Volcano and Glass Based Regolith Melting Petroleum Refiner and Polluted Water Purifier

[axxionx12]

On the eve of the rocketry update, I give you the Volcano and molten glass based regolith melter, petroleum refinery, and polluted water purifier. This will be a long post that can also be viewed at https://imgur.com/gallery/RAPA6WO

 

Ignore the miscellaneous other structures. I initially built this in debug mode and then in my actual game. This is my current setup and I have run it for 50+ cycles without issues. The heat sources for this are the shown volcano ( 15 tons of magma per 15 cycles with ~55% uptime) AND 4 glass forges above the build. All air is pumped out of every chamber. The tube system is used to allow dupes to retrieve rock and glass as it is cooled in the oil. Starting from the top, magma enters the system via the volcano. It drips below where regolith is shipped in and melted, which creates more heat. Once the magma reaches the level you see above, the door opens in 0.6 second intervals to drop small amounts of magma into the drip chamber. From there, the magma splits roughly in half and hits the doors. It almost instantly becomes rock, but never becomes a block that must be dug, which is the entire purpose of this chamber. There is a wolframite mesh tile between the tiles above the doors to allow any magma to even out if it does not immediately freeze. There is a manual door opening hydro sensor in the oil containers that allow you to drop the rock into the oil to be cooled further. The role of the glass will be explained in the piping layout. The center metal pillar is made of tungsten. It conducts heat with the help of diamond shift plates down to the oil containment area. The doors you see just above the oil are because the fluid dynamics are wonky and on occasion, the dripping glass would vaporize small amounts of petroleum into NG (SG with the new patch) and ruin the vacuum. Once the crude oil becomes petroleum, the crude oil reservoirs pump more oil into the refinery wells (2 pumps per side). This pushes the petroleum over the edge and into the cooling well. A pump in the middle is temperature controlled with iron doors to allow it to safely pump petroleum to power plants or to fuel rockets. The petroleum boils polluted water (currently with Expressive update level SHC), which is cooled below with another polluted water cooling loop. The materials are temperature appropriate with wolframite being used for the volcano room door and the 3 doors on each side of the dripping room. Tungsten is used for all metal tiles and diamond for all temp shift plates. Any feedback/ criticism is welcome. This is 1 way of doing this and it certainly isn't the only way. Improvement and tricks are always welcome.

 

The piping system shows the path of the molten glass above. Molten glass is pumped down through the magma to add heat to the system when the volcano is not working. It is looped to ensure the most heat is dumped into the magma as possible.  Note that you MUST have insulated abyssalite piping everywhere except the radiant pipes. The radiant pipes should be allowed to fully submerge in magma from the volcano prior to producing any molten glass or you will get freezing pipe damage. The molten glass ultimately lands below the triple doors but above the single door. This allows it to quickly freeze (it'll stay liquid if it exits with the igneous rock at the level of the dripping chamber)

Next, the oil entering from the top of the reservoirs with 2 pumps at the bottom. I used an airflow tile to push air out prior to sealing it. Once the oil begins to turn into petroleum, the pumps are activated and pump oil to cool the petroleum and push it to the collecting level. The pump in the petroleum collecting area is cooled by the polluted water and iron doors that close when the petroleum on one side is too hot. They tend to balance out pretty well overall.

Down below, incoming oil cools the steam as it comes in. In addition, polluted water is pumped in to cool down the petroleum. The steam goes downward where it is cooled by incoming crude and below that, I have another polluted water loop that cools steam down before i destroy the heat with water sieves.

 

Automation is pretty simple with the exception of the volcano room. I used tungsten in the volcano room due to the intense heat. What you see in the volcano room is a hydro sensor 1 tile above the shipping rails set to turn on when it's above 1500. This goes to an AND gate that is tied to 2 hydro sensors in the dripping room to prevent magma buildup. This AND gate then links up with another AND gate that activates the door. 

On the far left is a simple dual buffer gate designed to open the door for 0.6 seconds every 15 seconds. The right buffer gate is set for 15 seconds, which connects to another buffer gate set to 0.6 seconds, which is looped to a NOT gate that links back up with the 15 second buffer gate. As long as there is enough magma above and no magma below, the door will open on this interval.

In the refining chamber, the hydro sensors are set to active when <800kg. 1 tile of petroleum under normal pressure will only reach 740kg while Crude oil will cap out at about 870. By setting the central hydro sensors to <800kg, the system can "sense" when petroleum is being created and add more crude oil.  Again, fluid dynamics are wonky, so occasionally you'll get more crude per tile, but it'll turn into petroleum and spill over the side regardless.

Below the oil refinery are 2 temperature sensors set for active if <120C. This keeps the pump from overheating when a sudden surge of petroleum adds heat to one side or the other. To test the resiliency, I even added a ton of heat to the system via 2 full eruptions of magma in less than 1 cycle and the pump did not have any issues.

Finally, the polluted water hydro sensors. You need a lot of them because fluid dynamics again are wonky and a single tile can build up several tons of polluted water, which can destroy the tiles above or below the system. Because of the way automation works, a single positive single turns the entire grid green, so I had to invert everything. All hydro sensors are set to above 500kg with a NOT gate before the pumps. This prevents any single tile from building up too much water and breaking things.

 

 

The power scheme is pretty simple. I must note that the transit tube access terminals are on their own circuit while the rest of the system AND The oil pumps are on a single circuit. The only circuit overload I encountered was when all of the gas pumps were on during the system priming.

 

 

The ventilation is pretty straight forward without much issue. 1 mistake I made was piping straight through the gas pumps in the dripping chamber. All pipes are made of abyssalite, which is probably overkill.

 

 

Finally, the Shipping system. This is incredibly simple. It moves regolith on wolframite rails to a wolframite storage container where it waits to be melted by magma.

 

Just in case my explanation doesn't fully answer your questions, I have attached the save file so you can watch it work/tinker with it. Note, it's a large file and I have several other builds in there (ignore the infinite gas storage setup....)

 

Final Final Glass Build.sav