Oil Cooker mk2

[impyre]

EDIT: it worked for about 40 cycles, but the pump eventually overheated. Apparently the temp in the heating chamber spikes up every once in awhile, enough to drive the output up past 275. The heat spike only lasts for a second, but long enough to damage the pump a bit... going to try and fix it. Will update later.

 

I posted my mk1 awhile ago in another thread, it used magma heating but required constant supervision (because it sucked up a lot of heat energy, causing the magma to cool).

What follows is my mk2, but first a few words of warning:

1. It is a pain to build.
2. It is a pain to get running.
3. It requires a decent amount of steel.
4. It requires quite a bit of ceramics (or better).
5. It requires a *constant* supply of oil. (if you run it dry for a minute or two, it isn't terrible... but if it gets too hot, it can take quite a while to cool down)

It is not a build for the faint of heart; however, the rewards are great.

1. It only requires about 520kDTU of heat. (which is barely enough to drop a single 1840kg tile of lava by .2 degrees C)
2. It turns 85C oil into 100C petroleum... cool enough to work with.
3. It requires no maintenance or supervision once running.
4. It only uses 240W of power.

Here's the build:

Spoiler

 

above: overview            below: plumbing

 

below: gas overlay

 

The entire thing runs off of super-heated hydrogen... It's currently running at 186g/s hydrogen and processing 3333.3Kg/s oil. The math suggests it will scale up to a max of 10Kg/s oil at around 555-560g/s hydrogen. It was built only with ceramics and steel, though I used insulation for the outermost walls (since in my non-sandbox game I'll just use a vacuum instead). The room on the right does not have any specific atmosphere requirements. The main heating room works better if filled with chlorine before starting it up. The room on the right filled with petroleum is just a series of three heat exchangers. The next plan is to move the petroleum over to a similar build for producing sour gas, I'm hoping that if I can make this system modular, it will make switching to natgas easier. I initially tried doing an all-in-one build, but I found that two phase changes in the same system made balancing it precariously difficult... it should be easier this way, also each system can be tweaked for max efficiency at the relevant temperatures.

The three transfer loops alternate directions since the liquid flow alternates directions. It should always be a counter-flow, that is, you always want the hot with the hot and cold with the cold (relatively speaking of course). Take the outer heat exchanger loop as an example: starting in the top left, 240C coolant meets 200C oil, heats it up a bit, and moves to the right (where the cool oil is coming from), by the time it gets to the vent it's around 200C. It heats up the oil and cools down even more before traveling down to the output pump. The freshly "cooled" petroleum cools off the output petroleum and the pump, then moves to the hotter side to do even more cooling and absorb as much heat as possible so that it can pre-heat the oil above. The middle loop does the same thing at a slightly higher temperature, and the inner loop is even hotter.

Notes on getting it running:

You will have to work the valve manually until it gets started. Start with 3333kg/s oil or preferably less, and start with around 500-600g/s hydrogen.

Keep an eye on that bit of liquid in front of the radiant gas pipe filled with hydrogen. Once the system starts running you'll see it flicker from black to yellow. Any change in its duty cycle shows whether the system has too much heat being put in, or not enough. You want it to be around 50/50 black/yellow. If it's too cool, it'll be black more than yellow, and if it's getting too hot it'll be yellow more than black. If it's too hot, drop the g/s of hydrogen a bit. I find that I usually end up going from 600-650, straight down to like 450, then 350, then 250, then 200, then 190. If you're good with the valves, attentive to the system, and have quick dupes (or a locked-in dupe), you can get the system up to equilibrium within a normal workday easily... though it may take some practice in sandbox. Also, I used a tank in my hydrogen circulation loop, near the output, to average the output hydrogen temperature so I can monitor that as well. If it drops below 400, then you're definitely running too cold.

Also be aware that catastrophic failures may result in the build needing to be torn down and rebuilt, but that's extremely unlikely. In the event that you end up with some sour gas in your system, it isn't the end of the world as sour gas isn't a terrible insulator... it just isn't as good as chlorine. The biggest risk is flooding the system. If you pump in too much oil, or oil that's too cold, the system will never be able to heat up to operating temperature... one tile of hydrogen just isn't enough. You can prevent having to tear down, empty, and rebuild by putting in an auxiliary heat source that you only turn on in the case of flooding... and just long enough to get it running again... but I haven't had to do this yet. Just make sure to err on the hot side, it's better to have a bit of sour gas in there than have the whole thing flooded with cold oil.

All that having been said, once you get it working in steady-state mode... it doesn't need any more messing, tweaking, or supervision. I have a ten-tile lava heat exchanger for my hydrogen and it hasn't really cooled at all. I expect hundreds of cycles before I'll need to turn up the heat a bit.... just steady petroleum.

[Nativel]

Ok, can ya make video how ya making this w/o sandbox and it's working for some time like 1 cycle.

[impyre]

no, and so far it's already been running 20 cycles without any intervention

[Nativel]

7 minutes ago, impyre said:

no, and so far it's already been running 20 cycles without any intervention

Okay, I have different setup, look it's probably will help with your new branch of making this liquid gold.

There is two videos, second is end of this setup.

 

[impyre]

4 minutes ago, Nativel said:

Okay, I have different setup, look it's probably will help with your new branch of making this liquid gold.

There is two videos, second is end of this setup.

A) My build works fine, and is far more efficient.

B) I was *specifically* trying to *avoid* using space materials for a reason... this build is accessible as soon as you have ceramic and steel... no rocket required.

[Nativel]

20 minutes ago, impyre said:

A) My build works fine, and is far more efficient.

I see.

[Saturnus]

I specifically like the idea of using a gas to transfer heat energy. It's something I've also been using for a while, although I use steam as it has 74% higher SHC and about 9.5% higher thermal conductivity (although that's really not important). Using a gas to transfer heat energy means you can have much cleaner magma volcano set up. If you combine it with a infinite water fall pump to constantly circulate the magma you can for the most part also avoid ever having problem with magma solidifying because you can combine it with an overflow system so that when new magma from the volcano is added some of the old magma is ejected keeping the temperature stable.

[impyre]

22 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

I specifically like the idea of using a gas to transfer heat energy. It's something I've also been using for a while, although I use steam as it has 74% higher SHC and about 9.5% higher thermal conductivity (although that's really not important). Using a gas to transfer heat energy means you can have much cleaner magma volcano set up. If you combine it with a infinite water fall pump to constantly circulate the magma you can for the most part also avoid ever having problem with magma solidifying because you can combine it with an overflow system so that when new magma from the volcano is added some of the old magma is ejected keeping the temperature stable.

Probably switching to steam now lol... I had no idea its conductivity was higher, and the specific heat is much better (which I would've expected)... but I just assumed the conductivity was terrible. I've tried working this five different ways... and I keep running into problems. I think it's mostly the fact that the specific heat for petroleum is higher than oil. The imbalance causes the system to be unstable, and while it can self-correct within reason, this means that no matter how balanced I get it, the pump always overheats some tiny amount once or twice every cycle or so. I think I have to figure out where to extract heat from, and how much to pull out to balance the equation and make it stable. I had a less efficient version of the mk2 working yesterday and it ran for about 80 cycles or so... but I broke it down because the delta-T between input temp and output temp was much higher than I'd like... it was 90C in and something like 180C out. I'm sure it can be better.

Actually... now that I math it out, that's exactly how much heat I was adding... 520kDTU/s. I guess I just need to see if I can get that number down.

[Saturnus]

With the new thermo sensor range going up to 1000C you can probably optimize it quite a lot. The best thing about using superheated gases is that accurate temperature control is much easier since you can use shut off valves to regulate heat much more accurately than old fashioned opening and closing doors, and by varying the gas flow with gas valves.