Author Topic: Metalurgy  (Read 10184 times)

Toupie

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Metalurgy
« on: October 14, 2013, 05:13:45 pm »
It's simple enough to automate the manufacturing of most metal bars. But Bronze Bars and Stainless Steel Bars are very difficult to automate since they need to mix correctly before being cooled.

Could it be possible to make the Melting Furnace not expel the melted metal before you tell it to with for example a BlackRock Blue or could we have some machine that can read the metallurgy mix and only let them pass when it is correct?

It is possible to store the melted metal in an Atomic compressor by having and Voxel Dematerialize store it there. But that seems to ruin the metallurgy mix. Those melted metals always make Defective Alloy when cooled.

olive

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Re: Metalurgy
« Reply #1 on: October 14, 2013, 07:41:45 pm »
Yep, it's difficult automating the fabrication of some of the alloys. But we really want some challenges in Blackvoxel. Some future high end alloys will be even more difficult to make.

But we are also thinking about items that will help making alloys and understanding what is done. First, an heating machine that will re-heat the melted alloy preventing it to cool down where you doesn't want it to(in the mixing tank). And yes, some way to analyse the molten alloy before it is cooling down like they do in real life factories.
In the test phase, we used a kind of analyser and we had found it's very fun to play with that. But we hesitate between an analyser unit, some kind of "analysing goggles" that might also give informations about some other voxels. Another idea we will certainly do anyway is to give to the programmable robot the ability to get some detailed informations about a voxel. That would include some of the alloy composition.

The Blackvoxel Team

Qon

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Re: Metalurgy
« Reply #2 on: October 14, 2013, 10:32:37 pm »
Sounds really good olive!

@Toupie Doesn't a sequencer achieve that already?

Toupie

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Re: Metalurgy
« Reply #3 on: October 15, 2013, 12:37:32 am »
@Qon:
The Sequencer can feed to Melting Furnace so it produces molten metal, but it can't handle the already molted metal.
When you make Stainless Steel you need to melt 7 iron, 2 chrome and 1 nickel, and all those 10 blocks of molten metal needs to touch for the metallurgy to mix. If you cool the molten metal before they have all touched you will get unpredictable result like 4 iron ore and bunch of defected ally.

So the only sure way to automate it as it is now is to make a conveyer belt that holds as many molten metal that are needed to produce the correct metallurgy mix (for stainless steel that mean 10,20,30....) and put a Selective Mover at the end that only moves them of the conveyer belt once they have cooled of into Stainless Steel Bars. But this is a very slow way.

See my image for a working factory


Yves

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Re: Metalurgy
« Reply #4 on: February 26, 2019, 11:04:40 pm »
This is not the only way.
I have an efficient and reliable production of bronze and stainless steel, taking a ground surface of roughly 10×5 voxels.

Oh, well, let me publish the related article now :-) Here it is:
http://yalis.fr/cms/index.php/post/2019/02/24/Fun-with-Kanban%2C-episode-2