Creating biomass?

[dupa]

In the past, I used to recycle plants and pass them through centrifuge to get biomass. Now the same process yields reagent mix. What is the correct way to make biomass?

[God, owner of the Universe]

This is the way.

I did create biomass repeatedly days ago on Beta like this: Shred potatoes. Toss that reagent mix from the recycler into the electric centrifuge. So ... I don't know what to tell you.

[dupa]

Thanks for answering, I got it working. I was trying to recycle a cooked potato, the centrifuge said "potato" after it was processed and it spit out reagent mix. Now I tried it with raw potatoes and it worked.

[God, owner of the Universe]

xD
Wait, you can shred a cooked potato,
and that will give you a potato after the centrifuge? Is it edible, can it be cooked?

[dupa]

It gives a potato reagent mix, I didn't try doing anything with it.

[Tanqard]

I just wait for the food to spoil before tossing it into the recycler.

[God, owner of the Universe]

I have shredded many a potato (and then centrifuged to biomass) in recent days on Beta. But those were all raw, not cooked.

[powerkek]

And there's no other way to make Biomass? I noticed the Stationpedia entry says it contains 8mol Volatiles each, but if it comes out of a centrifuge then the gas is always deleted.

Or maybe that's just a leftover from way back when centrifuge didn't remove gases.

[God, owner of the Universe]

The centrifuge still removes gases. But please notice that it doesn't *delete* them, it *releases* them. I'll leave the next thoughts to an engineer's mind.

[karel2501]

Originally posted by powerkek:

And there's no other way to make Biomass? I noticed the Stationpedia entry says it contains 8mol Volatiles each, but if it comes out of a centrifuge then the gas is always deleted.

Or maybe that's just a leftover from way back when centrifuge didn't remove gases.

The gas neither released nor deleted. It's contained in the biomass itself. You need to further process it to release the volatiles.
Easiest way to do that is by turning the biomass into charcoil, e.g. "roasting" the biomass (ideally, using an arc furnace).
Keep in mind that the arc furnace creates enough heat to make those volatiles instantly react with any oxygen that might be around. To safely capture volatiles from biomass, make sure the arc furnace is place in small vacuum chamber, or a room filled with innert gas. Otherwise, the volatiles released will instantly ignite, and aside from losing valuable gas, it's not hard to kill yourself. Vacuum works better, because you will want to suck out the atmosphere once the roasting process is done, to capture the volatiles anyway. Aside from volatiles, roasting biomass also produces some pollutant, so be ready to separate them either via atmospherics kit, or use the condesation trick.

This is the only way of producing volatiles (and consequently, water) on ice-less planet runs. The amount of volatiles you can produce from biomass this way is pretty wild.

An alternative way of getting volatiles from biomass is via composter. Both types of composters actually release volatiles much like when you roast the biomass in a furnace. HOWEVER, composters do consume water, which makes it a hydrogen net loss process as far as I can tell - if you are making volatiles to supply yourself with water, the amount a composter will consume will be greater than the amount you could generate via H2O combustion.
Anyway, much like when making charcoil, keep in mind the easy ignition, and make sure your composters are in an atmosphere where either no oxygen is present, or at least there are no things that could spark it.

[powerkek]

Seeing some conflicting info here. Maybe it's just the stuff you get from traders that doesn't have any gas in it? I took those stacks of 25x Decayed Food through the whole Recycler->Centrifuge->Art Furnace chain in a vacuum sealed room, and there was no gas produced at any point.

Composter seems to work, it releases more volatiles that what's contained in the water it uses up. But It's hard to tell how much exactly.