Metal Refinery keeps breaking down

[GoHereDoThis]

Thanks for all the help!

Played around with this setup and I'm now using pWater as coolant for my aquatuner which I use to cool down stuff and that works great, but I also tried having a passive loop for my metal refineries using crude oil as coolant.  I set it up so that it goes into a reservoir, then out to the refineries, the out to the radiant pipes in my steam room.  I found out that eventually, the crude oil coolant and the steam room temp will reach equilibrium.  As I don't have my refineries running all the time, the temp settles at around 120-130C.  While this is perfectly fine for crude oil coolant (it is fine, right??), I was hoping to get the crude oil to be at a much cooler temp, but I guess that's not possible on a passive loop.

[KILLABUDZ]

1 hour ago, GoHereDoThis said:

I was hoping to get the crude oil to be at a much cooler temp, but I guess that's not possible on a passive loop.

Heat is an energy, the vibration of the matter that makes up an object. An object can only release energy into an environment with less energy, otherwise it absorbs energy. So your oil being used for coolant in a passive loop cannot be cooler than the area you are radiating its energy into.

[GoHereDoThis]

Yeah, that's why I always used to use an active loop with an aquatuner   Not sure how I feel about passive cooling.

[Craigjw]

The steam turbine only works with steam at >125c, so that will be the lowest temperature you'll get from oil, you can get it lower, but that's not useful in this situation.  Ideally, you want the oil to be as close to 200c as possible without going over, as this is the optimum temperature that a steam turbine operates at for maximum power output.  There is no problem with running your refinery coolant at 200c, I'd recommend it, it's what I do.  I would advise against going over 200c though, as past this temperature, the turbine will require extra cooling, with no extra power output, as any extra heat is converted straight to heat in the turbine itself.

To achieve this, just place a thermo sensor in the steam room and directly attach it to the turbine auto-input and set the sensor to activate when it's at least 195c.  You can run oil up to 400c without issue, but above this, you'll break pipes when it's converted to petrol.  Petrol can be run at <540-ish without issue.

I use a refinery to convert oil to petrol, the coolant is petrol, it peaks at around 530c when I make steel.  running oil at <350c is totally fine.

[KILLABUDZ]

Water also has a higher SHC but lower TC, you get better performance the other way around for this application imo. Getting almost 4x the TC helps the cooling loop dump its heat faster.
For passive loops to work you just need to understand the process a little better. I grew up with solar power and hot water, and fire jacket + solar water heating was a great way to learn the basics of thermal exchange and flow control.