Can you make Petroleum by heating Crude Oil via Metal Refinery?

[Unfawkable]

Was just thinking about using Crude Oil as coolant for Steel, and I wanna know if it'll come out as Petroleum if heated enough. Also, will ceramic Isolated Pipes take the amount of heat?

On the Pipe subject, can I pipe molten glass through isolated ceramic pipe without fear?

[ruhrohraggy]

Hopefully first, so I could give some insight on how to find this answer for yourself, which is more valuable imo.You can apply this thought process to any future questions / problems you run into.

First, set up a sandbox game.

Then gather the information you need : Get the information of the liquids you're interested in using the in-game index. (Press u)

Then, investigate the interactions of the metal refinery. You can also use developer mode if you enable it, press CTRL-F4 to enable instant building, and build a mock-up of whatever system you want to use. You can use sandbox to spawn in dupes and liquids to do the things you want.

While investigating you can check : Does the coolant heat the refinery up? How much heat does the refinery add to the coolant? Can the volume of liquid going in / out of the refinery be controlled? Etc...

To the second part of your subject. The in-game wiki (of sorts) holds all of the information you seek.

[CDoroFF]

The pipes will break after the state change.But you can use petroleum as coolant and transfer heat to the crude oil storage.

[Unfawkable]

I frequently consult the wiki, but I don't have the time in my gaming hours to test stuff out in sandbox, hence my post here.

I was unable to find definitive information on whether molten glass can be piped through isolated pipes. I know it has a pretty low thermal capacity, so I also thought about just pumping it through a cold biome via radiant pipes instead of leaving it in a pool to cool off on its own.

22 minutes ago, CDoroFF said:

The pipes will break after the state change.But you can use petroleum as coolant and transfer heat to the crude oil storage.

Nice idea, think I have just the way to do that too. Thanks

[Promethien]

Ceramic will keep your glass at temp until you dump it wherever you want. Ceramic is effectively the best insulator that is relatively easily available. The absolute best insulator isn't actually required for anything, which is good because its absurdly difficult to make. 

[ruhrohraggy]

1 hour ago, Unfawkable said:

I frequently consult the wiki, but I don't have the time in my gaming hours to test stuff out in sandbox, hence my post here.

I was unable to find definitive information on whether molten glass can be piped through isolated pipes. I know it has a pretty low thermal capacity, so I also thought about just pumping it through a cold biome via radiant pipes instead of leaving it in a pool to cool off on its own.

Doesn't take that long, 15-30 minutes to setup and test a system tops. I setup both systems in question for giggles in the time it took for a response.

I'm assuming you're talking about piping molten glass over a great distance. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "isolated" pipes. Insulated pipes?

Ceramic is a decent insulator, but if you are not running the piping through insulated tiles, you will still get some sizeable temp changes. The molten glass comes out ~ 700C above it's freezing point though, so you have some room to work with.

Here's an example : I piped this through a cold biome. It starts off at 1739C

Spoiler

It ends at 1676C

 

Spoiler

 

If you limit the flow of liquid in a pipe to 1 kg/s, it will not state change inside of a pipe. So if you restrict the flow at the glass forge to 1 kg/s you can pipe it over any distance. I would say that this falls into the realm of game mechanic exploitation.

Use at the discretion of your own moral compass...

 

Spoiler

 

To showcase this, I piped it through the same cold biome, but at a limited flow of 1 kg/s with exposed thermium pipes. You can see the liquid glass temp inside the pipe is 17c at the output, well below it's freezing point. It gets output as a solid.

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Argelle]

@ruhrohraggy

nice explanation !

I don't get the copper ore liquid valve resisting a flow of 1726 °C molten glass...

Are valves magic transporters like bridges?

[ruhrohraggy]

1 hour ago, Argelle said:

@ruhrohraggy

nice explanation !

I don't get the copper ore liquid valve resisting a flow of 1726 °C molten glass...

Are valves magic transporters like bridges?

Basically.

From what I've witnessed, they only receive heat from their surroundings, not the liquid inside. So material choice only matters based on what environment they are sitting in, not what's being pumped through them.

Though this is only partially true, because it also depends on what piping you're using. If the piping heats up, that also heats up the surroundings which heats up your valve...

An experiment : Pumping 950C molten salt continuously through a thermium liquid valve and observing :

 

Spoiler

 

To be more thorough with this investigation, it's probably better to pump it through while inside a vacuum. We get the same result, however.

Spoiler

 

 

[Unfawkable]

Yeah, insulated is what I meant, I had a Freudian slip.

The trick's neat, but I wouldn't use it, I'm all for realism so no pumping glass through pipes at room temperature. I don't even use waterlocks cause they seem exploity to me.

Just wanted to make sure the pipes won't just break and rain molten glass all over the place, I'll probably end up dumping it in a reservoir with Diamond temp plates and glass tiles and just pipe through some cold hydrogen. Thanks

[ruhrohraggy]

27 minutes ago, Unfawkable said:

Yeah, insulated is what I meant, I had a Freudian slip.

The trick's neat, but I wouldn't use it, I'm all for realism so no pumping glass through pipes at room temperature. I don't even use waterlocks cause they seem exploity to me.

Just wanted to make sure the pipes won't just break and rain molten glass all over the place, I'll probably end up dumping it in a reservoir with Diamond temp plates and glass tiles and just pipe through some cold hydrogen. Thanks

It's really a small quantity of glass being output at a time. 25kg, so dunking it in a pool of water is also a simple and viable alternative to consider.

I usually park mine over the pool of water that gets created when I sack a cold biome early for steel and plastic production.

In this case, I parked it next to the ph2o geyser i found. I used this to make the 4,200 kg of glass that I needed for my desired 21 solar panels.

[KittenIsAGeek]

6 hours ago, Unfawkable said:

Was just thinking about using Crude Oil as coolant for Steel, and I wanna know if it'll come out as Petroleum if heated enough. Also, will ceramic Isolated Pipes take the amount of heat?

On the Pipe subject, can I pipe molten glass through isolated ceramic pipe without fear?

Short answer: Yes, you can create petroleum from crude by manufacturing steel.  The longer answer is: Its somewhat tricky.

Ceramic pipes will work amazingly for preventing high-temperature liquids (such as molten glass) from interacting with your base (mostly).  However, there will be a frustrating period where the liquid will react thermally with the inside of the pipe causing the liquid to decrease in temperature (or increase if you're making LOX) until the pipes reach the temperature of the liquid.  This usually only happens with very high temperatures or very low. In the case of molten glass, the output rate is below the phase-change threshold, so you shouldn't have pipes breaking because the glass won't solidify until it drops out the vent.  In my experience, short pipe runs work much better for glass manufacture, and you should only have the output of ONE glass forge on any given pipe.

The second problem you'll have is that if a material phase-changes within the pipe, it breaks spilling junk everywhere.  So if you're running crude through your refinery for coolant, when it gets hot enough to turn into petrol you'll have a problem on your hands.  A better method would be to run petroleum in your refinery pipes, then have them circulate through an oven-type set-up that boils crude into petrol at a controlled rate.

The third problem is that the margin between crude and sour gas is somewhat slim.  If you're manufacturing steel, you can easily get things too hot by accident.  So you want to make sure that your heat gets applied in a controlled manner. 

[mbugra]

If you use naphta as a coolent for metal refinery, you can make make petro boiler. i tried petroluem as a coolent but because of heat capacity low, pipes broke. but naptha good for the job. this design works for over 400 cycles.

sorry for the mess, this area become chaos.

[ruhrohraggy]

Actually decided to take a crack at this process. Using metal refineries to generate the heat necessary to cook crude, without any other heat sources (like aquatuners or volcanos) involved. I'm still testing, I'll post up my results in a thread soon.

Unfortunately you can't use the same material to cook itself without exploiting.

Petroleum however, is great for cooking crude into more petroleum. I can see naptha working too, but you have to do some stuff to get it...and I cba. I want something that's as brainless as possible.

The good thing, which covers the second problem @KittenIsAGeek mentions, is that refineries add an exact amount of temperature to a liquid, which means you can easily automate bypasses / shutoffs based on input temperature.

In the case of heating, if you know the refinery adds say, 59C worth of temperature while manufacturing steel, then you re-direct any fluid going into that refinery that is near 59C from boiling. (I'm not sure the exact number in C, i know for sure that it's roughly 250F while processing steel)

More good news is that the margin between petroleum boiling, and crude boiling is large, ~ 250 degrees F. The bad news, is that's just about how much heat a refinery adds to petrol.

So using something else to heat petroleum to 900'ish degrees and sending it through / dripping it onto crude to cook it is probably not too hard...managing petroleum temps so it doesn't turn into sour gas while sending it through the refinery is finicky.

The other bad news is that phase changes in bodies of liquids are also finicky, and they don't always change at the exact temperature listed in the tooltip. There always seems to be some margin...This may also be due to how uniformly the body of liquid is heated, and I'm looking into that as I test this crude cooker.

[beowulf2010]

43 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

In the case of heating, if you know the refinery adds say, 59C worth of temperature while manufacturing steel, then you re-direct any fluid going into that refinery that is near 59C from boiling. (I'm not sure the exact number in C, i know for sure that it's roughly 250F while processing steel)

Since I'm actually home, here's the maximum safe input temperature numbers for my 6 most refined metals, using Petroleum and Polluted Water as a coolants:

Aluminum - Adds 107.9C, max 430C - Adds 45.5C, max 73C

Copper - Adds 45.7C, max 493C - Adds 19.2C, max 100C

Gold - Adds 15C, max 523C - Adds 6.3C, max 113C

Iron - Adds 76.3C, max 462C - Adds 32.1, max 87C

Steel - Adds 132.9C, max 405C - Adds 56C, max 63C

Wolframite - Adds 44C, max 494C - Adds 18.5, max 100C

I have the other naturally occurring room temperature liquids in a spreadsheet is anyone cares. (Note: Ethanol is useless as a refinery coolant due to its 78.4C vaporization point)

Also, I ignored the +-3C phase change delay in these calculations so there's around a 3 degree buffer built in due to this and rounding.

Lastly, I'm not sure Naphtha is worth using over Petroleum. Same vaporization point at 538.9C and the higher Specific Heat Capacity only adds 28C to the maximum safe input temperature.

[ruhrohraggy]

Yep, thanks, gonna snatch those numbers and save them for reference. I saw a similar list posted earlier but couldn't seem to find it.

I'm aware that it had to do with the specific heat of the material being melted vs. the specific heat of the fluid being pumped through, just didn't have the numbers written down / memorized.

I usually observe the system in action regardless. Just habit. ONI is weird.

In my current test with crude and petrol, the refinery is adding about 250F or ~ 130C to either of them while making steel.

Petrol going in at 322.7C at the moment, exiting at 454.4C. (This works out to about 250F)

Made sure to note the temps of the incoming liquid after the refinery has emptied itself out, as to not compare liquids from a previous cycle.

[beowulf2010]

15 minutes ago, ruhrohraggy said:

Yep, thanks, gonna snatch those numbers and save them for reference. I saw a similar list posted earlier but couldn't seem to find it.

Maybe I'll just put that page onto Google Docs. I'll post a link if I do. 

[Xuhybrid]

You can pre-heat the oil going in while also cooling the petroleum coming out using Petroleum as the coolant. This way you can use pre-space materials. 403C petroleum is safe for the refinery which is conveniently the temperature you need to state change.