oil refineries 10kg crude oil in, 10kg oil out

[socooo]

And that's really what I want to talk about today -- refineries.

The refinery machines provided in the game are high input and low output, but easy enough to obtain.Unfortunately, we can only get 5kg of oil and a small amount of natural gas from 10kg of crude oil, so I made an independent refinery - no manpower required but fully automatic.

The hot oil that is produced undergoes nine cycles of cooling until it reaches a temperature almost identical to that of the input crude.At the same time, the oil was heated nine times to 398 degrees Celsius.Eventually, only a small amount of heat is needed to convert crude oil into oil.

This is the energy required by the whole device in one cycle (about 450kj).

More details about the installation follow:

High pressure liquid storage is used on the top, but there are some small problems: the oil tank below cannot be empty, otherwise the liquid cooler will not be able to absorb heat from the crude oil below. The more common device is given in video, but more space will be needed to hold the liquid.

video link:https://www.bilibili.com/video/av42094156/

So there's an interesting cycle: from the reservoir, 3.3kg of water -10kg of crude oil -10kg of oil - oil generators -3.75kg of sewage -3.6kg of water - and back to the reservoir.

We can get carbon dioxide, a little water, a lot of energy and some heat.

[Chuckh]

Very cool! I'm just imagining trying to set this up with dupes...  And failing haha.

[socooo]

29 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

你最好第一次就把它弄好！

If you are worried, you can refer to the building method in video, which provides the space for maintenance and upgrade

[Zarquan]

I think you may have a slight overheating problem.  The specific heat of petroleum is higher than crude oil, so heat is added in to the system when you "boil" it.  Over time, I believe this setup will heat up without an external cooling source.  Not as much as a nat gas boiler though. 

I like the staged cooling system.

[blash365]

@socooo: sweet design, as always. but could you kindly elaborate on what happens in the aquatuner chamber? I dont see why the atmosphere changes phase.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, blash365 said:

@socooo: sweet design, as always. but could you kindly elaborate on what happens in the aquatuner chamber? I dont see why the atmosphere changes phase.

It's supercoolant.

[blash365]

29 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

It's supercoolant.

 

32 minutes ago, blash365 said:

I dont see why the atmosphere changes phase.

That was my guess as well, but why does it change phase? The aquatuner heats it up, but how is it cooled down?

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, blash365 said:

 

That was my guess as well, but why does it change phase? The aquatuner heats it up, but how is it cooled down?

It's cooled down by the tempshift plate that reaches through the insulated plates to the cooker.

[Gus Smedstad]

It's being used as a temperature monitor. I saw some older builds, before you could set temperature sensors above 300 C, which used supercoolant evaporation to check if an oil boiler was getting too hot. Here, there's an atmosphere sensor that turns the aquatuner off as soon as the supercoolant turns to gas and creates pressure.

Personally, when I built a boiler, I put the aquatuner directly into the crude oil, and put a couple of temperature sensors in there. One if the pool is below 405, so the boiler stops adding oil, and one if it goes above 425, which shuts off of the aquatuner. Maybe I'm being paranoid about the latter - I was wondering what would happen if it got hot enough to turn the oil into petroleum while it's still in the pipe.

[melquiades]

Is the heat from the aquatuner going through the insulated tiles to the oil? Why is that?

[PhailRaptor]

7 minutes ago, melquiades said:

Is the heat from the aquatuner going through the insulated tiles to the oil? Why is that?

There is most likely a Tempshift Plate behind both the Atmo Sensor and the Liquid Vent.  For thermal calculations, Tempshift Plates are making thermal contact with all 8 of the spaces around them, and as such are able to conduct the heat diagonally between the Insulated Tiles.

[socooo]

18 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I think you may have a slight overheating problem.  The specific heat of petroleum is higher than crude oil, so heat is added in to the system when you "boil" it.  Over time, I believe this setup will heat up without an external cooling source.  Not as much as a nat gas boiler though. 

I like the staged cooling system.

If viewed as a separate system, the heat increases as a whole, but in reality, the unit has an output-oil drain.If you want to lower the oil discharge temperature, lowering the oil input temperature is a good choice.For example, if you put in 50 degrees Celsius of oil and produce 60 degrees oil, no matter how much oil you put in, you won't overheat(and all the possible heat was added to the 10 degrees).

You don't have to worry about the stability of the whole thing, it runs on my computer for over 100 hours with no problem.

15 hours ago, blash365 said:

@socooo: sweet design, as always. but could you kindly elaborate on what happens in the aquatuner chamber? I dont see why the atmosphere changes phase.

thank youI used a Tempshift Plate in the corner.The role of that radiator is to heat the oil from 398 degrees Celsius to between 402 and 403 degrees Celsius, and the heat transfer from 50 degrees Celsius to 398 degrees Celsius is done before the input.

10 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

It's being used as a temperature monitor. I saw some older builds, before you could set temperature sensors above 300 C, which used supercoolant evaporation to check if an oil boiler was getting too hot. Here, there's an atmosphere sensor that turns the aquatuner off as soon as the supercoolant turns to gas and creates pressure.

Personally, when I built a boiler, I put the aquatuner directly into the crude oil, and put a couple of temperature sensors in there. One if the pool is below 405, so the boiler stops adding oil, and one if it goes above 425, which shuts off of the aquatuner. Maybe I'm being paranoid about the latter - I was wondering what would happen if it got hot enough to turn the oil into petroleum while it's still in the pipe.

Yes, the device has been built in previous versions, but changes to the temperature sensor have made it more accurate.We used to use hydraulic sensors to detect fluctuations in flow, but you know, it's still a little rough.So now we're looking at a completely optimized device

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm more impressed that he's getting it to 398 with just 60-ish pipe segments. There was a rather long thread here about reverse flow heat exchangers, and the designs tended to be longer for that kind of efficiency.

... unless the radiant pipes are Thermium and not gold. I was assuming gold. If they're thermium, this setup is actually not very efficient at all compared to a dead-simple pipe snaking back and forth.

My boiler's based on John Francis's design in that thread. It's very large (200 gold pipe segments), but fairly heat efficient. It doesn't use supercoolant, and the only thermium involved is the aquatuner.

In actual operation it's produced a lot less than 10kg/s, mainly because I haven't been running the aquatuner full-time. I've been running polluted water through it and using it to cool large sections of my base, but that's reached a point where my industrial areas are at 0 C and my residential areas are at 10-15 C.

Even so, it's producing much more petroleum than I'm actually using. Automation shuts it off pretty often because the petroleum is backing up. I'm even running a couple of petroleum generators nonstop just to generate polluted water and carbon dioxide, since demand for petroleum is less than I'm getting from my oil wells. I'll probably add more later, since the output from each generator's only 750 g/s.

[melquiades]

13 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

There is most likely a Tempshift Plate behind both the Atmo Sensor and the Liquid Vent.  For thermal calculations, Tempshift Plates are making thermal contact with all 8 of the spaces around them, and as such are able to conduct the heat diagonally between the Insulated Tiles.

Oh, i didn't know that, thanks!.

 

[impyre]

2 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I'm more impressed that he's getting it to 398 with just 60-ish pipe segments. There was a rather long thread here about reverse flow heat exchangers, and the designs tended to be longer for that kind of efficiency.

That's actually not all that difficult when you segment the thermal transfer stage. Also, the length of the heat exchanger depends on the throughput. By using temperature controls to decide when to advance the petroleum to the next section, he's allowing his system's length to determine it's throughput instead of the other way around; The shorter the system, the longer it would take to cool off the petroleum adequately. If he were piping 10kg/s petroleum, it might very well need to be longer.

[Gus Smedstad]

I thought he was piping 10 kg/s of crude oil in, and 10 kg/s of petroleum out. Did he mention the flow rate somewhere?

[Mullematsch]

Can we maybe just get a safe? Would like to take a look at it in detail. 

[Saturnus]

5 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

... unless the radiant pipes are Thermium and not gold. I was assuming gold. If they're thermium, this setup is actually not very efficient at all compared to a dead-simple pipe snaking back and forth.

It's thermium. 

[Gus Smedstad]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Can't be achieved with a snake design.

It absolutely can. I don't think you understand what I mean by "snake." I don't mean just snaking the pipe back and forth, you also interleave tiles, so it's one long path, rather than a simple radiator in a tank. Read that thread I linked earlier, they go into length on different designs.

Here's my boiler, based on John Francis's design.

 

Spoiler

No, it's not as impressive as Socoo's, but in involves no super coolant, and the pipes are gold, not thermium. It's much lower tech and less expensive, despite the size. The oil is 375 C when it hits the liquid vent. In this screenshot it's backed up a bit because I'm not using nearly as much as I've been refining.

By "efficient," I mean with a simpler, easier design, he probably could have gotten the same heat exchange with fewer thermium pipes. I don't know why you think that's a "strange definition."

It's true that 375 is a good 23 degrees cooler than 398. In that sense, Socoo's is significantly more efficient, requiring far less energy to push the oil up to 405, since i'ts a 30 degree difference in mine and 7 in his. However, based on the research in that thread, I strongly suspect you can get that efficiency with fewer pipes and a simpler layout. I wouldn't be surprised if all you need is thermium pipes and a valve or two limiting flow rate.

[Saturnus]

18 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

This is why you will not be able to achieve such high and low input and output temperatures with such a design.

My version which is a snaking heat exchanger but a slightly different layout does between 394C and 397C as I use liquid shut offs to by pass sections on the top layer next to the boiler so the temperature can be controlled within a fairly tight window.

Oh, and that's with gold pipes obviously.

You should read through that thread though. I demonstrate falling staircase heat exchanger designs that have zero of the hot-cold interaction you talk about. 

[socooo]

The maximum efficiency of this unit for converting crude oil is 10kg/s, not the thermal transfer efficiency, but simply because the maximum capacity of a single pipeline is 10kg/s.In the early stage, some materials with low thermal conductivity can be used to make radiation pipes, which will only lead to slightly more energy consumption of the liquid cooler, rather than the conversion efficiency of 10kg/s of the device.

A layered design of vacuum insulation is used, with each 1000kg of oil passing through nine layers of cooling before being discharged from the heat exchange tower.The temperature difference in each layer is about 40 degrees Celsius, and the input temperature of crude oil is between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius.In fact, 10 floors is theoretically optimal, but 6 floors are also feasible, and the liquid cooler is capable of these tasks.

As a final note, I used a small amount of supercoolant (100-200kg) around the liquid cooler. In fact, less is better without overheating. This will make the temperature range of the oil above smaller.I usually use a bottle of super coolant (200kg), and the temperature sensor is set below 403 degrees Celsius. Due to the problem of response time, the temperature of the temperature sensor will reach 405 degrees Celsius, so I did not use the radiation pipeline in the back.

[Denisetwin]

11 hours ago, Saturnus said:

My version which is a snaking heat exchanger but a slightly different layout does between 394C and 397C as I use liquid shut offs to by pass sections on the top layer next to the boiler so the temperature can be controlled within a fairly tight window.

@Saturnus Link?  I can't find this in the thread on heat exchange or rather if it is in that one, I can't figure out which version ended up with the 394c/397c   My next building project will be an oil boiler with no space materials.