Natural Gas Cooker without any space material

[Gus Smedstad]

Last game I stored the sour gas in a pressurized room. A high pressure vent lets you bring it up to 20kg / tile, and that adds up quickly. The room was maybe 15 x 4 and wasn't near capacity.

It would never have occurred to me to vent it to space. I'm a reflexive hoarder so the idea of throwing stuff away usually isn't on my radar. Except maybe for regolith, there's way too much of that.

[0xFADE]

The hoarder life for me. I’ve got high pressure rooms that also have gas storage inside.  I have been using the gas storage a lot more recently since they are quick to put anywhere and vacuum out a room. 

[Abt9]

So here's my inefficient build for 1kg/s Oil Cooker (Crude Oil to Natural Gas), without using any space material. Honestly at this point it seems like getting it more reliable and efficient. The vast power output just dwarves the power cost on active cooling.

 

Liquid Methane through aquatuner should give better efficiency. It seems like space material is just for convenience, not something really necessary..

[Gus Smedstad]

If I'm reading that correctly, you've got a couple of heat exchangers. Which is good.

The first one seems to crude oil <-> early sour gas. That one seems dangerous, since the oil could potentially overheat and damage the pipe.

The second one is outgoing natural gas <-> sour gas. That looks fine.

The third one is liquid methane <-> sour gas. Also looks fine. Though I'm not sure what happens if natural gas starts backing up. Presumably this area just reaches really high pressures if the gas pumps aren't going.

I assume the chamber below the aquatuners is liquid oxygen? Something that can reach -170 C to condense the sour gas without freezing. It's interesting that a single metal tile is enough to cool the sour gas.

Where is the heat from the aquatuners going? I don't see any attempt to cool them. They're pumping what, liquid oxygen? So each one isn't moving that much heat, since the specific heat of oxygen is only 1 DTU/g/k. Still, I'd expect a steam turbine over them to absorb the heat.

[Abt9]

On 2019. 5. 1. at 1:44 AM, Gus Smedstad said:

Where is the heat from the aquatuners going

Polluted water the NatGas generators are creating. But yeah, it should better be utilized to run a Steam Turbine.

And yes, this isn't a solid build - it is more of a prototype, because I'm really lazy. Though there are some mechanics to prevent problems - methane water lock blocks the natural gas from backing up. And I've never met any crude oil boiling issues, but it should be easy to control. Now to polishing the whole design - but this does display that it's not that hard to create an oil cooker.