Digging by the Metal refinery

As you know, when digging ore, manually by dups or Robo-miner, we get only 50% of the block mass. It is especially unfortunate to lose rare ores, such as wolframite. With map generation, you might be unlucky to get only a couple of dozen tons of it, and if there is also no asteroid with tungsten, it can be a problem. This article describes the idea of melting wolframite (or any other ore/mineral), which was proposed in this thread by Prince Mandor, Hjoyn, mathmanican and others. The essence of the proposal - to heat steel to a high temperature (about 3200 ° C), heated with it a small amount of steam, which will melt the wolframite.

The Metal refinery can use as its coolant any liquid from water and oil, to molten metal. Depending on the recipe and the type of coolant, it will increase its temperature by a certain number of degrees.

The least heat-intensive recipe is melting gold. In this case, the coolant is heated only from 3.13 ° C (supercoolant), to 204.62 ° C (liquid gold). The most heat-consuming is steel - which gives a heating of, for example, 1169.63° C for glass and 1811.82° C for gold.

But gold and glass will turn to gas at temperatures well below 2926.8°C (the melting point of wolframite), while steel will do. Its vaporization temperature is 3826.8°C.

Getting liquid steel
There are at least 2 ways to produce liquid steel: operation of a Kiln and AT in a vacuum.

The kiln method, the slowest, as the kiln only produces 20 kDTE/s of heat. This scheme uses 3 kiln, which after melting them will produce only 600 kg of steel, which the pump will collect and place in a liquid reservoir. Instead of the reservoir, the steel can be pumped directly into the tungsten smelting circuit.

A similar use of the pump was described in the Plumbing article. Since the circuit is temporary, the naphtha is cooled by a metal tile surrounding the atmosphere with an automation bridge.


 * Mesh tiles: steel
 * Hydrosensor and automation wires: tungsten
 * All other common materials: copper, ceramic, granite

Tungsten smelting
The liquid steel enters the Metal refinery and is heated each time by +605.98°C. If its temperature after leaving the machine is lower than 3200°С, it enters the storage and immediately to the inlet of the machine. If higher, it spills over onto the diamond tile.

There it heats up the steam, and when it cools down below 3170°С it is pumped into the storage. The cycle repeats.

The order of starting the scheme is as follows: initially there is vacuum in the tungsten chamber. We wait a few cycles for liquid steel to heat diamond blocks and diamond tempshift plate (to about 3000°C). We run some water into the circuit to get just a little bit of steam (about 10 g/cell). As the chamber with ore heats up, we bring steam pressure up to 100...150 g/cell.

It will probably take 2...3 times as long, because the tungsten was already at room temperature and the amount of tungsten was not large.
 * At about cycle 17, the liquid vent and the section of the steel pipe will melt.
 * On cycle 21 we will get the first portion of tungsten
 * On cycle 23 all the wolframite will be melted


 * Thermosensor pipe: >3200°C
 * Hydrosensor: >0
 * Thermosensor (steam chamber): <3150°C
 * Window tile and tempshift plate: diamond
 * Liquid vent and tube: steel
 * Hydro sensor, automatics wire: wolframite
 * Other: ceramic, copper

Since the circuit is temporary, I took the liberty of cooling the oxygen near the metal refinery with Wheezewort and the metal tile with ambient oxygen. The metal refinery is in a recess so that a layer of carbon dioxide would form near it. It will reduce the heat transfer from the ceramic pipes to the liquid steel.

All three circuits should be supplemented with a turbine over the vacuumed part and a water supply so that the circuits can be cooled at the end of their work.

Liquid steel can be reused, in another part of the map, if it is transported in an insulated pipe, with a volume not exceeding 10%.

Blueprint
Tungsten smelting