Metal Refinery keeps breaking down

[GoHereDoThis]

Just getting into this phase of building and my Metal Refinery keeps breaking down and leaking steam all over the place and flooding the place.  I have now built it out of ceramic and using ceramic pipes going into and out of the refinery but it still breaks down.  I'm not sure if it's the refinery itself that breaks or the ceramic pipe right out the output tile.  Is this normal?

I have a thermo sensor that turns the refinery on/off based on the temp of the liquid going through the pipes but I've noticed that even when off, the refinery will still take any liquid in the pipe and I think sometimes the refinery will take in hot water?  I've set my aquatuner to cool it down to about 6C but obviously the first cycle of liquid (pWater) won't be that cool.

[suicide commando]

Sounds like your pipes are giving you issues. Polluted water is not the best liquid to use as a coolant in there. if it's very cold ( 0 celsius ), it's usable, but only for one fabrication. Metal refineries put out a LOT of heat when making iron/steel/tungsten and all that heat gets put into the coolant. Personally, I use petroleum as my coolant with a resevoir to store it in along with a sensor that will send any petrol that is over 200 degrees to my cooling loop, which is a set of radiant pipes through a room with steam and a turbine. Thus I turn the heat into power to run my refinery.

On top of that, I also check if the temperature in there doesn't get too hot, if it does, I shut down the refinery until the steam and the petrol have cooled down to manageable temperatures before I run more production cycles.

 

[psusi]

The refinery heats the coolant.  If it heats it hot enough then it boils when it hits the output pipe, which damages the pipe.  Make sure you only load in cold polluted water.  If hot water goes in by mistake then it can be boiled.  I've been using a reservoir to hold plenty of water and it normalizes the temperature of it all.  When the refinery is using it, it sends the hot output water to cool off in a loop through the cold biome before it returns to the reservoir.  When the refinery isn't using it, the reservoir keeps circulating it back through the cold biome to keep cooling it down.  As long as the temp in the reservoir is under 40 C or so the output stays below 100 C, even when refining iron.  Steel I think I calculated needs the water to start at like 25 or less to avoid coming out over 120 and boiling.

[GoHereDoThis]

Yeah, I think that's what's happening, stuff gets turned into steam and breaks the pipes.  I thought that if the refinery was turned off (via liquid thermo sensor) then it won't take in the liquid but apparently it does?  Once the liquid is in the refinery, there's no way to get it out?  I guess I'll have to make a loop before the refinery and keep circulating the hot water there, only opening it to the refinery once it's at a cooler level.

Not quite sure I want to put stuff in a liquid reservoir just yet, still playing around with the designs.

[psusi]

Oh you definitely want a reservoir.  It means you don't waste power dropping water out a vent and pumping it back up again, and the temperature of incoming water immediately is averaged with the rest, so there's no chance of some hot water that just came out of the refinery going right back in and boiling.  And you can use pipe priorities to make the flow go where it should instead of having to manually turn things on and off.  Remember that any input port will take from the pipe first, and only what is left will keep going down the pipe to the next target.  That includes pipe bridges, so you can use them to make sure that liquid prefers to go one way and only goes the other when the first is full.  Likewise output ports will only outptu if the pipe is empty, so you can force one side to back up and wait as long as the other is outputting.  If you want a thermo sensor then you don't want to shut off the refinery, but use a pipe shutoff to stop the flow to it.  With a reservoir though you don't really need to worry about it unless you want to set the refinery to run forever and forget about it.  The water in the reservoir will take a while to heat up.  I usually run a batch of 6 refines and go elsewhere for a while and when I come back, the water has had a little time to cool down and I just make sure it isn't too hot before starting another batch.

 

[Ixenzo]

An automatically turned off building will still accept piped resources. Your choices are not to pump the coolant if it's too hot in the first place (control the pump) or look for hot packets in the pipe and divert them elsewhere, perhaps to cool, with a shutoff.

[GoHereDoThis]

Maybe later when I get to a more solid idea of how my layout is going to be, I'll put a reservoir but at the moment, I'm looking for a way to properly cool down the coolant so that it's a totally forget-about-it affair.  If I'm not mistaken, the reservoir only acts as a buffer and given enough time, it'll still overheat and end up emptying hot coolant into the refinery, right?  I don't want to have that worry so I'd like to make a cooling loop first, I think.

[beowulf2010]

8 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

Maybe later when I get to a more solid idea of how my layout is going to be, I'll put a reservoir but at the moment, I'm looking for a way to properly cool down the coolant so that it's a totally forget-about-it affair.  If I'm not mistaken, the reservoir only acts as a buffer and given enough time, it'll still overheat and end up emptying hot coolant into the refinery, right?  I don't want to have that worry so I'd like to make a cooling loop first, I think.

My first metal refineries just dump the coolant when it's too hot into a corresponding storage tank. I use a pipe thermal sensor set to a specific temperature based on the material I'm refining and the coolant I'm using to eject any coolant hot enough to phase/element change on the next refinery errand and only pull cool coolant in then. 

Later, I build a dedicated steam turbine setup to cool the coolant in a separate loop. 

I'll try to post my refinery setup tomorrow, depending on sleep and the 5yo kidlet. 

[Dosephshih]

I suggest you to have a look on the ONI Wiki, page of Metal Refinery.

It list out the temperature of different liquid acceptable to refine different materials.

For example ,water is only acceptable below approx. 40C as I remember, and it will get near boiling point after just 1 use.

You must have some set up to cool the liquid before re-using of just put it at other use. Metal refinery is quite hard to use at beginning but almost the most funny design in my opinion.

Now, i only setup the metal refinery when i can build the turbine as well, using the oil as coolant.

[bobucles]

Metal refineries 100% LIE about the amount of heat they produce. Check the wiki as others have said. You can not cool down refinery heat by any ordinary means. Dump the heat into a sacrificial biome, or find a way to delete the heat. Pincha peppers will drink up to 85C water, research stations will consume any temperature water, and electrolyzers make very efficient use of hot water. Oil wells also don't care how hot their input water is.

Once steam turbines are unlocked, oil/petrol cooling is your best friend. You can even recover most of the energy that went into smelting, which is a nice perk.

[Ixenzo]

2 hours ago, bobucles said:

Metal refineries 100% LIE about the amount of heat they produce

There was a patch a while ago that fixed the refinery heat issue.  After that, I find the process to be consistent with what it says on the tin.

[GoHereDoThis]

Thanks for the help guys! 

I've been looking around YouTube videos on cooling the coolant used for refining and I wonder why most of the designs I see has the cooling loop exiting the refinery and just going through radiant pipes in a steam room.  Isn't this passive cooling, just allowing the radiant pipes to radiate the heat into the room?  Is that better than just using an aquatuner to actively remove heat?

[Aelfled]

Smelting iron and steel can be power positive if you don't use an aqua tuner, your coolant gets toasty, but petrol never gets high enough to boil to sour gas

[KILLABUDZ]

3 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

Is that better than just using an aquatuner to actively remove heat?

An aquatuner doesnt delete heat, the steam turbine does. The aquatuner uses 1200w to tx the 12c or so diff from the liquid to its surroundings. If you can tx this heat without using 1200w then you are much more likely to be power neutral or even positive. When making heat exchangers you need to consider the thermal conductivity of your mats. To my understanding matching extremely high end mats with low end mats is a complete waste as the heat tx is limited by the LOWEST conductivity rate. A very thin layer of liquid also helps building rid their heat to the floor or surroundings.
As someone else said, reservoirs will instantly average out the temp of internal liquids or gasses, and once primed dont need power to push the liquids around.
I was challenged to play through the same seed of Rime by a friend (first real playthrough) so my solution is probably not applicable but I decided to use the refinery to first of all thaw a small oil biome and then get it comfortable for my slicksters.
An ice biome has a lot of potential heat capacity, but remember mined blocks halve in mass so dig the absolute min for best value. Mined ice is good for temp shift plates to cool rooms that can flood or bodies of liquid.

[psusi]

3 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

Thanks for the help guys! 

I've been looking around YouTube videos on cooling the coolant used for refining and I wonder why most of the designs I see has the cooling loop exiting the refinery and just going through radiant pipes in a steam room.  Isn't this passive cooling, just allowing the radiant pipes to radiate the heat into the room?  Is that better than just using an aquatuner to actively remove heat?

Yes, but you first have to research and build a steam turbine to do that.  I've finally done that in my current world but I'm still just dumping the heat from the refinery into the cold biome because I'm nowhere near done melting it yet.

 

[GoHereDoThis]

17 hours ago, KILLABUDZ said:

An aquatuner doesnt delete heat, the steam turbine does.

Err, no, the aquatuner removes (not delete) the heat from the liquid/coolant, and yes, the steam turbine is the one that does the deleting.

I wonder if just using radiant pipes is better (passive) rather than using the aquatuner (active)?  I might have to try out the debug mode I keep watching on tutorial videos in order to try this out.

18 hours ago, Aelfled said:

Smelting iron and steel can be power positive if you don't use an aqua tuner, your coolant gets toasty, but petrol never gets high enough to boil to sour gas

But how do you cool down the coolant after sufficient use?  Or do you just keep looping it into the steam room?

 

17 hours ago, psusi said:

Yes, but you first have to research and build a steam turbine to do that.

Doesn't take much to research steam turbines, no?  In all my builds, one dupe is concentrating on research and I usually have the tech researched well before I need to be using them.

[KILLABUDZ]

4 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

Err, no, the aquatuner removes (not delete) the heat from the liquid/coolant, and yes, the steam turbine is the one that does the deleting.

I wonder if just using radiant pipes is better (passive) rather than using the aquatuner (active)?  I might have to try out the debug mode I keep watching on tutorial videos in order to try this out.

The aquatuner transfers heat from the liquid piped through it to its surroundings, usually a steam room for a turbine. It uses 1200w to do this. 1200w is quite a lot, 2 coal generators worth, and the system will usually have a few other components using a little power.
Passive cooling means you are not using power. If you are not using power then less resources and effort are needed.
Crude oil can be heated up to the 400c mark with no problems, petrol is 530ish? while the steam room only needs to be >125c to start generating power.

[psusi]

4 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

Doesn't take much to research steam turbines, no?  In all my builds, one dupe is concentrating on research and I usually have the tech researched well before I need to be using them.

You also need plastic which takes a little while to get

You should certainly have a metal refinery before you have researched steam turbines.  Don't waste labor on research you don't need yet; instead go explore the map more and get things set up that you need sooner rather than later.

[Craigjw]

Just dig down and plant some terrariums around the tunnel here and there.  When you reach oil, pump it into a refinery and make plastic with the petrol. just repair the refinery and plastic maker when it breaks, having some liquid on the floor tiles helps slow this down.

If you don't have atmo suits, you'll have to be more careful with temperatures though, but you can do this within 10-20 cycles if you are lucky with your biome placements.

[psusi]

38 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

Just dig down and plant some terrariums around the tunnel here and there.  When you reach oil, pump it into a refinery and make plastic with the petrol. just repair the refinery and plastic maker when it breaks, having some liquid on the floor tiles helps slow this down.

Oh good God no!  the plastic maker sucks donkey dong.  Way better to just ranch a few drakeos.  And why would it break?

39 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

If you don't have atmo suits, you'll have to be more careful with temperatures though, but you can do this within 10-20 cycles if you are lucky with your biome placements.

10-20 cycles?  Jesus, I don't go for oil until after 100 cycles.  I don't know how you possibly could do it without atmo suits.

[Craigjw]

I meant, you can do it in about that time frame, not absolute time.  The sooner you get oil, the better in my opinion, although I would suggest that it's lunacy to attempt to go for oil within 20 cycles of starting a map.

You don't need atmo suits, you just have to be careful.

[GoHereDoThis]

15 hours ago, KILLABUDZ said:

The aquatuner transfers heat from the liquid piped through it to its surroundings, usually a steam room for a turbine. It uses 1200w to do this. 1200w is quite a lot, 2 coal generators worth, and the system will usually have a few other components using a little power.
Passive cooling means you are not using power. If you are not using power then less resources and effort are needed.
Crude oil can be heated up to the 400c mark with no problems, petrol is 530ish? while the steam room only needs to be >125c to start generating power.

LOL, semantics.  Yeah, it removes heat from the coolant and the steam room removes the heat from the aquatuner and then finally the steam turbine removes the heat from the steam room and finally deletes it.  I think that's clearer now?

I think the issue here is that I'm using pWater as coolant which obviously cannot be heated past 120C or so?  And therefore cannot be used as coolant in a passive loop?  Is that correct? 

 

15 hours ago, psusi said:

You also need plastic which takes a little while to get

You should certainly have a metal refinery before you have researched steam turbines.  Don't waste labor on research you don't need yet; instead go explore the map more and get things set up that you need sooner rather than later.

I dunno.  The way I play the game, I have tech way before I need them, I get atmo suits well before cycle 100, and plastics shortly thereafter IIRC. I'm usually aggressive at the start and mine out an adjacent slime biome and rely on converting the pO2 to O2 via deodorizers to kill most of the slimelung.

[Craigjw]

The game was more interesting when slimelung was actually dangerous.

[psusi]

I don't understand why dupes with slimelung will no longer go lie down in a triage cot.  Sure, it won't cure it but it at least used to help them breathe and not spread the slimelung around.

[KILLABUDZ]

On 12/1/2019 at 1:28 PM, psusi said:

I don't know how you possibly could do it without atmo suits.

You can just get a fresh dupe and send them to their doom, recovering the body for a nice mausoleum later.

 

15 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

I think the issue here is that I'm using pWater as coolant which obviously cannot be heated past 120C or so?  And therefore cannot be used as coolant in a passive loop?

If a liquid or gas changes state in a pipe it damages the pipe and leaks.
Selecting any mat and looking at the properties tab will show you its thermal thresholds.