Pre-space sour gas boiler V3

[DRAKCORE]

----CURRENT VERSION V3----

Made several changes to the chamber, making it more efficient and reliable.

You don't have to follow the setup to a T and can make changes to get even better performance, I'm just passing on the flame.

Save file attached.

SANDBOX MAP.sav

 

---OVERVIEW

You have the volcano chamber where the magma heat will not be lost due to the airflow tiles in a vacuum.

Heat leach chamber removes additional heat from the magma that hardens into igneous rock.

The usual heating and cooling sides, as the crude intake / natural gas output and finally the sulfur delete chamber.

 

---VOLCANO, LEACH CHAMBER AND HEATING

The volcano chamber is in a vacuum surrounded by airflow tiles, this prevents all heat loss to the magma (except for minor loss in the one insulated tile above the door due to mechanics).

You have a 'and gate" with a 'thermo sensor" set to below 1111C and a timer that runs ever 100S and keeps the door open for 4.2S. Door has 8 blocks before it giving you around 500KG of Magma with each drop/100S loop.

This causes the magma to cool down and form igneous rock in the small steam room allowing you to leach beyond the 1409C to 542C.

 

---HEATING CRUDE INTO SOUR GAS

*Take note, have the door always facing upwards or at least have the heat transfer areas always on its top side since it expels heat from its top. Gave me endless headaches on major heat loss, until I realized it (vertical or horizontal, top of door always expels heat).

1. Use a hydro sensor instead of a thermo sensor since this allows you to get the heating side down to 475C from 540C+-, effectively giving you an average of 75C+- less top heat. Also having petroleum being heated 95% of the time instead of sour gas gives you 10% more efficiency due to sour gas having a higher heat capacity.

This little trick allows you spike the heat to just convert the petroleum into sour gas and then keep it cool below 500C, allowing the higher temps to feedback into the cooler petroleum.

This was giving me sour gas temps after passing the crude piping of 115C to 135C, it fluctuates due to 900L of petroleum turning into sour gas ever so often.

*Crude comes in at 90C, so you only adding between 25 to 45C, and if you adjust the settings a bit you could get it lower.

You can also make the heat chamber probably a few blocks shorter or even half it if you used some tiles to either zig zag or diamond tiles to shrink the feedback of the sour gas.

 

---SULFUR HEAT TRANSFER AND DELETION

Sulfur is railed down the cooling chamber, though mine takes a shortcut through the insulation walls since before the chamber was primed, you would get grams of sulfur that would turn into liquid and block the chamber.

*Take note putting rails behind any blocks increases heat transfer exponentially, even insulation tiles until heat balance is made.

1. As below I am using doors to get heat transferred out of the sulfur as fast as possible, additionally splitting it into two stacks so double the heat dissipation. The more stacks you have the more heat you can move about.

2. Also once the sulfur turns into a liquid it will be deleted by the doors/blocks.

3. Heat is also pulled into the natural gas chamber to pull any additional heat out if possible. 

The doors are on a 200S loop with the top doors closing after 4.5S and the bottom doors after 5.5S.

 

---Cooling side

Random bugs.

1. Every 20+- cycles there is a hiccup and those mini pumps would push out over 1L causing pipe damage. Thus flow control set to 990g/s and the crude side since they match their quantities equally.

2. Thermo sensor connected to the crude liquid shuttoff set to -50C due to the heat increasing on the heating side even when the doors were open, only happened once when I was clicking quickly to test the doors. *Had to just close and open the doors again. This Thermo sensor isn't really needed but just a little extra safety in case the chamber gets flooded with heat it will cut off the crude, allowing you to reset the chamber.

 

Thermo sensor was set to -218C allowing me to push the regulators to around -249C with their internal hydrogen.

 

 

 

 

(OUTDATED)

-----PREVIOUS REVISION OF SOUR GAS BOILER-----

 

Posting my most recent sour gas boiler, using pre-space materials.

*Just take note efficiency is far less and your system gets a little more bulky since you have to use hydrogen/gas instead of super coolant/liquid.

*Issues with the current map build. 

Built the sour gas chamber a little short so the methane/natural gas is coming out too cold and to counter this I needed to reduce the cooling on the one end and increase the heat by 40c on the other so the methane/natural gas hits my steam room around 120-200c, which is needed or it cools down the steam below 125c in the gen room. I also usually have 5 blocks on the hot side of the chamber so that the methane can travel 70% up the way to heat up, this build is 3 blocks wide and the methane travels up a vacuum channel.

Sulfur should of been transported higher, to right below the heat exchange so it flashes into a liquid but I tried something a little different by dividing it up into stacks which does work, just at a slower rate.

 

Requirements

You need x1 volcano, x1 oil well and lost of steel if you want a steam room.

 

The Math

Using 1L of water, the oil well produces 3,333L of crude, which is flashed into sour gas and then cooled down to methane(66%) + sulfur(33%)

So in our system we use 3L of crude per second which is 2L of methane(natural gas), that can power 22 natural generators, which provides 17600W of power, 1.485L of polluted water and 0.495L CO2.

1L water = 3L of crude (plus 0.333 not used) = 3L of sour gas = 2L methane(natural gas) + 1KG of sulfur(waste product) = 17,6KW + 1.485L polluted water + 0.495L of CO2.

What does this mean? You can have a closed loop un-managed (except for the oil well) and get 50% more water out + ton of energy and byproducts.

 

The Design

Overview

(Green) - the sour gas chamber has the heating and cooling at the top - reason behind this is that sour gas is heavier than natural gas, so if by some chance the methane turns into natural gas it will stay in the cooling side and not clog up chamber. Sulfur being the heaviest will fall down at the bottom of the chamber and solidify into a solid and get transported out of the chamber.

Sulfur accounts 33% of your total cooling, so to save on energy you rail it down the same path of the methane to cool down the sour gas, once it flashes past its melting point it will turn into a liquid or gas and fall down to bottom where it will ejected out of the chamber.

(Pink) - the heat exchange has magma less than 1400KG sitting on top of diamond windows, so when they do cool down they won't form blocks, but by some odd chance they do, there are robo miners there to clean it up.

(Yellow) - Oil well + excess water deleting. Water is pumped into the oil well and any excess water is deleted with closing doors since I don't need the extra water.

(Red) - Natural gas storage.

(Blue) - cooling system - Honestly you only need around 12-16 on a poor to medium efficient sour gas boiler, I just built a lot since it primes the system exceptionally fast and they only run 15% of the time.

(Topaz) - CO2 and heat deletion + water collection.

 

Attached a bunch of pictures which are self explanatory, but if you got questions just drop them below.

[psusi]

Wow, that is a thing of beauty.  I've seen sour gas boilers before but never one that has 3 separate lines of 1000g/s of oil going in.  And that generator room is perfection.

What I am not sure about is using the diamond windows to transfer cooling to the sour gas.  Why not just run the hydrogen into the sour gas room?

One other thing that is interesting is that other designs use the heat from the thermo-regulators to warm the liquid methane back up, but you are using it instead to heat steam for the turbine.  I suppose that creates a net transfer of heat from the volcano to the turbine, which I suppose is a good way of using the excess heat from the volcano.  If you don't have a volcano though then I guess you would want to use the pump trick to get some magma from the magma biome and would want it to stay hot instead of sending heat to the turbine, so you would want to cool the thermo-regulators with the liquid methane instead of steam.

Finally, with the generators all running hot, they are creating a ton of heat in the newly created boiling polluted water.  Honestly, I am quite surprised that a single steam turbine can handle all of that heat, plus the heat being transferred from the volcano.

[DRAKCORE]

@psusi

In a few builds I have run the hydrogen directly into the sour gas chamber, downside to it is that I would usually chain all the thermo regulators into a single pipe making it very hard to prevent the hydrogen from freezing + efficiency goes down rather badly if the piping is too long (loosing between 20%-30%).

You can build a vacuum around a smaller room filled with hydrogen or a cheaper material instead of diamond to transfer heat.

One steam turbine is more than enough. I use to put the kins and a glass forge in there as well. Not sure if this is correct but I was experiencing a heat loss with the natural gas gens running, which could be the P2O, in this last build.

If you want to be as efficient as possible, use a hybrid system and include a thermo aquatuner to cool down the sour gas to -10C+- before it hits the thermo regulator cooling to get it to -165+-.

Thermo aquatuner are almost x4 the efficiency compared to the equivalent thermo regulators, since they push 10L@1200W instead of 1L@240W(2400W in comparison), also using polluted water it can transfer even more heat since it has a heat capacity of 4.179 vs hydrogen of 2.4.

Been very tempted to play on sandbox and create the perfect pre space sour gas boiler working down the exact measurements.

[Craigjw]

The natural gas gens fuel tank is sat on a metal tile, the metal tile conducts with the cold fuel in the tank, cooling the tile and surroundings.  If you place metal tiles around the fuel tank and a mesh underneath the fuel tank you should get better results, as the only heat conduction is happening with CO2, which is much less significant than a metal tile. 

This is the reason why your nat gas is cooling down the room when it's below temperature, this and you have non-insulated pipes.

I have hot fuel going into this setup and don't want it to heat up the surroundings.

 

[psusi]

58 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

The natural gas gens fuel tank is sat on a metal tile, the metal tile conducts with the cold fuel in the tank, cooling the tile and surroundings.  If you place metal tiles around the fuel tank and a mesh underneath the fuel tank you should get better results, as the only heat conduction is happening with CO2, which is much less significant than a metal tile. 

Good point about the floor, but his room is full of steam, not CO2.

@DRAKCORE

I spotted a major flaw in your setup. The reason you need so many thermo-regulators is that in effect, you are using them to move heat from the volcano to the steam turbine, and that's a very inefficient way to do it.

I think I'm going to try to build a sour gas boiler without natural magma.  I'll start with dripping molten glass from the glass forge onto one steel tile. The glass will cool from 1750 C until near the temperature of the steel tile.  The tile will heat up and the glass will solidify at which point it can be swept elsewhere to finish cooling.  Once the steel tile is up to 1000 C, drop 10kg of sedimentary rock on it.  This will cool the tile some, but should get the rock up to 926 C, at which point it will change into 1409 C magma, and multiply its specific heat by 5.  That should heat the steel tile further before freezing into igneous rock which can be swept away.  Repeat until tile is getting close to 1409 C.  Build second steel tile next to it.  That should drop the temperature back down below 1000 C, so you will need to forge some more glass to get back to 1000 C, then throw on sedimentary rock again, and repeat adding 2 more steel tiles below ( one at a time, then reheating ).  At that point you should have 4 steel tiles sitting at around 1400 C.  Add the conduction door and two more steel tiles for your hot plate inside the sour gas chamber, and as long as your top plate is still over 1000 C you can reheat it any time to 1400 just by adding some more sandstone.

With an efficient sour gas boiler, the hot plate will lose heat very slowly.

[Craigjw]

My bad about the CO2.  I don't think the gas in question makes a difference, the room is still being cooled by the gas tank.

Nice use of fusion or is it fision? to turn sandstone into heat and igneous.

There is some counter flow heat exchange happening before the gas reaches the thermo regulators, but I can't say how effective this is.

[DRAKCORE]

34 minutes ago, psusi said:

Good point about the floor, but his room is full of steam, not CO2.

@DRAKCORE

I spotted a major flaw in your setup. The reason you need so many thermo-regulators is that in effect, you are using them to move heat from the volcano to the steam turbine, and that's a very inefficient way to do it.

I think I'm going to try to build a sour gas boiler without natural magma.  I'll start with dripping molten glass from the glass forge onto one steel tile. The glass will cool from 1750 C until near the temperature of the steel tile.  The tile will heat up and the glass will solidify at which point it can be swept elsewhere to finish cooling.  Once the steel tile is up to 1000 C, drop 10kg of sedimentary rock on it.  This will cool the tile some, but should get the rock up to 926 C, at which point it will change into 1409 C magma, and multiply its specific heat by 5.  That should heat the steel tile further before freezing into igneous rock which can be swept away.  Repeat until tile is getting close to 1409 C.  Build second steel tile next to it.  That should drop the temperature back down below 1000 C, so you will need to forge some more glass to get back to 1000 C, then throw on sedimentary rock again, and repeat adding 2 more steel tiles below ( one at a time, then reheating ).  At that point you should have 4 steel tiles sitting at around 1400 C.  Add the conduction door and two more steel tiles for your hot plate inside the sour gas chamber, and as long as your top plate is still over 1000 C you can reheat it any time to 1400 just by adding some more sandstone.

With an efficient sour gas boiler, the hot plate will lose heat very slowly.

The thermo regulators are just used to cool the sour gas to methane. You only need around 1/3 of what I have but I prefer to run them 15% of the time but have a far faster processing speed to cool things if required. I have them in the steam room to leach off their excess heat they produce for additional energy.

[psusi]

46 minutes ago, DRAKCORE said:

The thermo regulators are just used to cool the sour gas to methane. You only need around 1/3 of what I have but I prefer to run them 15% of the time but have a far faster processing speed to cool things if required. I have them in the steam room to leach off their excess heat they produce for additional energy.

You have 26.  Even a third of that is 8.6.  You should only need like 2, and not on full time either.

[DRAKCORE]

5 minutes ago, psusi said:

You have 26.  Even a third of that is 8.6.  You should only need like 2, and not on full time either.

Maybe if you only pumping 1L of crude a second, I'm pushing 3L/s, even with counter flow, you still going to have sour gas hitting the cooling area at  90C @ 3L density vs 2L of cooling at max -220C, getting it to -165C wouldn't work.

[psusi]

2 minutes ago, DRAKCORE said:

Maybe if you only pumping 1L of crude a second, I'm pushing 3L/s, even with counter flow, you still going to have sour gas hitting the cooling area at  90C @ 3L density vs 2L of cooling at max -220C, getting it to -165C wouldn't work.

I watched a video the other day on youtube... I think the guy's name was Brothgar.  His did only have 1 kg/s but the two thermo-regulators at the bottom hardly ran.  He said there was almost no heat actually making it all the way from the hot plate to the cold side.

[DRAKCORE]

6 minutes ago, psusi said:

I watched a video the other day on youtube... I think the guy's name was Brothgar.  His did only have 1 kg/s but the two thermo-regulators at the bottom hardly ran.  He said there was almost no heat actually making it all the way from the hot plate to the cold side.

I watch him as well,  he was using aquatuners with super coolant the last few videos if you were thinking about that one. Aquatuners with super coolant is 8 times more efficient and he was using 2, so 16 regulators, but if you do counter flow the methane as you should be doing, temps are lowered below 90c after it counter flows the raw crude to around -70C+-. Actually going to have some fun in sandbox and see how efficient I can get a sour gas boiler pre space tech, while making it as compact as possible.

[Craigjw]

I'd be interested to see a compact gas boiler, these things as they stand tend to be huge.

[DRAKCORE]

So far with experimenting, managed to get it down to 6 regulators and 1 aquatuner, though it looks like the regulators are barely keeping up and 8 might be required. Aquantuner only runs 15% of the time +-.

Steam room is only the regulators + aquantuner, with the steam turbine set to turn on only when temps hit 185c, so PO2 water can be piped through and flashed once ejected. This should be more efficient than trying to heat the entire generator room + saving on a lot of steel.

Can still be compacted more, will try again latter in the day once I have some free time.

[Craigjw]

That looks really nice.

You could just replace the Thermo regulators with Aquatuners and use Lox.  I don't know how the maths works out for this to make it more efficient or not though, but would decrease the footprint and would just need the coolant swapping out when Super-coolant becomes available.  And really, once you have the thing working, even if there is inefficiency in running Lox as the coolant, you aren't going to be worried about it, as you have a **** load of natural gas.

My preference would be to go for the AT, purely for the convenience value it holds when Super coolant is available, cutting down on time spent faffing around replacing the thermo regulators with AT's.

[DRAKCORE]

Liquid oxygen? Its' heat capacity is only 1 making it less efficient than hydrogen with regulators, only viable liquid pre space could be propane which has the same heat capacity of hydrogen of 2.4 but being used with a aquantuner which only uses half the watts making it twice as efficient, though you threading a really fine thread since propane freezes at -188c.

[Craigjw]

I would agree that it may not be as efficient, but look at it in the long run, once you have super coolant, what are you going to do with the regulator version? Are you going to make a new one with AT's & super coolant, or are you going to keep the current one forever and never upgrade. 

If you aren't going to upgrade, then then the Lox coolant is the long term winner in terms of efficiency as it gets an almost free upgrade to super coolant, which is more efficient than hydrogen.  A short term loss for long term gain.

Aside from the inefficiencies of running Lox, are there any other issues that might arise from running coolant at -200?

[Gamers Handbook]

@DRAKCORE  How do we make propane?  Also I've found liquid methane in an aquatuner to be excellent... in sandbox mode.  Pre-cooling the cooler and then swapping to the methane without damage was not as reliable as I wanted.  The cooling area could also warm the methane up too much if sour gas was pushed in too fast or the cooling area was too large and each methane packet was exposed to too much heat.  And of course you'll still need hydrogen thermoregulators or something to make the methane originally.  But I really think the most efficient non space cooling solution is going to involve liquid methane in an aquatuner.

For this design, how much excess power does this generate?  As in what's the power per second when you take the average power provided and subtract the average power consumed?

[DRAKCORE]

1 hour ago, Gamers Handbook said:

@DRAKCORE  How do we make propane?  Also I've found liquid methane in an aquatuner to be excellent... in sandbox mode.  Pre-cooling the cooler and then swapping to the methane without damage was not as reliable as I wanted.  The cooling area could also warm the methane up too much if sour gas was pushed in too fast or the cooling area was too large and each methane packet was exposed to too much heat.  And of course you'll still need hydrogen thermoregulators or something to make the methane originally.  But I really think the most efficient non space cooling solution is going to involve liquid methane in an aquatuner.

For this design, how much excess power does this generate?  As in what's the power per second when you take the average power provided and subtract the average power consumed?

Can't make propane unfortunately, only in sandbox mode where you can spawn it in. I am currently experimenting with liquid oxygen and methane opposed to the regulator with hydrogen. Going to have to say it is a struggle to stabilize the temp so you don't burst the pipes. Methane has a 21C+2C window and liquid oxygen has 36C+2C window to work with. Methane has a 2.191 heat capacity while liquid oxygen has 1.01, requiring twice as much equipment to cool. Being a aquatuner cools at 14C makes it rather hard, but I'm getting there. As CraigJw stated, the transition from pre space material usage to super coolant, aiming for that design right now.

Did further work on the above hybrid version, with the aquatuner and regulators, you only using 2.5k watts, include the pumps, CO2 scrubbers and oil well, push that up to 4k watts in total - the total output of 22 natural gas gens 17600 watts, so 17600-4000=13600 watts of constant output.

With the use of super coolant you just saving around 1750 watts+- and if you temporarily use methane prob like 1000 watts.

[Craigjw]

Are you looking to get the cold block below the AT/Thermo regulators accurately to a specific temperature?  I have a very precise temperature control system I can show you, it's even accurate with no reservoir to average out the temperatures.

[DRAKCORE]

@Craigjw Decided to rather just use regulators, managed to get the chamber more efficient using the sulfur to suck up a lot of the heat, plus the current design allows me to remove the regulators and put a aquatuner with super coolant at a latter stage. But post the info anyway.

[Craigjw]

The flow valve allows the input of cold stuff more accurately.  Any temperature coolant can be used, so long as it's colder than you need, just adjust the flow valve to suit.  A reservoir on the AT output can be used to further increase accuracy by averaging the temperatures.

This is a little bulky, but it's really effective.  I use this for my Lox & Hydrogen pre-cooling and condensing tanks.

[DRAKCORE]

You can ignore the clocks connected to the batteries in the steam room, used them to force them system to run 30+ cycles.

Also a interesting note, the steam was continuously dropping until I increased the aquatuner thermal sensor to turn it on from above 35C to above 96C after which it was sitting around 132C and slightly climbing, so you can regulate the steam temp by the aquatuner thermal sensor cooling the steam turbine and CO2 scrubbers.

The water being ejected out the steam room would be used for the oil well, but in this sandbox test, there was no oil well nearby.

 

[psusi]

On 11/8/2019 at 3:18 PM, DRAKCORE said:

I watch him as well,  he was using aquatuners with super coolant the last few videos if you were thinking about that one.

Nope, he said it was a pre-space material build and they were definitely thermo-regulators using hydrogen.

15 hours ago, DRAKCORE said:

So far with experimenting, managed to get it down to 6 regulators and 1 aquatuner, though it looks like the regulators are barely keeping up and 8 might be required. Aquantuner only runs 15% of the time +-.

The key to efficiency is the temperature delta between the incoming oil at the last spot the sour gas touches it, and the sour gas at that spot, as well as the temperature delta between the outgoing natural gas and and the sour gas at the last spot they touch.  In an ideal system, if they were both exactly the same temperature, the thermo regulators would never run.  What's the delta in your setup?  I'm guessing you have a fairly good delta since you made the exchanger kind of compact and are running 3 lines straight instead of one with a zig-zag.  Did I just miss the temp shift plates or did you not use those to help exchange heat?  It should also help to keep the pressure of the sour gas high so there is more mass to exchange heat.  Maybe use a door just before the cold side to control the release of sour gas to the cold plate and keep higher pressure in the heat exchanger?

So it is a trade-off between size and efficiency.  I guess that you don't really care about spending more power on the cooling side since you get an insane amount of power from burning the ng in the generators, and so as long as you have a volcano to keep providing fresh magma, go for the more compact and less efficient one.  But if you don't have a volcano, and you don't want to use up your magma, then you want a big efficient one.

[Craigjw]

The heat transfer between the rails and gas is going to be non-existent when this goes to off-screen as there are no bridges. A bunch of bridges with the green ends where you want the heat to be transferred while off-screen is the solution to this.

[DRAKCORE]

9 hours ago, psusi said:

Nope, he said it was a pre-space material build and they were definitely thermo-regulators using hydrogen.

The key to efficiency is the temperature delta between the incoming oil at the last spot the sour gas touches it, and the sour gas at that spot, as well as the temperature delta between the outgoing natural gas and and the sour gas at the last spot they touch.  In an ideal system, if they were both exactly the same temperature, the thermo regulators would never run.  What's the delta in your setup?  I'm guessing you have a fairly good delta since you made the exchanger kind of compact and are running 3 lines straight instead of one with a zig-zag.  Did I just miss the temp shift plates or did you not use those to help exchange heat?  It should also help to keep the pressure of the sour gas high so there is more mass to exchange heat.  Maybe use a door just before the cold side to control the release of sour gas to the cold plate and keep higher pressure in the heat exchanger?

So it is a trade-off between size and efficiency.  I guess that you don't really care about spending more power on the cooling side since you get an insane amount of power from burning the ng in the generators, and so as long as you have a volcano to keep providing fresh magma, go for the more compact and less efficient one.  But if you don't have a volcano, and you don't want to use up your magma, then you want a big efficient one.

You sure about Broths vids, please send that link of the video, I've skimmed over his lists again and can't find anything relating to just regulators being that efficient.

There is only tempshift plates in the natural gas / sulfur exchange room and one where heat exchange between magma the crude, beyond that you don't need them. Back pressure or pressure build up, happens naturally and the longer the chamber the more pressure build up at the sour/magma exchange point increases. You won't have to worry about pressure, in any system it will stabilize over time and find a equilibrium with incoming and outgoing mass exchanging heat.

The sulfur going down the rails only looses about 15% of its coldness, once it is dumped into petroleum in the natural gas room, all excess 'coldness' is leached out, same goes for the natural gas in that chamber which is a nice stabilizer if the system is stopped or started for long periods.

Sulfur accounts for 1/3 of all your cooling. If you had a reversed system to mine you could just leave it in the cooling chamber while in my design it is more preferable to ship it down to the higher temps so it can cool incoming sour gas and get the full heat exchange from -165C to 100c+-.

Efficiency is only lost if you sacrificing heat exchange and forcing more energy into brute cooling/heating, which is not the case here. Crude is going in at 90C and natural gas is leaving at 100C and it will stabilize further over time as the counter flows reach a equilibrium.