[DESIGN]New Mid Game Oil Boiler (Use Metal Refinery)

[manganeko]

Using a metal refinery as heating source, it can turn 1.1T crude oil into petroleum every cycle (that's every 200kg steel, but the first time takes about 1T steel to warm up the chamber).

I think this unit is easier to build than my last design, but the idea is same, using crude oil to cool petroleum down to 275 ℃, then nothing but a steel pump could work well. Then we can get some extra petroleum very early in the game. The output petroleum (around 250℃) can be sent to a steam turbine for extra electricity, but that's nothing to do with this design.

Ok, any thought, just let me know 

Ah, a mistake, should be less than 0.1kg.

[Gus Smedstad]

I’m not seeing what prevents this from just spilling cold crude oil into the bottom chamber if the temperature is too low. I.e. if you don’t run the metal refinery constantly, or often enough.

Also, isn’t “greater than” (as it is in the diagram) correct for the hydro sensor?  I assume the point of the hydro sensor is to make sure there’s enough fluid in that chamber to have a stable temperature for the temperature sensor (which I’d probably set to 250 or less for safety). If it’s “less than,” it can potentially lock the door closed forever.

[manganeko]

Just now, Gus Smedstad said:

I’m not seeing what prevents this from just spilling cold crude oil into the bottom chamber if the temperature is too low. I.e. if you don’t run the metal refinery constantly, or often enough.

Also, isn’t “greater than” (as it is in the diagram) correct for the hydro sensor?  I assume the point of the hydro sensor is to make sure there’s enough fluid in that chamber to have a stable temperature for the temperature sensor (which I’d probably set to 250 or less for safety). If it’s “less than,” it can potentially lock the door closed forever.

Ah I see, sorry forget to mention that, pump in some petroleum (one pack should be fine) before crude oil, that will prevent crude oil from spilling.

And the hydro sensor less should be less than 0.1kg,then when there's no petroleum, shut the door. My mistake, sorry

[Gus Smedstad]

I’d still think enough crude oil will push out any petroleum that’s lying on top of it. I’d have to actually build the thing to see how it works, but my initial take is that it looks unsafe. The solution I used in my oil boiler was a temperature sensor that shut off the flow of crude oil if the temperature was too low in the boiler compartment.

I’m still not following the hydro sensor logic. “Less than” means the hydro sensor sends “true” when less than 0.1 kg, and “false” when it’s greater. False locks the door. Which means the door is closed, not open, when there’s enough petroleum, and the system locks up forever.

[manganeko]

10 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I’d still think enough crude oil will push out any petroleum that’s lying on top of it. I’d have to actually build the thing to see how it works, but my initial take is that it looks unsafe. The solution I used in my oil boiler was a temperature sensor that shut off the flow of crude oil if the temperature was too low in the boiler compartment.

I’m still not following the hydro sensor logic. “Less than” means the hydro sensor sends “true” when less than 0.1 kg, and “false” when it’s greater. False locks the door. Which means the door is closed, not open, when there’s enough petroleum, and the system locks up forever.

It' safe, just take a look at the first pic.

Since it's a memory toggle, True signal from hydro sensor will refresh the toggle, lock the door. The true signal from that Thermo sensor will open the door if there's some petroleum (greater than 0.1kg). Because the thermo sensor tends to sustain the temprature it last sensed, I came up this way to refresh it every time, prevent it from mis-opening.

maybe an and gate would work fine too

[Gus Smedstad]

I guess if the two tiles above the crude oil are petroleum, the oil doesn’t push them together, regardless of how little petroleum is in each, and how much crude oil is below them. ONI liquid rules aren’t always intuitive to me.

I missed that the gate is a set/reset latch, not an AND gate. I just assumed that you’d put an AND gate there, and that the screenshots weren’t showing it properly. I’ve had gates not display properly before.

You don’t actually care about the latching effect; you want the door to stay closed if there’s insufficient petroleum, regardless of reported temperature. Which is why I assumed you had used an AND gate and would use “greater than.” An AND gate does the job better, since the latching effect could theoretically keep the door open if both values are FALSE (> 0.1 kg petroleum, >275 C) and the door started open, but in practice that’s unlikely.

[manganeko]

10 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I guess if the two tiles above the crude oil are petroleum, the oil doesn’t push them together, regardless of how little petroleum is in each, and how much crude oil is below them. ONI liquid rules aren’t always intuitive to me.

I missed that the gate is a set/reset latch, not an AND gate. I just assumed that you’d put an AND gate there, and that the screenshots weren’t showing it properly. I’ve had gates not display properly before.

You don’t actually care about the latching effect; you want the door to stay closed if there’s insufficient petroleum, regardless of reported temperature. Which is why I assumed you had used an AND gate and would use “greater than.” An AND gate does the job better, since the latching effect could theoretically keep the door open if both values are FALSE (> 0.1 kg petroleum, >275 C) and the door started open, but in practice that’s unlikely.

yea ONI liquid rules are kinda wired to me too.

and indeed it's not nessesary to use a toggle switch in this case. I just used my old experience which might not be quite proper.

[Neotuck]

I can see this working, indeed the ONI liquid rules would prevent the oil from pushing the petroleum out though a one tile space

Nice build!

[Xuhybrid]

How much heat gets added to Petroleum if that's what you're using to exceed 400C? I guess it can't exceed 538C so it doesn't really matter. I'm curious what happens when the output tank is full and you try and use the refinery. I'll be trying something like this on my next colony so thanks for posting.

[manganeko]

Just now, Xuhybrid said:

How much heat gets added to Petroleum if that's what you're using to exceed 400C? I guess it can't exceed 538C so it doesn't really matter. I'm curious what happens when the output tank is full and you try and use the refinery. I'll be trying something like this on my next colony so thanks for posting.

if the temp is higher than 403C, petroleum won't flow back to the metal refinery, so there's no more refinery work any more till the pipe is chilled down again. And as you mentioned, I should add a sensor to detect wether the output tank is full or not to make it safer.

[SchlauFuchs]

 

4 hours ago, manganeko said:

if the temp is higher than 403C, petroleum won't flow back to the metal refinery, so there's no more refinery work any more till the pipe is chilled down again. And as you mentioned, I should add a sensor to detect wether the output tank is full or not to make it safer.

Add more tanks  What sensor would measure that?

[Xuhybrid]

5 minutes ago, SchlauFuchs said:

 

Add more tanks  What sensor would measure that?

A pipe element sensor.

[Z0366]

Nice design. Although I don't personally use petroleum until launching a rocket ( ranching glossy drecko for plastic, NG for power), but good work.

[Bill_logic_ga]

I'm trying this out right now.  the liquid shutoff inside the glass that's supposed to dump the hot coolant keeps overheating when I make it out of gold.

 

What material did you use? I'm working on moving it to outside the heat chamber to fix the problem.

 

I get strange behaviors when I try to top of the coolant. My refinery will say 'output pipe blocked' if I hook up the petroleum pump in certain ways. I've got the fill pipe to work pretty well by hooking it up to the refineries exhaust port with a bridge to prevent backflow but the refinery still says output blocked while it's filling and I have to be careful not to overfill it 

 

Can you show us this hooked up to coolant and the logic you use for refilling the coolant after you dump the hot coolant?

 

Awesome design. I want to try this on my 'no sweat' base but I'm having trouble making it work in sandbox. Thanks for sharing

 

 

[DyingCrow]

The concept works. I built my own design based on this, way more compact and low tech, something adequate to be built in a real game scenario without too much effort.

The amount of oil that is dropped into the chamber is manually controlled through a valve. Flow of up to 500g look fine to maintain the temperature a bit over 400c, once everything was up to snuff and fully operational, keeping the process continuous as long as the refinery is being operated. It can go higher. The oil will always push the petroleum up, and down the shaft. That column of petroleum is permanent, and exists due to surface tension. After heating it up for the first time to 400c+, when the first bit of oil is dropped in it will form and stay there forever.

The whole chamber is in a vacuum.

The incoming oil will soak some of the petroleum's heat. The petroleum will still be at over 200c, so that thermal energy can be used for other things. Like melting ice cream, or boil a bit of germ infested toilet ph2o.

The automation here is very simple. The clock is connected to an AND gate, the weight plate to a buffer gate and then the AND gate. The clock sets the system ready for the day, the weight plate will enable oil flow, so chamber doesn't overfill and temperatures plummet if no dupe is operating. It takes a long time to reheat the whole thing again. The plate is a point of failure, since dupes can drop stuff on it, but if there is any automation to pick up stuff it shouldn't be an issue. The alternative is a hydro sensor in the chamber, below the vent, set to 20kg or so. We don't want too much liquid there, so temperatures stay as close to 400c as possible.

The thermo sensor, connected to the other valve in the middle, is there just because i used it to fill the refinery loop with petroleum. Neither are necessary.

The refinery is made of ceramic, and never overheats. It stays at about 45c-ish even when being operated. The pump is made of steel, radiant pipes made of gold, and insulated pipes made of ceramic, but could get away with something else at the expense of extra heat loss. Very doable in mid game.

This should be possible with 2 or more refineries, which would increase heat output and allow for higher oil flows. 

Save is attached if you want to have a look. The single refinery setup is operational, you shouldn't have to do anything but let the dupes do their stuff, and observe. The dual refinery is still warming up, it will take a while. When the tile below the vent is up to 420c or so, open the valve at 250g, and gradually increase the flow until the chamber temperature is stable at 420c or so. After that, shouldn't have to touch it again.

 

Refinery oil cooker Cycle 78.sav

[WanderingKid]

Steel Production creates +132.907 C Petroleum. Petro -> Sour Gas happens at 538.85 C.  Crude to Petro at ~402.5C.  At 403C minimum you get 535.9 C Petroleum in the loop.  Phase changes are +/- 3C so you can get away with a limit of 541.85C, in theory.

However, when I'd tried this personally when attempting this in a rather large heat sink, I still had busted pipes.  Have you had no issues with this?

[DyingCrow]

9 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

Steel Production creates +132.907 C Petroleum. Petro -> Sour Gas happens at 538.85 C.  Crude to Petro at ~402.5C.  At 403C minimum you get 535.9 C Petroleum in the loop.  Phase changes are +/- 3C so you can get away with a limit of 541.85C, in theory.

However, when I'd tried this personally when attempting this in a rather large heat sink, I still had busted pipes.  Have you had no issues with this?

No busted pipes whatsoever.

I feel like i'm taking over the OP idea, but i really like this concept and got me hooked, so credit goes to where credit is due

I simplified things a bit more, by removing the roleplay-ish clock and plate automation and replacing it with a single thermo sensor in the chamber.

This is more then enough to always keep the liquid in the refinerie's coolant pipes at a safe temperature, before it flashes into sour gas.

However, there is absolutely no reason to run this on a single refinery; 2 refineries can handle MORE then double the cooking load of a single one, with only very minimal changes. Or even 3, but the pipe spaghetti starts getting awkward, and there might be diminishing returns. For the matter i'd rather run 2 setups of 2 refineries each.

I am absolutely sure this can be improved even further, but i'm very potato at this game and prefer the simple, low tech, easy to build approaches that can be easily implemented on a real scenario. I feel the only limitations here are dupe manpower and ore supply/demand.

In this save, both the 1 and 2 refinery setups are fully up and running. Both are processing 2000g/s crude oil. To accurately compare results, it's just a matter of mopping the petroleum tanks, maybe tweak the valve flow a bit, leave the game running for a bit and see the results.

 

refinery oil cooker v2.sav

[Bill_logic_ga]

I played with that save a little. 

 

I really like how you use the hot petrol to boil water using the same design.

 

I added a wheezewort to condense the water but it looks like it caused the bottom cool passage to plug with liquid water once it condensed instead of going to the pump. I didn't run it long enough to see if the block would release but im sure it could be tweaked. I wonder what I could dump the heat from an aqua tuner into in order to make a cooling loop to condense the steam.

 

I also tired a gold pump in the single refinery setup for the 'cool' petroleum and it didn't overheat. It sits at about 110C...

This means the ceramic and the automation wire are the only refined products in the machine. If you replaced the ceramic pipes with gold pipes you could make the whole thing using only refined metal from the crusher. (Let me know if I'm missing something)

My issue with two refineries is that my base is not going to generate or consume that much metal at this point. I hadn't made rockets yet and that might change the calculus but the one game where I got far enough to have a metal refinery the dupes would run it for a couple cycles and then have enough metal for ten more cycles or so.

 

I really like this design because it takes the waste heat from the refinery and uses the heat to create something instead of trying to figure out where to dump the heat. Having a constant source of petrol is the icing on the cake.  It's amazing that you were able to further recycle that heat to boil polluted water as well.

 

Thanks for sharing

[Xuhybrid]

On 5/26/2019 at 9:31 PM, Bill_logic_ga said:

I'm trying this out right now.  the liquid shutoff inside the glass that's supposed to dump the hot coolant keeps overheating when I make it out of gold.

What material did you use? I'm working on moving it to outside the heat chamber to fix the problem

I would do the same, however if that area is a vacuum it cannot overheat. It's certainly just easier to have it outside the insulated box though.

On 5/27/2019 at 4:15 AM, DyingCrow said:

The concept works. I built my own design based on this, way more compact and low tech, something adequate to be built in a real game scenario without too much effort.

The amount of oil that is dropped into the chamber is manually controlled through a valve. Flow of up to 500g look fine to maintain the temperature a bit over 400c, once everything was up to snuff and fully operational, keeping the process continuous as long as the refinery is being operated. It can go higher. The oil will always push the petroleum up, and down the shaft. That column of petroleum is permanent, and exists due to surface tension. After heating it up for the first time to 400c+, when the first bit of oil is dropped in it will form and stay there forever.

The whole chamber is in a vacuum.

-snip-

This is a nice variation on the design, however the whole point of the system is that it uses pre-space materials. If you allow the petroleum to touch the liquid pump, the steel will eventually overheat because it won't like petroleum above 275C. You still need a thermo sensor to prevent flow.

[FiannaTiger]

Looks great need to try this in my current build.

[EGzO]

This is my version of oil boiler

Made larger snake to give more time for cooling, even made dirt cooker on the side to reduce temperature of petroleum. it takes some time to wind up capacity is about 4-5 kg/s, if it will stop due to lack of oil it will probably overheat. attached save file for testing

petroleum boiler.sav