Possible reusage of heat

[BaccoShow]

I'm new to the forum so the concept is almost certainly being used yet,                                            

I'm using the coolant from metal refinery to run the steam turbine. The materials are all basic except for the steel. It is igneus rock all around, steel pump and tuner. Oil and water in the chamber with thermal plates at top. it tooks around 5 cycle to start and gain 10W each cycle if the MR is running all day ( not full cycle ). The aquatuner was not running. You can also add a thermosensor to prevent oil to petroleum change of state. It will stop the MR or pump.

Since the pump overheats around 275 you can place it behind some isolation to reduce the heat spread of the oil. But it produces heat by hitself so better use it. The thermosensor will stop the system around 250 preventing it from overheating.

Don't mind the dead dupes.

 

[N00bieMeap]

2 hours ago, BaccoShow said:

Don't mind the dead dupes.

don't worry, I don't see anything : p

[PickPay]

...in other words the screenshot is tiny

[Promethien]

Hard to see exactly what you did due to tiny picture but yes, using radiant pipes full of your refinery coolant (usually oil or petrol) through a room full of water/steam under a generator is a common trick. 

[Gus Smedstad]

Steam turbine as a renewable heat sink for a metal refinery is pretty much a standard build. In my currently colony I lumped in an aquatuner to cool the area around the industrial block, since the turbine and metal refinery put out enough heat to make trouble eventually. I could have separated that, made a second turbine just for the aquatuner, but the metal refinery is not a constant-use item and the turbine would be just sitting idle otherwise.

I'm not clear on why you need a pump at all, steel or otherwise, but the screenshot is to tiny to comment on your precise build.

[BaccoShow]

My bad.

 

 

The idea is to accumulate heat in the chamber until i can move the oil in another space with magma near and transform it into petroleum at 1:1 ratio. The steel aquatuner can handle the heat ( 375 celsius ) but the pump stops at 275. So not sure how to do with the pump unless nobium? but it's an high tier material. I'll use a shoutoff to move the oil too hot out of the system preventing the MR to break. I can always move the oil around 200C, it'll be enought for the turbine to work 100% ( if i remember it right ) but still 200 degrees for the petroleum. This way the loss of heat will be the least i can think of.

[FenrirZeroZero]

On 18.8.2019 at 11:01 AM, BaccoShow said:

Don't mind the dead dupes.

Dead Dupes are the fuel of SCIENCE!

Also a third door could totally insulate your steam engine from the rest. 

Basically : Closed Door -> open Door -> closed Door 

If the middle door is closed ones (in example with an clock and automation to close on midnight for a second) it will crush the gas inside and stop transferring any heat.

 

[Gus Smedstad]

2 hours ago, BaccoShow said:

 The idea is to accumulate heat in the chamber until i can move the oil in another space with magma near and transform it into petroleum at 1:1 ratio. The steel aquatuner can handle the heat ( 375 celsius ) but the pump stops at 275. So not sure how to do with the pump unless nobium? 

You've got two different contradictory goals. You're trying to heat up the crude oil for eventual conversion to petroleum...  but then your'e also cooling the oil with the steam turbine.

A typical metal refinery / steam turbine combo doesn't use a pump, pool, or aquatuner. Instead, you use oil or petroleum as your coolant for the metal refinery, and the output circulates through radiant pipes in the steam chamber before returning to the metal refinery. There's no real upper limit to the temperature since you don't need machinery in the steam chamber, but typically you limit it to 220-230 C so you don't heat the steam past the steam turbine's maximum.

Here's my current setup, which is a bit messier and more complex than that, since it's in a working game:

 

Spoiler

Metal refinery's on the far left, steam turbine's on the far right. Hot petroleum goes down to a buffer tank, then up to a mechanical filter which shunts hot (>220 C) petroleum to the steam chamber, and sends cooler petroleum to a buffer tank and then back the refinery. Hot petroleum coming out of the steam chamber re-circulates if it's still above 220 C, otherwise it continues to the "cold" coolant tank.

Further complicating this is an aquatuner in the steam chamber. It's not related to the refinery, it just cools a polluted water loop going around the top of the steam turbine, the metal refinery, and the kitchen. It only runs infrequently. It's really a separate system that could have its own steam turbine.

Also in the steam chamber is some one-time setup stuff. Specifically, a steel gas pump to turn the chamber into a vacuum before anything starts, and a water feeder to drip water into the chamber until it reaches pressure. It only takes about 120-150 kg of steam to fully pressurize the chamber, so you don't want to flood the chamber with water.

The setup could probably be cleaner and more compact. For example, the metal refinery could be a lot closer to the turbine, and the output buffer tank's on a different floor because the kitchen was already there when I started building.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I agree with @Gus Smedstad.  If you want to produce petroleum from crude using heat, then do that first, then use the steam turbine to cool your petroleum.

You'll also get the best results if you use water (or super coolant) in your aquatuners.  I did some math in another post and basically if you use petrol or crude in your aquatuner, it won't be able to boil the water fast enough to keep the steam turbine running.  So basically my setup is: Refinery to boil crude into petrol.  Petrol drops into a coolant tank.  Radiant pipes filled with cold water circulate in coolant tank to drop petrol down to reasonable temperatures.  An aquatuner sits in a steam chamber under a turbine, cooling the water that goes through the pipes to the cooling chamber.

[BaccoShow]

Is it only me or the pipes break if the oil to petr happens in the pipes? 

Anyway, with a single turbine the oil will heat up over time. Yes it does consume power all the time. I wanted to heat up in a controllable way the chamber to prevent losing of the heat because of the turbine over maximum output. 

I tried to mix all the objectives i had in mind, but i do recognize having separate sys to run the turbine, changing oil to petr etc is more flexible. Except for the pipes break when the liquid change or change state ( is it only me again? ) i can avoid the pool. The pool has sense only if i'm storing heat to use it for something in the future.

Maybe a thermosensor to stop the MR if the temp goes up to 200ish celsius in the steam chamber? I can always use steel mechanized doors to increase up to 430ish the temp the oil and chamber can go up without losing power but again pipes break after 400 because of the change of state of oil....  

Plus my liquid tanks overheat overtime. Guess you'll using steel for them?

[Gus Smedstad]

You don't want your oil to turn to petroleum in your pipes or in the metal refinery.

If your goal is an oil -> petroleum boiler, get rid of the steam turbine. It's directly at odds with your goal. Assuming you don't have space materials and don't want to use magma, you must use petroleum as your coolant in the metal refinery. It's the only fluid available which can get hot enough. You can obtain some with a oil refinery, and then use it in your boiler.

To boil your oil, just run >400 C petroleum in radiant pipes through a pool of oil. The petroleum's safe up to 530 C, so it won't turn to sour gas.

If your goal is a stable, infinitely usable metal refinery, forget the boiler and just heat steam in a turbine, the way I showed in my screen shot.

Tanks do not exchange heat with their contents. Rather, the liquid inside heats up the tile below the output pipe, so it's a good idea to make that an insulated tile. An iron tank can hold 500 C petroleum. The issue is if the air around the tank gets over 75 C, which is a problem caused by other things heating the air - the tile below the tank, the metal refinery, or the steam turbine. Waste heat is why I have that aquatuner and the polluted water cooling loop in my industrial block.

[cblack]

5 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

If your goal is an oil -> petroleum boiler, get rid of the steam turbine. It's directly at odds with your goal.

This isn't quite true.  He just wants to use it to cool down the petroleum after he's boiled the crude into it.

I was setting up an entirely automated system to provide cooled petroleum from an crude oil well, and while I'm sure it's possible, it's a lot of work to set up.  I gave up when I realized I don't need that much petroleum, or at least not right now.  Honestly unless you need a boatload of plastic, you're better off just going with hydrogen for rocket fuel ASAP and making as little petrol as possible.

[Gus Smedstad]

Really, he ought to look into John Francis's videos covering oil boilers that use counterflow heat exchangers. I've built them, they work pretty well. Once your energy needs climb above about 7.5 KW it's worth doing, since 1 kg/s petroleum = 1.5 kw in a petroleum generator with a tune-up.

The metal refinery is really not a good source of heat for oil conversion, since power demand is an ongoing thing, and metal refining is something you do only occasionally.

[KittenIsAGeek]

4 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Really, he ought to look into John Francis's videos covering oil boilers that use counterflow heat exchangers. I've built them, they work pretty well. Once your energy needs climb above about 7.5 KW it's worth doing, since 1 kg/s petroleum = 1.5 kw in a petroleum generator with a tune-up.

The metal refinery is really not a good source of heat for oil conversion, since power demand is an ongoing thing, and metal refining is something you do only occasionally.

If you're using counterflow heat exchangers, then a metal refinery is an excellent source of heat for conversion.  Run your pipes into a large metal block that connects via vacuum doors to your boiler.  By the time the crude gets done with the heat exchange, it will only need a bit of a nudge to transition.  Have a temp sensor close the doors to keep the boiler at the right temp, and run the refinery to keep the metal block somewhere above that temp.  

Heck, while we're at it.. put a reservoir on the heating loop.  When the refinery produces liquid above the right temp, send it to the reservoir.  When liquid circling through the metal block drops too low in temp, send it back to the refinery.  Maybe I'll build something up later and do screenshots.

[Gus Smedstad]

1 minute ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

If you're using counterflow heat exchangers, then a metal refinery is an excellent source of heat for conversion.

I was going to dispute this, but looking up the actual heat output, the refinery does put out a LOT of heat if you're smelting iron. 1.3 million DTU/s, which is far more than you get from an aquatuner, for a comparable energy cost.

I seem to recall I was getting my oil up to about 360 C through the heat exchanger before it hit the aquatuner. Which meant that I needed 40 C * 1.69 DTU / g / C * 10 kg = 676 k DTU/s. So Iron jobs give you about twice the heat you need.

On the other hand, you're going to run through a lot of iron ore. If you're running jobs 50% on / off, it's 0.5 * 600 seconds per cycle * 100 kg / job / 40 seconds / job = 750 kg per cycle. A 30 ton reserve (which is a lot, and how much I currently have) will only last 40 cycles before you're out, and can't boil any more oil.

Once you get to space, you can obtain more iron ore that way. Throughput from that is maybe 500 kg / cycle per 2-cargo rocket, if the source is pretty close.

A more efficient heat exchanger would help tremendously. If you can reliably get the oil up to 380 C just by transferring heat from the outgoing petroleum, that cuts the heat costs in half.

[bobucles]

10 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

A 30 ton reserve (which is a lot, and how much I currently have) will only last 40 cycles before you're out, and can't boil any more oil.

That's the main reason players set up counter current boilers. The principle is simple, recycle and reuse the heat as much as possible so very little extra heat needs to be generated. A good petrol boiler will have a petrol output only a few degrees higher than the input crude, with the fresh oil absorbing as much heat as possible as it snakes towards the heat source.

[BaccoShow]

I do use tons of steel for the space stuffs. Plus with 11 vulcanoes i need a lot for the setups there. The MR is still working all time, but the lime is almost finished. I completely forgot about the mesh or airflow tiles to prevent heat transfer with the liquid tank. Guess i'll go back to a simpler sys without pools. 

Plus the map has the metal rich trait. I already have up to 100t on iron with the 40% of the map discovered and without digging it specifically. 

[Gus Smedstad]

10 hours ago, bobucles said:

That's the main reason players set up counter current boilers. The principle is simple, recycle and reuse the heat as much as possible so very little extra heat needs to be generated. A good petrol boiler will have a petrol output only a few degrees higher than the input crude

I'm aware of the how and why of counterflow heat exchangers. The key thing isn't the output temperature of the petrol, it's the peak temperature the crude oil reaches before hitting your heat source. Granted, the two are directly related, but measuring the former is what tells you the ongoing heat need.