Factorio Forums

Hello!

I am a huge fan of the game!
I am currently employed as a process engineer for energy development at a large pulp and paper mill in Sweden. I am also a programmer in C++! I would love to add the Kraft process (process of pulping wood into black liquor and cellulose) and burning black liquor to generate steam and recover chemicals to the game as a mod! I was also wondering if it's possible to add more challenging aspects of engineering such as chemical reaction thermodynamics, equilibrium, temperature, endo/exothermic reactions and heat equations to the game to make it more brutally realistic, this may require differential equations or simplified analytical solutions equations to work however . This game reminds me of process simulation software such as ASPEN. I have learned alot about society by playing the game too! I also think this game misses hydraulics and pump head, frictional losses in pipes I could help add these equations. Call me crazy but I think this game is potentially a cool and fun way simulate real world chemical engineering problems that can help us design energy systems in tge real world more efficiently!!

Regards
Francis

I thought about this a while back, but didn't really want to make it (partly due to having only an introductory understanding of chemistry, and partly due to it being a lot of work). A chemical reactor should accept arbitrary ingredients (any item or fluid, though it may be sensible to exclude finished/assembled products), and should continuously run a chemical reaction *simulation. The chemical reactor should be able to, at any time, **directly manipulate the reaction in various ways -- insertion and extraction of any material, agitation, vibration, pressure, heating/cooling (which may preferentially require connection to both hot and cold heat pipes), exposure to radioactive sources, exposure to electrodes (which may preferentially require connection to both powered and unpowered electrical networks), etc. So far as I am aware, Factorio does not support arbitrary chemical mixtures, so a filtering/purification operation will probably be required in order to get usable products out of the reactor, and if there is a need for it, intermediate products flushed out of the reactor can use a dummy prototype with composition stored in a managed shadow-prototype.

(*) Chemical reaction simulation being both the "that's a lot of work" and the "I don't know much about it".

(**) The chemical reactor should also be programmable either through circuit-network signals or through a scripting interface (which another mod providing a more conventional programming language can interface with to make the chemical reactor programmable).