Plastics & Steel production: Introducing SPoRC

[SpreadsheetGamr]

There comes a time when you want lots of plastic and steel.  You've got a base set up and now you're looking to push out and explore the map.  Plastic helps with transit speed and steel helps with taming high temperature stuff and space stuff, so you want lots of both.

I decided to put some effort in to streamlining refinery processes and I came up with this machine that I'm tentatively calling a Self Powered Refining Complex, or SPoRC.  I'm sure we'll come up with a better name.  Anyway, I made a video explaining it in more detail for newer players, but for veterans you probably just want the...

Summary

• Consumes waste heat from steel production (capacity: 1 refinery, ~1200kg steel per cycle)
• Converts crude oil to petroleum (capacity: ~2400kg/cycle, output petroleum @ 130°C)
• Produces power (powers metal refinery, self cooling and about 500 watts extra)
• (optional) Purifies water (capacity: <2400kg/cycle, depending on input temperature)
• Self cooling, cools refinery, output water and can be extended to other parts of your base
• Setup: requires 5000kg petroleum, no advanced materials, total 2000kg steel.
• Machine size: 19x33 including access ladder.

Design Principles

• Buildable as early as possible.  No late game materials, simple construction techniques.
• Resolve negative externalities relating to oil and metal refining.

Construction plan

There is an attachment showing various overlays.  I recommend proceeding in this order:

1. Plan out the area (19 wide, 33 deep).  Building in carbon dioxide is recommended, otherwise you may need to vacuum out other gasses.
2. Build the refinery, and reservoirs on the refinery level and connect them together, but do not link up the heating radiator yet.
3. Fill the feed reservoir with petroleum.  You may need to use an Oil Refinery to make the first 5 tonnes of petroleum.
4. Use the metal refinery to produce 2 tonnes of steel.  This will start pre-heating the petroleum, and the steel will be used in construction for the lower part of the machine.
5. Build the rest of the machine while leaving access paths for dupes to enter each level. Steam turbines can be delayed.
6. Disable the lower three reservoirs and then fill them.
7. Remove all debris from inside the various chambers.
8. Test the automation.  Toggle sensors by pressing above/below.  Nothing worse than finding you missed a wire after the machine is filled with hot steam!
9. Disable the Metal Refinery and all 3 reservoirs on the refinery level.
10. Vacuum any gasses lighter than steam from the steam chambers (Oxygen, pO2, Nat Gas, Hydrogen)
11. Connect the heating chamber radiator pipes to the refinery pipes.
12. Seal it up, enable all reservoirs and start refining!

Usage notes

• I recommend connecting the machine to your main power network.  At times it may draw power, but it will be a net energy producer.
• The metal refinery may be used to refine other metals.  Crude oil cracking will not be interrupted, but it may not produce enough heat to be self powered, depending on your duplicant's operation skill.
• I recommend extending the cooling loop as you see fit.  It has lots of spare capacity, but again the machine will draw more power.  Note however that it will refund the maximum possible energy while using water as a coolant, so this is still an efficient cooling option until late game materials.
• The input temperature of waste water and crude oil affects power production.  The hotter these inputs, the better.

SPoRC.blueprint

[alexkuzmov]

Does it really need to be this complex just to convert crude oil to petroleum using refinery heat?

The idea to purify water is cool and all but its not practical. Water has more than twice the specific heat capacity of petroleum, if its not preheated, then you lose all of the thermal energy just to boil water. The Water Sieve does the same, 5 kg/s and takes 120W. Filtration medium is free.
I havent calculated it but I bet that you can get more than 120W from the petroleum + steam turbine combo.

Consider powering the plastic production from the heat instead of boiling water.

[SpreadsheetGamr]

On 9/11/2019 at 4:36 AM, alexkuzmov said:

Does it really need to be this complex just to convert crude oil to petroleum using refinery heat?

No, it could be much simpler if that's all you wanted to do!

There's some complexity to cool the petroleum and quite a lot of complexity in running the steam turbines as efficiently as possible.  How do you cool petroleum from 405C to below 159C while getting steam at exactly 200C?

On 9/11/2019 at 4:36 AM, alexkuzmov said:

The idea to purify water is cool and all but its not practical. Water has more than twice the specific heat capacity of petroleum, if its not preheated, then you lose all of the thermal energy just to boil water. The Water Sieve does the same, 5 kg/s and takes 120W. Filtration medium is free.

Yeah, those are good points.  The machine I built is not a water purifier first and a refinery second.  The water purification is optional, at the operators discretion.  It would be energy inefficient to try and use that purifier on bulk, cool polluted water and I wouldn't recommend that.  There are a few notable differences.  The water purifier will clean polluted water, salt water, brine and germs while the water sieve only does one of those things.  The sieve also produces 4kDTU/s and 200g/s polluted dirt, which need to be accounted for.  Conversely, the purifier uses around 8% of it's internal energy production on water purification in the worst case scenario (35C pW) and directly produces 25% of the dirt without requiring compost flipping.  The purifier looks better versus the desalinator, and looks better the hotter those waste waters can be found.  I'm not sure what the break even point is but I would guess anywhere above 70 degrees is great.

On 9/11/2019 at 4:36 AM, alexkuzmov said:

I havent calculated it but I bet that you can get more than 120W from the petroleum + steam turbine combo.

If you want to optimise the system for energy recovery you'd need a third steam engine for sure, or you'd have to slow down the rate of steel production.  Since this system does so many things you really have to decide which are the highest priority and what you're prepared to sacrifice.  I was happy enough with 'self powered + 500 watts', maxing out two steam turbines.  The layout and design was not too difficult with just two turbines.

[Site]

It is a pretty decent design, somewhat complicated (offset by using blueprint mod) with only one big flaw that I see after testing it for a few hundred cycles. It's function ceases use after the big steel push is over, the water purification cooling needs a way to bypass the middle steam chamber if you are not currently running metal production, short of that it is a very good setup, thank you for posting 

[SpreadsheetGamr]

Thanks for the feedback.  I've come to the same conclusion about the aquatuner placement.  It would be better to put it in the upper steam chamber.  I think I'll probably do (yet another) redesign at some point.

I've found the water purification system is really only suitable for a very small throughput, otherwise the coolant loop heats up from turbine output.  At least it can handle the toilet water.

[Denisetwin]

On 9/10/2019 at 11:40 AM, SpreadsheetGamr said:

Construction plan

There is an attachment showing various overlays.  I recommend proceeding in this order:

1. Plan out the area (19 wide, 33 deep)

Can I just say i LOVE LOVE LOVE that you include this Construction Plan?  It's awesome!!

 

[NihilRex]

What is the thermoaquatuner chamber filled with?  Crude?