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[Captain Failmore]

Now that saltwater is included in the game, an idea has come to mind during a discussion with some people elsewhere. How about throwing in a new workshop made specifically to distill water?

Think of it as an evaporation-condensation boiler, designed to take in saltwater and process it into fresh water, leaving behind salt. This water could then be stored in a barrel or flow out of the workshop via channel, while the salt is stored in bag or block form. The salt itself could be useful in cooking and trade, and the water supplied would of course be useful as... water. Other forms of non-drinkable water could possibly be processed as well, in the absence of proper wells or a ready source of fresh water, without the additional byproduct of delicious salt.

Workshop Process:

REQUIREMENTS FOR CONSTRUCTION -

Stone Blocks (1)
Steel Bars (1) (For Magma Variant)
Metal Barrel (1)
Bucket (1)
Pipe (1) (Replaces the bucket if the workshop can be attached to a body of saltwater or a channel instead.)

INPUTS -

Salt Water (Delivered by Bucket or Channel)
Any Fuel (Or Magma)

OUTPUTS -

Equivalent or Near-Equivalent Volume of Fresh Water (Emptied into Barrel or Channel)
Salt (1) (Block or Bag)

JOBS -

Furnace Operator

The possibility of only a 'near equivalent' volume of fresh water being output versus the input of saltwater denotes some loss of water due to the inherent inefficiency of the process. Still, if for every seven units of water tossed in, five returned would be acceptable. (Or all of them if you'd prefer.) One unit of salt would be returned every time the process is completed by the operator.

Even if it's possible to retrieve drinkable water from other sources on a map containing saltwater, the workshop could still be valuable for producing salt, which could prove useful as a trade-good and in producing food. (Prepared meals, preserved food rations, bloated tuber chips, etc.)

Thoughts?

[Surma]

This is an interesting idea, and I approve  

One thing this made me think of is a new biome, Salt Flats. Which would be invaluable in the mining of salt as a trade good, although you would have to import almost everything.

[Anticheese]

Or you know, dig into the bedrock.

Thumbs up for this idea! (Although I don't think the metal bucket is necessary though)

[Captain Failmore]

quote:Originally posted by Anticheese:
<STRONG>Or you know, dig into the bedrock.

Thumbs up for this idea! (Although I don't think the metal bucket is necessary though)</STRONG>

Barrel, you mean?

The metal barrel would be for boiling the water, but could be removed as well. (There isn't a barrel present in the still, after all, which always struck me as odd.) It could also be a job-item if the water was stored in barrels.

The bucket would only be useful if water was hauled to the distillery manually instead of channeling it to the site. (Or if it was also bucketed out.)

I wasn't aware that pockets of water were infinite, only aquifers. I was under the impression that they were finite and could drain, and that the water would eventually go away even if you took steps to conserve it. If that's not the case, the water-producing capabilities of a water distillery would be of limited use, but in any case the production of salt would be nice. Assuming salt is present in future versions of the game, boiling it from saltwater would provide a relatively economical and infinitely viable alternative to digging it up from deposits in the ground or importing it at a premium.

[sideburns17]

So I thought to myself, wait a minute, we don't even do this in real life (Middle East, a few other places excepted). Why would dwarves do it? And then I said to myself, well, because they have access to magma. Strictly speaking, if we were to try to do this with wood, it'd be incredibly inefficient. And here's why:

According to my back-of-the-envelope number crunching, it takes 2.57 MJ/liter of water to raise water from 23 C to 100 C and to boil it all off completely.

If we look up wood burning energetics, we see that a value of 30000MJ/cord ( slightly biased source:woodheat.org) for hardwood isn't far off. Note that things like pine would give off less heat. 30000MJ/cord is about 4220.7 MJ/m^3. If we take a chunk of wood the size of a liter of water, 1000 cm^3, and completely burn it, we would get 42.27 MJ out of it. So assuming we have perfect efficiency (WHOA HORRIBLE ASSUMPTION) it would require .061 blocks of wood at 1000 cc's to boil one liter of water. So we'd need a block of wood a quarter the size of a quart of water to get one gallon of water out of the system. IF everything was ideal.

So the 30GJ number for the wood was for perfectly dried wood in a bomb combustion chamber (filled with oxygen for better combustion). Unless your dwarves were seasoning their wood for several years in a sheltered location, and then burn the wood in an oxygen-rich environment, the numbers they'll get out will be much less. New wood has tons of water, so it has to boil that water off as well as combust, meaning less energy out. So let's say that our actual number is 1/4 of 30 MJ, taking into account the various types of non-hardwoods (tower-caps, for instance) that we're burning. So now we need a block of wood the size of a quart of water to boil a gallon of water.

Of course, when we're burning this wood, not all of this heat is going into the water. Far from it. Depending on the quality of the stove, anywhere from 70-90% of that heat is getting radiated away into the surroundings, regardless of the quality of the wood. So if our stove was 20% efficient in burning wood, a significant accomplishment, then we'd be burning a gallon and a quart of water-sized amount of wood to boil one gallon of water.

Add in other inefficiencies, like loss of steam and other thermal factors, and we can quickly see the amount of wood we need going up and up.

Post summary in one line: use magma instead.

Sorry if any of my numbers are off, I'm not a thermo guy. It's interesting to note that you'd need magma in order to boil this saltwater, so you'd have to pick your biome carefully. A volcanic coast line?

[Captain Failmore]

What about coal or coke? Would that burn hot enough to do this efficiently?

[Sukasa]

...Or we coudl take the easy way out and have one log of wood work for x unit of water  TBH, while the idea of needing the right amount of heat is nice, It'd make getting water almost too hard, really.

[Capntastic]

I think that just being able to distill water at a still would be nice.   Likewise, turning ice into water as a constant job option.

[Captain Failmore]

quote:Originally posted by Capntastic:
<STRONG>I think that just being able to distill water at a still would be nice.   Likewise, turning ice into water as a constant job option.</STRONG>

There's another thought, but doesn't glacial ice give off water in summer? I've yet to attempt settling on one so I wouldn't know.

[SheepishOne]

quote: It's interesting to note that you'd need magma in order to boil this saltwater, so you'd have to pick your biome carefully. A volcanic coast line?

My dwarves have always wanted to go to Hawaii