Thermal Evaporation Plant

The Thermal Evaporation Plant is a Mekanism multiblock that’s used to boil Water down into Brine, and then Brine down into Liquid Lithium, using nothing but heat. It’s a hollow tower with a 4×4 base that can be anywhere from 3 to 18 blocks tall, and it’s built from Thermal Evaporation Blocks with one Thermal Evaporation Controller somewhere in its walls.

It doesn’t use any power, so the heat will usually come from up to 4 Advanced Solar Generators sitting in the top corners, which get a full-height plant up to 640 mB of Brine a tick in daylight. You’ll need Brine for Sodium, Chlorine and Lithium, so most players will want one of these built before they start on 4x ore processing or a reactor.

How to Build It

There are three parts to craft. Thermal Evaporation Blocks are made 4 at a time from 4 Steel Ingots around a Copper Ingot, and you’ll be making a lot of them. The Thermal Evaporation Valve takes 4 of those blocks around an Advanced Control Circuit, whereas the Thermal Evaporation Controller needs 5 blocks, 2 circuits, a Glass Pane and a Bucket.

Thermal Evaporation Block

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Thermal Evaporation Valve

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Thermal Evaporation Controller

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The footprint will always be exactly 4×4, and it’s only the height that you’re able to change. Inside, there’s a 2×2 column of air running from just above the floor all the way out of the top, as the plant has no lid. If anything is placed inside that column, or over the opening at the top, then it won’t form.

When we say any part, that’s a Thermal Evaporation Block, a Valve, the Controller or Structural Glass, which you might want in the walls to be able to see the fluid level. The floor rim and the four corner columns are the frame though, and they’ll only accept plain Thermal Evaporation Blocks.

How Many Blocks You Need

The count works out at 12 positions for every block of height, as the open top cancels out the filled floor. Here’s what that looks like at a few sizes, with the Brine each one will make from 4 solars in a temperate biome like Plains.

The smallest plant, with its Controller and one Valve, will cost you 44 Steel Ingots, 11 Copper Ingots and 3 Advanced Control Circuits. A full-height one with two Valves comes to 228 Steel Ingots and 57 Copper Ingots, so it’s worth starting small and building upwards later, as you’re able to add layers without losing anything.

Where the Controller and Valves Go

You’ll need exactly one Thermal Evaporation Controller, and it can’t sit on the frame. That leaves the wall positions between the corner columns, the middle of the floor, or the ring around the top. Most players put it in a wall at eye level, as that’s where you’ll right-click to see the temperature and the production rate.

Thermal Evaporation Valves go in those same positions, and the plant will form without any at all. You’ll want at least two though, one for Water coming in and one for Brine going out, and a third if you plan to heat it with a Resistive Heater. Any Valve is able to do either job, so they don’t have to be set up as inputs or outputs.

How It Works

Once it’s formed, the plant only has two recipes. It’ll turn 10 mB of Water into 1 mB of Brine, or 10 mB of Brine into 1 mB of Liquid Lithium, depending on which one you pump in. That means Lithium needs two passes, either through the same plant after you’ve emptied it, or through a second plant that’s fed by the first.

How fast it works is decided by its temperature and its height, and nothing else. The plant takes its temperature in Kelvin, subtracts 300, and multiplies what’s left by 0.4 for a full-height tower, with shorter ones getting a share of that based on their height. So a plant at 1,900 K that’s 18 blocks tall will make 640 mB a tick, whereas a 9-block one makes 320.

The input tank holds 256 buckets for every block of height, so it’s rarely going to be a problem. The output tank is the one to watch, as it’s only 10 buckets at every size, and a big plant will fill that in under a second. When it’s full the plant just stops, so the Brine has to be pulled out all the time.

Heating It with Advanced Solar Generators

The plant looks for Advanced Solar Generators in the four corners of its top layer, which are the positions the frame leaves empty. The generator’s base block goes into the corner itself, level with the top ring, and not on top of a block placed there. A basic Solar Generator won’t work, it has to be the advanced one.

Each one adds heat while more than half of its panel has a clear view of the sky during the day, and they’ll carry on making power as normal while they do it. Rain cuts their power output, but it doesn’t reduce the heat they give the plant. Adding more of them helps a lot more than you’d expect, as the temperature goes up with the square of the count.

Those figures are what the plant settles at, and it takes a while to get there. From cold, 4 solars will have it at half temperature in under 2 minutes and close to full after about 7. It’ll lose all of that within a few minutes of the sun going down, so a solar plant only really works during the day.

Height doesn’t change the temperature, only how much the plant makes at that temperature. The biome matters a little, as a plant starts from the temperature of the air around it. That’s 300 K in Plains, about 330 K in a Desert, Badlands or Savanna, and as low as 280 K in Snowy Plains.

Heating It with a Resistive Heater

Solars aren’t the only way to heat the plant, as a Resistive Heater will turn FE into heat and pass it into whatever it’s touching. For the plant, it has to be placed against a Thermal Evaporation Valve, as that’s the only part that takes heat in. The Controller and the plain blocks will ignore it.

You’ll set how much power the heater draws in its own screen, and the table shows roughly what’s needed to hold a plant at each temperature with no solars at all. These are in FE a tick (1 FE is 2.5 J), in a 300 K biome.

The two can be used together as well. A full-height plant that already has 4 solars only needs about 290 FE/t of heater on top to sit at the 3,000 K cap during the day, which takes it from 640 to 1,080 mB/t. Running the heater at around 1,250 FE/t on its own will keep it at the cap day and night instead.

The calculator below puts all of that together for your own plant. You’ll set the height, the number of solars, the biome and any heater power, and it shows the temperature the plant settles at and how much Brine or Liquid Lithium it’ll make each tick.

Why It Won’t Form or Makes Nothing

There are two different problems that players run into here. Either the plant won’t form at all, which the Controller will tell you about when you right-click it, or it forms fine but the production stays at 0. The second one is nearly always down to temperature.

That 300 K figure is fixed, and it isn’t adjusted for the biome. In Plains the air is 300 K, so a plant with no heat source makes nothing at all. In a Desert it’ll sit at about 330 K, which is enough for a full-height plant to make 12 mB a tick with no solars, whereas in a cold biome it’ll need heating before it does anything.

Upgrades and Automation

The plant doesn’t take any upgrades, so the only ways to speed it up are more height and more heat. Water usually comes from an Electric Pump over a single Water source, piped into any Valve. It’ll use ten times what it makes, so a full-height plant with 4 solars drinks 6,400 mB of Water a tick, which is seven pumps with 8 Speed Upgrades each.

For the output, run a Mechanical Pipe from another Valve and sneak-right-click the connection with a Configurator until it’s set to pull. You’re also able to fill and empty the plant by hand, using the tank slots in the Controller’s screen. A Comparator placed against a Valve will read how full the input tank is.

Brine then goes to an Electrolytic Separator for Sodium and Chlorine, or into a second plant to be boiled down again. That second plant is able to be much smaller, as it only has a tenth of the fluid to deal with. Lithium covers the rest of that chain, through to Lithium Dust and Tritium.

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