Over Pressure Distillation Machine

[Craigjw]

The Over Pressure Distillation Machine has a useful mechanic, which prevents more than 10kg/s of oil being pumped into the conversion chamber, without any automation.  This makes oil refining much easier and reliable.

When dripping oil from above into our conversion chambers, sometimes it can lose heat and pump oil over the edge and into the counter flow, meaning you'll have to repair the area, the OPDM does not have this issue, it will NEVER overflow with oil.

There are two version of the OPDM, the pumped version and the waterfall method, both achieve the same result, reliable petrol production.

Pumped version

Waterfall version

We should not be dripping oil into our conversion chambers from above, if you are, you are doing it wrong, this is unreliable and can have issues.

I present the Over Pressure Distillation Machine

The chamber on the right is where the action happens. If you haven't noticed, this uses the waterfall compressor effect, which makes it easy to make, as it can be built in a vacuum and doesn't really require any priming, just pump crude oil straight into the oil pipe and petrol into the refinery, hit go and wait

The chamber self primes with oil, which fills the tile and either spills over or blocks itself, either is ok.  When the oil reaches critical temperature, it turns into petrol and the waterfall effect starts up, at this time, the hydro sensor can be set to 100kg, releasing lovely petrol into the catch chamber immediately to the left, whereby it is pumped into the contraflow cooler on the far left.  Over time, the catch chamber heats up and self regulates at a stable ~405c.

One of the side effect advantages of this, is that it provides unlimited storage of your petrol as soon as it's converted, so, if you are feeling extra lazy about wanting petrol, but not bothered about cooling it, you can just leave it sealed up, then after maybe a thousand cycles later, just crack open one of the walls and watch in awe as your entire base fills up with 400c petrol

The only caveat is that it uses a Thermium pump.  You can get away with using steel for the pump in the contraflow, as petrol reaches here between 180-200c.  I would take an educated guess that this would quite easily be possible to build not using space materials.  The contraflow can accept input directly from the catch chamber instead of it being pumped in, by just lowering the whole contraflow assembly down 2 or 3 tiles, this would increase it's footspace though.

To summarize,

This is what I am actually discussing here, an Overpressure Distillation Machine.  ALL cooling after this, is a tertiary concern.  This requires absolutely NO maintenance or automation, apart from the hydro sensor to activate the pump.  Once it's primed, the output is always 100% petrol.

Below shows an OPDM when the oil is being pumped into the chamber, there is less than 1000kg of oil, so it is under-pressure.

When there is not enough heat to convert the oil to petrol, we go into a blocked state, which prevents any further oil from escaping for what ever reason.

The vent tile has reached 1000kg of oil, so it is now over-pressure and will not allow any further oil to enter the conversion chamber.

Piping overlays

 

 

 

 

 

 

[biopon]

1 hour ago, Craigjw said:

I'm not entirely sure if the tempshifts are doing anything positive.

They were not. They were doing the opposite of what you wanted, which (I think) is a gradual exchange of heat across that length of the pipe. To do that, leave 2 tiles between tempshifts so their area of effect does not overlap - and for the love of God, don't let your tempshifts affect your insulated tiles, especially like you were doing here; one insulated tile affected by 3 tempshifts, each supposedly trying to maintain its own temperature zone.

By the way, in a situation like this (one material in a pipe, the other in the cell), tempshifts don't do anything to speed up heat exchange between pipe & contents and pipe & cell. Their only function would be to help maintain a certain temperature in themselves and the cells they affect. 

[nakomaru]

Indeed the tempshifts in your snake are acting to conduct heat from hot petroleum to cold petroleum, which is an inefficiency. With ideal heat transfer, you can get about a 30C rise in temp from oil to petrol.

[SkunkMaster]

You could also build a petroleum well

 

[Craigjw]

Firstly, I removed the tempshift plates completely and the temperature is down to 115, I later re-added them with 2 spaces in between each plate and the temperature seemed to rise to 117, this increase might be caused by some other factor, like spurious dupe activity.

I made another test, not using the thermium pump, however, because it no longer has waterfall compression, it no longer forces the oil to remain in the conversion chamber, I periodically get oil overspill into the counterflow heat exchange, which then blocks and get overpressure damage, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place.

If thermium is available, then using the compressor is the best choice and is 100% failsafe.

[biopon]

There have been tons of topics on the subject, and many guide videos as well. For the latter I would recommend the one by John Francis, but google around a bit, there's a lot out there. For what it's worth I think this one is simpler and better than most:

Petroleum drips out at 113 degrees, the radiant pipes are aluminium, and the temp sensor is set to 405C. On the other side of the door in the upper left corner is your heat source; I use hot rocks but it's up to you.

No space mats used, not even steel. (Ok the mech door is steel for better conductivity, but it doesn't have to be with tempshifts on both sides.)

[Craigjw]

I'm not convinced my explanation is clear as to what I'm trying to do.  Most of the oil boiler designs out there, including the video's you mention aren't fool proof, at some random time, a blob of oil will spill from the vent area, polluting the counterflow and cause overpressure damage, this is a pain to deal with in survival.  Others are foolproof, but rely on lots of automation.  I have built almost all of them in survival games.

The device you have shown, does not fully prevent oil spill from entering the counterflow, it uses automation to stop the flow and resumes pumping at a temperature.  worst case scenario, this happens.  Which will require you to break into it and have your dupes mop the spill.

Using the unlimited storage waterfall compressor as part of the conversion chamber, it completely stops ALL oil from spilling into the left hand chamber (shown below) and into the counterflow.  I should remind you, that this is what we are actually looking at, all cooling is tertiary to this.

[nakomaru]

No temp sensor, no liquid sensor, no shutoff. Overflowing oil is completely inline with predictions.

JohnFrancis' design has the shutoff on the bottom which you may have overlooked. I like it up top by the vent, which is why I wait for niobium. And because I use an aquatuner to heat it. Two sensors is hardly a big deal, even the over pressure design uses one.

[Craigjw]

 

12 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

No temp sensor, no liquid sensor, no shutoff. Overflowing oil is completely inline with predictions.

I'm not sure what you mean with your first statement. I didn't overlook the shut off.  The design has failed on me in previous builds, sometimes the pipe remainder will be just enough to cause a spill over.  Most of the time, this is due to the whole system not being hot enough, which can happen when the heat source stops for prolonged periods.

[nakomaru]

3 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

Most of the time, this is due to the whole system not being hot enough, which can happen when the heat source stops for prolonged periods.

That's why you use a temp or element sensor and a shutoff, see above for an added picture. Pardon the confusion if his design doesn't do that, I'm not exceptionally familiar.

[Craigjw]

It makes more sense now, thank you. A good idea to add a shut off.

this setup seems to work nicely, it seems to stop the flow under low heat and doesn't use space stuff.  I'm still not sure about where's best to use metals and tempshifts though.  it is just a uniformly hot blob of petrol.

[nakomaru]

I didn't expect 3 tiles of pressure to hold back 1000kg of oil. That's neat.

You can place the shutoff in a nearby vacuum to use low quality metals up there if you like.

For example here:

[Craigjw]

I thought it was neat too, but then people start telling me to go look at over people's designs, which don't have it.

I switched production from Steel over to Iron and both the pump and non pump version have bee producing close to 100% petrol production at 10kg/s.  I'm quite surprised about this. 

In this latest bout of testing, 9 dupes were killed, as they got buried in iron ore that mysteriously appeared from no where and there were not enough digger dupes to free them in time.