to minimise heat bleed. So the 1st and 3rd door are closed and the 2nd door is open, use a pressure plat on both sides to close the middle door and open it again after the dupe goes in and out to delete any excess gas creating a vacuum.

As for cooling the metal, probably best to dump it in a compactor in water that cannot be used for cooling anymore, preferably polluted water. That way you clean water and cool metal. and from there you hopefully have more manageable heat...hopefully

[BionicSandwich]

Are dupes able to pick stuff up through corners? if so, I have an Idea for preventing heat bleed.

[Neotuck]

42 minutes ago, BionicSandwich said:

Are dupes able to pick stuff up through corners? if so, I have an Idea for preventing heat bleed.

Sometimes but not always

[BionicSandwich]

is it dependent on how close the item is to the corner. because if you could pick through corners, you could set up some automation to detect if the iron, or the gas around it, is under a certain temperature, then allow collection by means of doors when it is under that temprature.

[Neotuck]

Sweepers are affected by the item tempature as well and will heat up  by moving the hot iron

[vovik]

Guys, i would give an advice to not expose existing heat deletion methods to forums but instead expose intresting cooling methods that dont exploit code culprits. Overexposing those code culprits in form of glitch-driven designs will force devs to fix them beforehead and make game complete hardcore.

[0xFADE]

Take a look around. There are two pretty similar implementations that use  liquid cooling along with sweepers to collect the ore.

[avc15]

15 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Take a look around. There are two pretty similar implementations that use  liquid cooling along with sweepers to collect the ore.

not in a hot room full of hydrogen. (this method being preferred for extracting heat efficiently into a hot coolant e.g. a boiler)

But to the OP, if all you're trying to do is cool the molten metal, and you're willing to vacuum the chamber instead of blanketing in hydrogen, look for a post by lifegrow. His system uses a cold contact plate (over a tank of cold pwater) to solidify the iron and a sweeper in a liquid bath to collect it.

[0xFADE]

True but you can get a lot of the heat out just through contact with the molten metal with other metal tiles.  People who live in debug probably don't appreciate quite how valuable that metal is when it is finite and you need to leave unrefined metal around for most buildings.

[0xFADE]

It has been gradual and I made far too large of a heat sink but the temperature is now around 500 on all those tungsten and igneous tiles.

[Soulwind]

How in the heck did you get 850 Kg of Tungsten before cycle 100 in survival mode?  I'm typically approaching cycle 80+ before I even penetrate into the first biome outside of the starter.

[malloc]

6 hours ago, Soulwind said:

How in the heck did you get 850 Kg of Tungsten before cycle 100 in survival mode?  I'm typically approaching cycle 80+ before I even penetrate into the first biome outside of the starter.

I go straight to full refining just outside my starter biome early.  Coal power, large battery, heavy watt wires and polluted water coolant.  I do a few batches of iron then remove the battery and wires and replace them with smart battery and conductive wires.  Once I got to the first cold biome getting a ton of wolframite and refining it with the existing setup was trivial.  I typically rush all research so that's done by cycle 50 and I have one of the first three dupes be a dedicated miner so the starting biome is stripped about the same time and I'm ready to start exploring outside at that point which is when I ran into this volcano just to the west.  You can see the wall of my main base there on the right of the pictures.

You can see here the coolant on the left, the cold biome on the bottom left and the refinery.  The coal gen/battery were between the refinery and the scrubber but have now been replaced by the hydrogen gen attached to the exosuits which didn't exist in that early stage yet.  Cold biome now has a variant on Saturnus' oxygen setup.

[FenrirZeroZero]

My Strategy: A big pool of polluted Water under the volcano, room is in vacuum, the liquid metal drips into the water -> solidifies -> lands on trap door. The trap door (or more the 3 trap doors for vacuum insulation) is opened every 2 cycle (memory cells + AND gates + Timer), the water is cooled by an separated aqua tuner that is cooled by a cold slush geyser. (The hot polluted water gets recycled in fertilizer & oxygen plant). The metal is picked up be a sweeper under the trap door. The water that drops out is simply pumped back into the chamber. 

It's an gold metal vulcano, so the metal cools quite fast in the water. (I have quite some heat exchangers in the pool to prevent steamification )

It's large but (beside water & insulation) not too ressource intensive. 

Also you can set up the water tank in the beginning and just use the thermal capacity to deal with 2 or 3 cycles to gather metal for the self maintaining build.

 

My second volcano is refining my oil for me. Big pool of oil -> iron volcano on top -> waiting for the oil to be converted (and since i used far to much oil in the pool... im still waiting for the conversion. But i get metal :D) 

 

Principle of my builds: Pools of liquid big enough that the thermal energy of the vulcano in an active cycle is "tank able" and the cooling can happen in the dormancy.

[Oozinator]

I don't understand why you have a water sieve on top of a hot volcano.
Why not using Volcano to boil polluted water?

[PhailRaptor]

3 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

I don't understand why you have a water sieve on top of a hot volcano.
Why not using Volcano to boil polluted water?

They did indicate their long term goal of using the P-H2O for a FertSynth/NatGas complex.  There is an infrastructure hurdle they are still working on getting over before doing more complex, involved things.  And by putting it through the Sieve, they are using the fixed output temp to delete heat that they probably don't have another way to effectively deal with yet.

[malloc]

Exactly what PhailRaptor said.  It was built when it was too early to build a condensor unit to handle the steam but as the volcano had just gone dormant I wanted to build something with what I had to get it stable and get the iron coming out at the next live cycle.  It's not perfect but it suited the situation!