Is there any downside to using 500C petroleum in the generator?

[Lilalaunekuh]

Maybe someone can confirm if the following is true:

 

Assumption:

• Materials stored inside a building interact with a specific tile of the building.
• If your inside a vaccum and have a mesh tile below our specific tile the content of the building should be 100% insulated.

=> This would allow us to eliminate every influence the input temperature would/could have.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Maybe someone can confirm if the following is true:

 

Assumption:

• Materials stored inside a building interact with a specific tile of the building.
• If your inside a vaccum and have a mesh tile below our specific tile the content of the building should be 100% insulated.

=> This would allow us to eliminate every influence the input temperature would/could have.

For the Glass Forge, it has a tile (well, surface, really) at the bottom that thermally interacts with the tile below. 
The Auto Miner seems to also interact with a tile below and it definitely interacts with water placed over the same tile of the miner in vacuum.

I would suspect that for most buildings there is a specific building tile that
a) interacts thermally with a solid tile in direct contact with it and 
b) interacts thermally with any gas or liquid put in the same tile as the building tile

 

[bobe17]

I confirm. It occurs with most of the buildings. The contents acts as debris. There is exception (metal refinery).

[Mathgeekburch]

On 8/30/2019 at 6:37 PM, WanderingKid said:

Keep the generator cool and you don't have that issue, the input is not a direct correlation to the output.  It's based on the generator temp, as @Nebbie mentioned above.

I could have sworn that the CO2 was at the temperature of the inputs, while the pwater was at the temperature of the building.  I guess my understanding is outdated.

On a side note, do steel petroleum generator breakdown when above 125 C, due to the Pwater boiling? 

[Hellshound38]

1 hour ago, Mathgeekburch said:

I could have sworn that the CO2 was at the temperature of the inputs, while the pwater was at the temperature of the building.  I guess my understanding is outdated.

On a side note, do steel petroleum generator breakdown when above 125 C, due to the Pwater boiling? 

No... and you can cool them with an steam turbine. 

[Mathgeekburch]

2 hours ago, Hellshound38 said:

No... and you can cool them with an steam turbine. 

I don't wish to cool them down with a steam turbine.  I wish to use them to power a steam turbine, so I get even more energy for the fuel I burn.

5 turbines should be able to run on 8 petrol generators at about 270 C.  Albeit I'd probably run them a bit cooler since I am only 5C away from overheating.

[0xFADE]

You could do all sorts of things with tat heat first.  Steam generator comes to mind. 

[ZanthraSW]

2 hours ago, Mathgeekburch said:

I don't wish to cool them down with a steam turbine.  I wish to use them to power a steam turbine, so I get even more energy for the fuel I burn.

5 turbines should be able to run on 8 petrol generators at about 270 C.  Albeit I'd probably run them a bit cooler since I am only 5C away from overheating.

Yeah, each generator produces about 500W of hot steam at 265C. If you use the heat from the CO2 as well you get another 50W. Plus any power savings from pumping or sieving the water.

The 20kDTU output of the petroleum generator is not enough to get the generator to those temperatures or maintain the temperature as heat is lost to colder fuel inside the generator. Even so it's not worth putting fuel much above 125C into the generator, as you get much more power from the heat in the petroleum though a steam generator then it takes to make up for the small loss of temperature to fuel in the generator buffer (if fueling with ethanol it has to be well under 125C because otherwise it would boil out of the generator). An Aquatuner in the generator room only has to operate very occasionally, probably only around 50W average cost to maintain the generator's temperature, and using the energy in any hot petroleum to generate steam directly would be hundreds of watts.

[Gurgel]

6 hours ago, Mathgeekburch said:

On a side note, do steel petroleum generator breakdown when above 125 C, due to the Pwater boiling? 

I have a steel nat gas generator running constantly at 175C, no problem with the pwater there. Should be the same for the petroleum generator.

[0xFADE]

4 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

I have a steel nat gas generator running constantly at 175C, no problem with the pwater there. Should be the same for the petroleum generator.

Does it turn right in to steam?  No time to make any polluted oxygen?

[Mathgeekburch]

12 hours ago, ZanthraSW said:

The 20kDTU output of the petroleum generator is not enough to get the generator to those temperatures or maintain the temperature as heat is lost to colder fuel inside the generator.

Doesn't the contents of the fuel only interact with the generator through the medium middle man, and not to the generator itself.  So the generator should stay at the temp of the medium at the very least.

Effectively we are dealing with the opposite problem of the OP, where they were trying to prevent heat from leaking out of the petrol, we are trying to prevent heat from leaking into the petrol.  Unfortunately we don't have the option to turn the area into a vacuum since we are constantly producing large amounts of steam and CO2. 

Although slight question, since the problem is occurring from petrol stored in the generator.  Could we just limit the amount of petrol in storage in the generator by only giving it enough petrol to run?

[chemie]

14 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

You could do all sorts of things with tat heat first.  Steam generator comes to mind. 

This.  Back in the day, dumping heat into petroleum and then burning was great for heat deletion.  Now you really want to use steam gen and get some power out of it.  Just a radiator under the gen works and is zero power input (except for a bit of cooling for the gen).

 

I used to burn hot petroleum to rockets for the LOX/LH2 system but now just a steam gen.  Steam gens really trivialize heat management.

[ZanthraSW]

4 hours ago, Mathgeekburch said:

Doesn't the contents of the fuel only interact with the generator through the medium middle man, and not to the generator itself.  So the generator should stay at the temp of the medium at the very least.

Effectively we are dealing with the opposite problem of the OP, where they were trying to prevent heat from leaking out of the petrol, we are trying to prevent heat from leaking into the petrol.  Unfortunately we don't have the option to turn the area into a vacuum since we are constantly producing large amounts of steam and CO2. 

Although slight question, since the problem is occurring from petrol stored in the generator.  Could we just limit the amount of petrol in storage in the generator by only giving it enough petrol to run?

It's certainly possible it only interacts through the medium. The loss to the fuel is low, but more than the 20kDTU heating the generator produces. Any loss of generator temperature means a loss of output temperature meaning that without adding that heat back, over time the temperature will go down until it reaches an equelibrium where the heating due to the generator and cooling from the fuel are both equal to 20kDTU. You get about 3kDTU more heat in the steam output for every 1 degree hotter the generator runs, so if equilibrium is 200C and your desired temp is 265C, then the break even point for heating the generator to 265C would be about 200W average cost (about 3 watts for 3 kDTU * 65C = 195W) in maintaining the temperature, and that is far more than the actual average cost of maintaining the generator temperature.

Reducing the input flow does not help too much since the petroleum generator burns 400g every 1/5 of a second, and minimum pipe flow to maintain it would be 2000g/s, so there is 1600, 1200, 800, 400, and 0 g in the buffer in the best case.

[Mathgeekburch]

11 minutes ago, ZanthraSW said:

The loss to the fuel is low, but more than the 20kDTU heating the generator produces. Any loss of generator temperature means a loss of output temperature meaning that without adding that heat back, over time the temperature will go down until it reaches an equelibrium where the heating due to the generator and cooling from the fuel are both equal to 20kDTU.

20kDTU is still less than the heat lost to the fuel, why don't we take advantage of that.  In theory if we can equalize the heat well, the temperature of the generator shouldn't go up unless we input heat from somewhere else into it.  Therefor it should be safe to run the generator much closer to the 275c overheat temperature.  The extra heat energy in the steam will slightly counteract the cooling from the fuel, albeit the higher temp differences means more heat is entering the fuel before getting burned.  You still need to constant pump heat into the system to maintain temp of the generator.


It would be nice to know how much heat is being lost to the fuel though.  Easier to calculate the equations with more precise numbers.  





 

[ZanthraSW]

Yeah, the concern is how closely coupled the thermal sensor, petroleum geneerator and aquatuer are. 265 is about 30-40W less power than the theoretical maximum for steel at 275C, but gives a very good safety margin. Higher temp will always be better though, any increase in loss of heat to the fuel is easily made up by the extra power out of the steam turbine.

In this build I often see 5-15C higher buffer temps than input temps, so I expect the loss to the fuel is between 25kDTU to 100kDTU depending on fuel temperature and how often the tile with which it exchanges happens to be CO2 or Steam. Given where the PWater ejects from, it's likely very difficult to maintain CO2 on that tile.. (Fuel type won't make a difference since both Petroleum and Ethanol have higher thermal conductivity than steam or CO2)

 

[Mathgeekburch]

32 minutes ago, ZanthraSW said:

Given where the PWater ejects from, it's likely very difficult to maintain CO2 on that tile..

Would it be more possible if you don't use airflow tiles?  Or does that cause other problems?

A heat loss of about 25 kDTU/s or a bit higher is quite doable to counteract with even less effort. What is the ratio of time the tile is in CO2 vs time in Steam?

Also prior to getting super coolant for the aqua-tuner, a simple steel battery is more efficient than using pwater going through an aquatuner.  You should only need 4 per generator, maybe 8 if steam occupies the tile for a decent amount of time.


Random side question.  Can an ethanol distiller safely output ethanol gas?

[ZanthraSW]

18 minutes ago, Mathgeekburch said:

Would it be more possible if you don't use airflow tiles?  Or does that cause other problems?

A heat loss of about 25 kDTU/s or a bit higher is quite doable to counteract with even less effort. What is the ratio of time the tile is in CO2 vs time in Steam?

Also prior to getting super coolant for the aqua-tuner, a simple steel battery is more efficient than using pwater going through an aquatuner.  You should only need 4 per generator, maybe 8 if steam occupies the tile for a decent amount of time.


Random side question.  Can an ethanol distiller safely output ethanol gas?

I was not actually aware that the petroleum generator buffer exchanged heat with the gasses when I designed that, at the time I thought the exchange was with the generator directly. However, the PWater will turn to steam at or below the center tile of the generator, and has to go up to get to the steam turbine. There may be some tricks that could influence the likelihood of tile being CO2 vs Steam, but they are probably beyond me. If you could guarantee CO2 in the tile, the system might be self heating.

The strong active control with the aquatuner simplifies things greatly, and makes it much easier to bring up to temperature initially. Other heat sources could be used, for example if you are cooling 500C petroleum with steam turbines before running it into this device, you could just divert a few packets through the generator room for added heat.

The ethanol distiller question is somewhat of a trick. First the ethanol outputs at the temperature of the lumber, not a problem per se, but heating a constant supply of lumber has its challenges. Second the distiller outputs to a pipe at 500g/s. Packets of 1000g or less wont phasechange in the pipe, but will phasechange when sent to an outlet or a building buffer. 

[Mathgeekburch]

5 minutes ago, ZanthraSW said:

The ethanol distiller question is somewhat of a trick. First the ethanol outputs at the temperature of the lumber,

So different buildings have outputs at building temp, and others have it as input temperature.  I wish the wiki was reliably updated so I could know which one does which without looking in game.

Well I guess knowing the ethanol distiller works even if inputs are above ethanol boiling point (provided you putting it into an outlet) is useful when trying to delete heat.  Not so much for what we are doing here.

How useful is increasing the thermal mass of the system?  Like say adding dirt or igneous tempshift plates.

[ZanthraSW]

In general, power buildings output at building temperature, and refinement and O2 buildings output at input temperature. There may be exceptions.

More thermal mass means that while the loss to fuel does not reduce the temperature as much, it also takes more added heat to make up for that temperature loss. More thermal mass would mean you could run closer to 275C safely. It's exactly 3557.25 (3134.25 steam, 423 CO2) DTU/s or just a little over 3W through steam turbine for each degree hotter that you can run the Petroleum Generator.

[Mathgeekburch]

6 hours ago, ZanthraSW said:

In general, power buildings output at building temperature, and refinement and O2 buildings output at input temperature. There may be exceptions.

More thermal mass means that while the loss to fuel does not reduce the temperature as much, it also takes more added heat to make up for that temperature loss. More thermal mass would mean you could run closer to 275C safely. It's exactly 3557.25 (3134.25 steam, 423 CO2) DTU/s or just a little over 3W through steam turbine for each degree hotter that you can run the Petroleum Generator.

Also random question.  Have you ever considered how space age materials impact this.  A petrol or nat gas generator at 900c should be able to produce an absolute **** ton of heat (despite constantly losing heat to the fuel inputs, but I digress).  

[ZanthraSW]

At 900C you would get around 2500W from the output temperature, but it's more complex to exchange that heat with multiple steam turbines as 900C is too hot for a steam turbine directly. Heat lossses to fuel will still cost a fraction to make up compared to the output heat, but the survival game I am playing has no access to Wolframite, so no thermium, so I wanted to design something I could use with steel only.

[Mathgeekburch]

29 minutes ago, ZanthraSW said:

so no thermium

Weren't able to get any tungsten from space missions?

What about isoresin?  You can convert isoresin to tungsten at about 100kg tungsten per 15kg isoresin.  Requires you to make insulation, build insulation tempshift plates, then melt them since they actually have a greater than 0 conductivity.  (I heard it done before, how the hell they get 3630c temperatures, idk).

[ZanthraSW]

None of the asteroids had wolframite or tungsten. I was at first a bit disappointed, but took it as a challenge instead. I can still get small quantities of niobium for +500 overheat for select things, but 6 cycle round trips for a few kg niobium makes it feel valuable indeed.

[Derringer]

3 hours ago, ZanthraSW said:

None of the asteroids had wolframite or tungsten. I was at first a bit disappointed, but took it as a challenge instead. I can still get small quantities of niobium for +500 overheat for select things, but 6 cycle round trips for a few kg niobium makes it feel valuable indeed.

Tungsten should still be able to be cooked off the surface of natural abyssalite blocks by sufficiently hot gas. Much contrivance may be necessary to get the gas hot enough though.