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Compact Pre-Space Metal Volcano Petrol Cooker (WIP)


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Taking a stab at taming an iron volcano near my base with a fully accessible, compact petrol cooker that requires no space materials (some wolframite/tungsten and obsidian required because of the extreme molten metal temps, but that's as exotic as it gets).  It's still a work in progress, but is online for about 30 cycles now.  Found plenty of bugs early, lots of reloaded autosaves, but I think it's ready for stress testing and open to the public for critiquing.  All feedback, especially tips and suggestions for improvement are welcome!

Main idea is to use the pump range mechanics to drop liquid iron into crude with a tempshift sensor that toggles between dropping hot iron and preheated crude to keep it right around 410C. I'm dropping 30 g/s of fresh crude up top to hopefully keep the pump cool, the rest goes for preheating and off to the cooker pool. Because it's all going into the same pool I don't need any filtration for the iron/crude up top.  This idea should apply with magma or other other metal volcanoes.

Automation cuts off the fresh crude going up top above 410C which stops the pump from picking up iron. Fresh crude comes in around 50C atm (on Rime, expecting it to warm up to around 80ish?), keeps the pump in the corner cool, and gets up to about 250C before dropping in the pool. We'll see if I can keep the steel pump cool enough without extending the heat transfer area. For now it's hanging out around 220C.

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Plumbing overlay - bridges + shutoff + valve reroute stuck crude oil back to the main line to (hopefully) avoid spilling too much up top that would then flash to sour gas.  Otherwise it's just a regular pipeline to dump the iron in the cooking pool since control of that is handled by whether there's enough crude on top to reach the pump detection range, and a shutoff for the preheated crude.  No filter or bridges in the hot line helps keep heat losses next to nothing thus far.

tIJCxk1.png

Automation overlay - about as simple as I can think to make it.  Tempshift sensor toggles between dropping hot liquid iron and cool(er) crude oil at 410C.  The liquid shutoff for delivering fresh crude up top is hooked up to said tempshift sensor with a hydro sensor in the liquid iron pool to prevent dumping any more crude if the liquid level drops out of the pump range.  Another hydro sensor in the petrol is meant to keep enough liquid to act as a thermal buffer and keep the pump below 275C.

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Issues I encountered during the initial building or things I could see popping up during extended testing:

  • I started by trying water with a filter, but it just wouldn't work for me, despite deconstructing and sweeping out debris, laying fresh stuff down, etc. I could not keep the water temp from climbing up to 100C.  Once I switched to crude oil and ditched the filter, that problem has since gone away.  The issue may pop up again as temps stabilize, but I'll have a much bigger window before I have to worry (275C steel pump overheat temp vs. 100C evaporation temp).
  • Since I mentioned the steel pump... if it overheats and needs repairs right now I'm pretty sure debris is going to fall into the iron pool.  If steel melts and raises the level of the pool I'm assuming it's going to flash the crude up top straight to sour gas.  I had a mesh tile where the hydro sensor is now to catch debris... thinking I'm going to end up extending the pool (and pump) one tile to the right so I can leave the hydro sensor where it is and put a mesh tile back down.
  • Dupes picking up hot iron debris and running through the crude lock flashed some to petrol which then spilled onto the floor next to it which then flashed to sour gas when the next dupe ran by with hot iron.  I topped off the crude oil levels and hopefully there's enough mass there in that top tile now to keep this issue from popping up again.  If it does, I'll try switching to a petrol liquid lock instead as that should eliminate crude cracking to petrol raising the liquid level up one tile and spilling over.
  • On the note of hot iron debris... it's sitting in the petrol pool hanging out a little over 500C which means there's still thermal energy to harvest.  I'll need to set up an automation + shipping system to dump debris in a steam room.  Could also pipe the petrol through a steam room to harvest more of that thermal energy.
  • Not sure if the heat exchange area for bringing petrol temp back below 275C is going to cut it as things settle in.  I moved the coal generators from beneath this room to above in case I need the room for more heat exchange.

The throughput is not phenomenal... my geyser averages 335.5g/s liquid iron at 2527C and gets down to about 500C in the pool, so if my math is correct, that only allows for heating about 1kg/s crude from 240C to 410C.  Thinking this set up will be much better on the magma volcano on the other side of my base (math there suggests about 5.1kg/s crude from 240C to 410C given an average volcano output of 1.2kg/s).... numbers seem a little low to me, but I think the math is right... (m*C*dT)Crude=-(m*C*dT)Iron ...if something's wrong there please feel free to harass me about it.

Anyways... will be doing some stress testing over the next few days... let me know if you guys see anything that could be tweaked further optimize and/or dummy proof this thing.

 

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