magma [Solved] Help! My Meteor Magmaficator works too well!

[Sevio]

Edit: Solved here:

I've been working on a regolith to magma/igneous rock maker that I'm dubbing the Meteor Magmaficator, but it's working either too well and melting the input in the heat exchanger before it gets to the melting room or when I stop adding heat, it grinds to a halt when temperatures settle right at magma's freezing point and because of the automation to prevent overheating I can't get it going again without flipping a weight plate on and off.

I'm a little bit stumped on how I can avoid both of these problems so I would appreciate some help! Save attached, if you download it you will have to refine some metal (using insta build mode) and then toggle one of the weight plates on and off briefly to get some new heat into the system.

Meteor Magmaficator.sav

[Coolthulhu]

In ONI, you need at least 5C difference in heat to get a phase change. You can't melt rock with just-barely-liquid magma, nor you can solidify magma with just-barely-solid igneous rock.

To avoid overheating in the heat exchange, you could try not heating it up to magma temperature. You could use liquid gold + weight plate as a thermometer.

[Sevio]

The two compactors are set to allow only 20 kg (one packet) of regolith inside them and when the machine started to reach equilibrium I've been monitoring the temperature closely whenever it melts something. Maybe it's due to the small size but iirc the packets seem to melt at exactly 1410 C every time (melting point 1409.9 C), it doesn't require nearly a 5 C difference in this case.

Isn't gold's melting point somewhere between 1000 and 1100 C? I would be giving up over 300 degrees of preheating that will have to come out of the metal refinery instead... But if nothing else would work I guess that's a price I have to pay.

Another thought I had is making the heat exchanger smaller but I'm not sure if that will eventually still result in overheating since the exchanger still has liquid magma and/or molten glass going through it and one refinement of iron or steel is enough for quite a lot of magma being produced. It could lead to problems if regolith supply ever ran out and you have to send new regolith in after the exchanger has overheated.

[Sevio]

I'm happy to say I managed to get it working, and oh my is it incredibly efficient! The incoming regolith is heated to 1409.1 C just from the outgoing magma, less than one degree from melting. So once everything had temperature stabilized after running it a while, I cleared the output tray and ran the glass forge 40 times to see how much igneous rock I got.

In:

• 4 tons of sand
• Power
• 8 cycles time

Out:

• 1 ton of glass
• 6.8 tons of igneous rock

That's 70 % more rock I got back than the sand I put in! Since you can crush igneous rock into sand, you can make glass and more igneous rock (and plenty of heat for a steam turbine) indefinitely! If you refine any metals with the included metal refinery, (especially steel) you'll produce far more than this from just one refinement.

The solution was, quite literally, smarter automation.

Instead of trying to detect debris on the ground as a "cold" indicator, we can replace a compactor with a smart compactor! Combined with a filter gate set to 30 seconds means that the melting room will be considered "cold" after 30 seconds of nothing melting from the smart compactor. We also make a "dry" indicator with the hydro sensor (above 50 kg), inverting it and filtering that. The room will be considered "dry" if there is less than 50 kg for 5 seconds or longer.

Hot liquids are only allowed into the melting room if the room is "cold" and "dry". "Cold" by itself already prevents overheating if there's a lot of very hot liquid available such as from the metal refinery but "dry" prevents overheating if the magma pipes back up during intense use of the refinery such as with the steel recipe. (There's capacity for 4 kg/s magma in the heat exchanger plus 1 kg/s molten glass)

If you ever run out of power or regolith supply, the whole thing will stop safely.

The effect of these conditions is that the melting room is always hovering at or just above magma's phase change point, but the filter gate conditions push the system out of idle state whenever hot liquids are available. The last change is that I changed the molten glass pipe to also run with tungsten through one tile of magma. That cools the molten glass down enough that it never melts any regolith in the heat exchanger later.

I've attached the fixed save in case anyone would like to poke around or replicate it.

Meteor Magmaficator.sav

[Sevio]

It looks like there is still a small chance of regolith input melting in the heat exchanger, maybe it happened when I spammed both glass and steel refinement at the same time. It was only 2x 20 kg in a lot of cycles though, so it could be managed with decent access to the exchanger by dupes.

To deal with all the hot rock this thing produces, I added a standard self-pressurizing steam turbine and ran the hot rocks on conveyors through a hot plate made of diamond. With some tweaking to the thermo switches and toggling the doors under the steam turbine, it can be switched between an efficient power mode and cooling as fast as possible.

An auto sweeper using the diagonal extraction trick pulls out the rock whenever the hot plate temperature drops low enough.

That works while there is a steady supply of hot rocks, but while starting up or when reheating the hot plate after hot rocks ran out, it fails and the sweeper will just take all the hot rock it can get before it has given off enough of its heat to the hot plate. I could make the hot plate bigger but I think that it might get excessively large for what it is....

Forgot to attach the save file, here it is:

Meteor Magmaficator.sav