Not your mama's methane cooker

[Sigma Cypher]

This all started with @Lifegrow's Boom Box crude oil to natural gas refinery (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMNuqEq3SEA.  It worked for a while, and the video was very informative.  I also thought there was a possibility of simplifying the design and logic a bit.  Here is my attempt.

How it works:

The part that might not be self-evident from the pictures is the role of the tiles under the aquatuner.  The metal tile provides heat to the liquid methane to turn it into NG in the bottom chamber, and the granite tiles provide enough heat to the condensing chamber floor to melt any solid methane that drops (this can happen if the door pump was closed for a long time).  The insulating tiles are ceramic. 

If I did the math right, a single aquatuner can condense 880 g/s of sourgas (from 539 C to -161C) and at the same time heat about 76 g/s (?? must be wrong) of crude oil from about 90 C to the distillation point (400 C) and on to vaporization of the petroleum at 539 C.  That means our single AT condenser would outpace its ability to cook.

So to keep the oil-cooking AT on requires periodically diverting some supercoolant to something relatively hot, in this case the NG power plant and polluted water pool.  

And to keep condensing when the oil-cooking AT gets too hot, we need a second AT to take over condensation (for about 1/10th of the time).  I put the 2nd AT in the same polluted water pool that the first AT helps cool with its bypass loop.

To heat up the coolant when it gets too cold, a bypass loop made from granite pipes cools down the NG generators and polluted water pool.  I throttled the flow to about 3000 g/s but YMMV depending on how big your coolant reservoir is and how much of a heat load you have.  It's not critical - you know you have it about right if the standby AT comes on a few times a day.

I imagine there is a clever way to avoid having this second aquatuner all together with some automation but I couldn't do it.

Logic:

Standard (?) door pump logic.  Each change of door state is 6 seconds long, otherwise the gas doesn't move in turbo speed.

Two AND gates enable the aquatuners.  The oil cooker AT turns off if the ambient thermosensor gets a few degrees above the petroleum vaporization temperature (I set it to "below" 550 C, which is 25 C shy of when a Niobium AT will start complaining), or if the inlet coolant temperature gets so cold that the AT would freeze the supercoolant (-257.2 C)  The standby condensing AT turns off if the inlet temperature is too cold at either AT inlet (-257.2 C). 

 

The line thermosensor from the cooking AT also enables the bypass valve so that you can start heating the supercoolant reservoir.

A hydrosensor in the cooking chamber turns off the flow of oil if there is more than 800kg of standing petrol. 

A line thermosensor in the condensing chamber tells you if you have overwhelmed the condensing chamber capacity (coolant wamer than -162C) and interrupts the door pump logic.  If there is any cleverness (or I should say, luck) to the design it is this - the first NOT gate isolates the signal from the thermosensor so that its output overrides the normal input of the 2nd NOT gate.  This might actually be worth a second post, unless this is common knowledge already?

I've run this for about 40 cycles and it seems to be stable at 500 g/s crude oil (but preheating the crude a bit would let you get closer to the 880 g/s mark). Good enough for almost 6 natural gas generators.  

Let me know what you think, and if you see a way to streamline this further.

 

[Lifegrow]

Cool build bud, but it looks a heck of a lot more complicated than this 

Spoiler

 

 

[Sigma Cypher]

Very nice.  You put the aquatuner up on mesh tiles to keep the oil from cooling it too much?  I will try that - thank you.  

I also see now that I don't need a door pump when a single door will do.