Free Energy 150000, Power Generator SPG version 1

[DarkMoge]

During my experiments with oil, I have discovered a specific property of it, there is a way to convert oil to natural gas at 67% mass conversion, right after I discovered this property, I got to building a power station that makes use of it. Here is how version 1 of the station looks like.



The station produces between 8 and 9 MJ or power per cycle (around constant 15000 W) and around 410 kg/cycle of clean water. After priming the station, it does not really require any inputs, just a duplicant coming around once in a while to release the natural gas from oil well to keep it running. There are some issues with this build which I want to adress in future version, but right now its a proof of concept. It seems like the system can just run indefinitely, providing power to the colony. I called it Small Power Generator.

I would like to hear others thoughts and ideas on how to make it better. But first, I want to explain how it works:

The property of oil in question is that when it gets heated, it changed into a different element Crude Oil become Petrouleum... And well, Petroleum when heated becomes Sour Gas. Interesting thing is that when Sour Gas gets cooled down it becomes methane + sulfur and when methane gets heated up it becomes natural gas. Basically, it is a pretty long process of transforming Crude Oil into Natural Gas.

Within my tests and calculations: 1000g crude oil becomes 1000g petroleum which vaporizes into 1000g sour gas... 1000g cooled down becomes 670g methane and 330g sulfur... 670g of methane becomes 670g of natural gas.

Oil well with its 3333g/s of crude oil ends up producing 2233.11g/s of natural gas + 1099.89g/s sulfur... 2333.11/90 = 24.812333... it is almost enough to support 25 natural gas generators which produce 800W each for total 20kw + 1687.5g/s polluted water + 562.5g/s carbon dioxide. Because oil well requires 1000g/s water to run, the net gain of water is 687.5g/s.

For the version 1, I pretty much used best materials available in game, but I believe that for most things it is not required... I went overkill on most things to make a working version 1. I will mention materials which are required at their steps.

Station work flow step by step.

Step 1. Oil well drips down oil.
Step 2. Oil pump moves oil into boiling chamber, it gets divided between 3 outlets for more even distribution of heating. I believe that the room does not have to be completely insulted with insulation, but it might as well... though, the pipe that delivers oil into the chamber should be made out of insulation to ensure that oil does not turn into sour gas while still inside the pipes... There is probably a way around it with a different design...
Step 3. Oil gets boiled by 3 thermo aquatuners that are made out of Thermium, it should work with niobium too since they never get above 600C. Aquatuners cool down super coolant, you need above 2.5 aquatuners cooling down super coolant 24/7 to produce enough heat... Tempshift plates behind the aquatuners are made out of diamonds and they ensure that the temperature is evenly distributed. I think that I went a bit of overkill on the tempshift plates, you probably only need a few at specific spots rather then entire wall.
Step 4. Sour gas moves by itself into the freezing chamber where it gets frozen by very cold super coolant... It is required to run slightly more then 4 aquatuners at all time to delete enough heat.
Step 4.1. The super coolant is being moved to liquid reservoirs to turn their temperature into average rather then end up with packets of liquid at different temperatures. You do have to fill all the liquid reservoirs to ensure that temperature averaging happens, though, there should be a way to design this is much less reservoirs.
Step 4.2. Extra heat is being deleted by steam turbines which make some extra energy to keep the station running.
Step 5. Frozen sulfur is being picked up and just dropped somewhere, since there is no use for sulfur in current version of the game... Frozen Methane is being carried by conveyor rail into a melting chamber... Conveyor rail has to go through tiles made out of insulation to ensure that it does not melt in undesired place.
Step 6. The melting chamber I made is really bad, because my initial idea did not work, I ended up fixing it with a rubber bands, by putting super coolant which is being heated by liquid tepidizer, but there should be a much better way to melt methane.
Step 7. Melted methane becomes Natural Gas which is being fed to 25 natural gas generators by 5 gas pumps
Step 7.1. Hydrogen circulates through pipe that goes through entire room to ensure that nothing overheats... My first idea was to try transfer heat produced by generators into the melting room, but that method was too slow and did not work, so this is more of a relic.
Step 7.2. Polluted water is being fed to Water Sieve, it probably should go to some water boiler, but I was too lazy to make a water boiler and this is not the point of the build... Also, carbon dioxide is being deleted by carbon skimmers. Water is then being fed back to the oil well, net gain of water is disposed off.

Bugs: on game reload, some of the methane and sulfur turns into blocks which require duplicant to mine.
The game seems to produce way more methane and sulfur then I calculated, I suspect that auto sweepers are duping items when they attempt to pick them up in the air.

I attached the save file for others to look at.

Small Power Generator Version 1.sav

[Coolthulhu]

4 hours ago, DarkMoge said:

The game seems to produce way more methane and sulfur then I calculated, I suspect that auto sweepers are duping items when they attempt to pick them up in the air.

Phase change sometimes produces extra resources - it's easiest to see by rapidly cooling CO2 from above so that it drips on something hot. This can quickly produce a massive "blast" of CO2, well above initial pressure.

[badgamer123]

22 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Phase change sometimes produces extra resources - it's easiest to see by rapidly cooling CO2 from above so that it drips on something hot. This can quickly produce a massive "blast" of CO2, well above initial pressure.

.......I still don't quit understand those matter converter and phrase change mass...
it does explain why my ice maker(AETN) have a lot CO2 around.....,I always think to just freezz those CO2 anyway,the AETN on top of mesh tile never stop freezing COZ while i got so few dupe walk around that location....

[0xFADE]

That is one big mamma jamma.

[DarkMoge]

I did some experimentation, mainly on the boiler+freezer... I am amazed at how I just got most of things right... First of all, it is important to keep the flow of coolant in the opposite direction from the incoming gas (aka you need coolant to go from bottom upwards). Existance of gas tiles is also important, they create the best insulation you can get between the boiler and freezer while allowing the gasses flow between the two areas, adding some other things that have high mass a relatively low thermal conductivity should help... without some sort of separation between the areas, a large portion of aquatuner works end up cooling the oil that it tries to heat up in the same time, lowering the efficiency of the whole system. The size of both freezer and boiler also has an impact on the efficiency, I have not really tested for ideal values... 

I tried to make a smaller version of this with just 1 aquatuner inside the boiler and drip lower amounts of crude oil onto it, but that system ended up being incredibly hard to prime and also relatively unstable... I believe the system becomes unstable when the amount of mass moved per second is very insignificant compared to 5t... Because with 1 aquatuner I kept on running into the situation where it would just turn off, because the average temperature in reservoir was acceptable which led to boiler not making sour gas which in turn led to coolant not interacting with anything for it to change its temperature... While 3 aquatuners setup boiled crude oil in real time, 3333g/s, the setup with 1 aquatuner somehow ended up boiling the oil in large bursts once a cycle. Though, it might have been caused by my other experiments with the setup, I am led to believe that larger system becomes more and more stable.

Another experiment that I did is to try priming system to make liquid methane instead of solid methane. Liquid Methane is much easier to melt, but I think setting up the specific temperature required is very impractical without sandbox mode, while the system is priming iself for liquid methane, you just end up with random outlets of natural gas inside freezer... It starts working after like 30 cycles of waiting, when freezing to solid starts working almost right away.