My first petroleum boiler

[travaldofan]

Hey guys! Haven't played the game very long. But thanks to Francis build my first petroleum boiler. It's fantastic.

[Nedix]

Can it process 10kg/s? I have an issue with my space material oil boiler, it cannot process more than 8 or 9 kg/s and I was also thinking of building one of these.

[travaldofan]

i have minor volcano so probably no 400g/s pf petroleum will be most. but check this one i found pretty damn cool. ima trying this out soon

 

[travaldofan]

Well, didn't pay attention few cycles. oops. Had to pump out all the crude oil that overflowed.  But added liquid element sensor to the vent now no need to worry a bit. 

And interesting thing is it really depends on how much magma (heat) you can put into it. It will just boil it real fast once its primed up!

[TheMule]

Where did you get that design? I've watched many videos on FJ's channel and I think he always uses a robominer when building a boiler, like he does here:

 

[travaldofan]

On 4/25/2020 at 7:04 PM, TheMule said:

Where did you get that design? I've watched many videos on FJ's channel and I think he always uses a robominer when building a boiler, like he does here:

 

hey, in his new geothermal build he made door locking magma the igneous rock design (way more efficient for pulling the heat) and i adapted improvised. I think this design is just gobbles up magma and i already made 7 full liquid reservoir in 3 or 4 cycles. But now magma run out.

 

[seaborgium]

On 4/24/2020 at 4:11 AM, Nedix said:

Can it process 10kg/s? I have an issue with my space material oil boiler, it cannot process more than 8 or 9 kg/s and I was also thinking of building one of these.

I used Francis John's one from his Rime play through.  Was the first time I set one up, had to start slow (1 kg/s) and then slowly ramp it up but it's running my oil generators flat out just fine after a bit of time.

 

 

[nakomaru]

If you put the liquid vent at the bottom, submerged, instead of dropping it on top, you can't get a problem like that. It will stop itself. No automation needed and more peace of mind.

[Zarquan]

12 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

If you put the liquid vent at the bottom, submerged, instead of dropping it on top, you can't get a problem like that. It will stop itself. No automation needed and more peace of mind.

I don't think that works.  Liquid vents will vent up to 1000 kg, but oil and petroleum start flowing upward below 900 kg/tile, so the vent will keep flowing.  An automation sensor is needed for this.

[travaldofan]

well it was my first

[TheMule]

5 hours ago, travaldofan said:

hey, in his new geothermal build he made door locking magma the igneous rock design (way more efficient for pulling the heat) and i adapted improvised. I think this design is just gobbles up magma and i already made 7 full liquid reservoir in 3 or 4 cycles. But now magma run out.

 

He had to make adjustements too, I think it was more of an experiment. I'd stick with his well-proven designs.

That said, I do mix and match. My last boiler was a combination of Brothgar's heat extraction and FJ's heat exchanger (modified based on my tests).

[TheDeamon]

7 hours ago, TheMule said:

He had to make adjustements too, I think it was more of an experiment. I'd stick with his well-proven designs.

That said, I do mix and match. My last boiler was a combination of Brothgar's heat extraction and FJ's heat exchanger (modified based on my tests).

The Steam Boiler is not his Petrol boiler design. Debris transfers heat MUCH more slowly, as he covers in the Steam Boiler video, So for maximum heat transfer, and thus allowing 10 kg/s of petrol production, the petrol boiler is built to allow the magma to create tiles. Yes, it means you need to add a robo-miner, but it still is insanely power positive compared to an Oil Refinery.

Meanwhile, the Steam Boiler isn't worried about petrol throughput, and simply seeks to keep pace with the volcano that is feeding it, and doing so in the least resource intensive means possible. So it makes use of game mechanics to create debris without need of a robo-miner to draw on the power the turbines are generating.

"The other factor" in play with the steam boiler is you only want 200 degree steam at 4 to 6 kg/s, anything more is kind of a waste. Meanwhile the petrol boiler is trying for 403 degree crude oil at up to 10kg/s.

Different tools for different tasks.

It should also be noted that FJ briefly mentions coupling a space metal aquatuner(400+ degree steam) to power a Petrol Boiler instead of Magma in the Petrol Boiler video. If you build out the counterflow long enough, you can also get that to churn out 10kg/s Petrol for much less than 50% uptime on the aquatuner. I actually bastardized one of my very first boilers to do pretty much exactly that while waiting for the volcano to build up a supply in the tank(I already had space metals in that game). Even with the extra step to bridge across where the magma dropper was, it was still far better than running a refinery.

[TheDeamon]

And curse this discussion, in the pursuit of completely useless and overkill design productions, I'm now trying to modify the petrol boiler design to boil water and using the counterflow to cool down the output. First iteration was promising, now waiting for things to warm back up for round two, priming the thing is tricky when you're using an aquatuner as the heat source.

[nakomaru]

20 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I don't think that works.  Liquid vents will vent up to 1000 kg, but oil and petroleum start flowing upward below 900 kg/tile, so the vent will keep flowing.  An automation sensor is needed for this.

[Nedix]

The automation is not that difficult especially since you don't need a shutoff valve anymore (see attachment). I've put petroleum in the cool box and I don't remember if in the initial design was water because it turns into tile or it was another reason. This is one of the problems I have with this setup, or better said this is part of the problem which has as a result the impossibility to safely run this build at 10kg/s.

So, you build the boiler and, drop some crude in the chamber. You fill in the pipes of the aquatuner with supercoolant and turn it on to heat-up the plates to boil the crude. This is where the sh*t starts. The aquatuner dumps chill in the cool box but because the pipes are short and the cool box fairly small, it reaches quite fast the petroleum's freezing point. The petroleum freezes and solidifies to one layer, of course, the bottom one. This means, the supercoolant in the pipes will have nowhere to dump the chill so the aquatuner will eventually stop because it will not be able to cool no more. Which means the heating of the plates above will stop --> no more crude boiling --> crude overflowing and spilling in the entire boiler if you don't have an automation to prevent that.

I've implemented a workaround by combining the liquid that passes through the cooling box as in feeding also some crude @ 90+ degrees from the oil biome. I've put a liquid filter at the end of that pipe with one output - petroleum - towards the petroleum tanks and the crude towards the refinery as a measure of backup in case this stops.

If I feed the boiler with 10kg/s, then due to the sheer flow and volume of crude in the boiling chamber the conversion plate will not be enough to transfer the heat so the spill will happen again. Not enough crude will be turned into petroleum, the chamber will overflow because of that; in the same time, the aquatuner will work continuously to boil the crude in the chamber thus cooling the cool box to the same point where the petroleum will freeze and eventually, the aquatuner will stop.

If I turn up the heat of the heating chamber to over 410, for a while, the boiling chamber will be able to deal with 10kg/s. But now there is a new problem: the resulting petroleum will be so hot that it will boil the crude in the counterflow pipes and break them. Even if you don't use radiant for the last counterflow row and you use normal pipes, eventually, they will warm up to 403 degrees and boil the crude in the pipes (thus breaking them).

Another issue is that by the time the boiler is stable, you always have to have the crude flowing through the cool box. If for any reason it stops for a while then the crude in the pipes will freeze because the aquatuner keeps dumping chill into the box and since the freezing point of the petroleum is lower than crude then the crude will freeze before the petroleum and break the pipes.

Last but not least, the reason I mentioned 410 degrees in the heating chamber before is that I lose around 3 degrees through the plates and the control door between the aquatuner and the boiling room (so 6 degrees in total - 3 between the first metal plate and the control door and another 3 between the control door and the boiling plate). I tried several combinations like gold-steel-steel, gold-steel-diamond, steel-steel-termium, gold-steel-niobium. I couldn't try aluminum because I don't have it on this map.

So just to make sure I don't have headaches with this, I limited the flow to 8.5kg/s and it seems to be stable now. But it ate tents of cycles if not more than that to stabilize it.