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Crude Oil => NG processing. How to heat up solid methane?


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Dear All. I am designing small 1.8 kg/s crude oil boiler. At this point I have output conveyor rail with solid methane around -184*C and I am running out of ideas how to heat it till evaporation. Running 36 long conveyor rail through hot (256*C) Supercoolant with a thermium tempshift plates background is not enough. I have tried dropping it on hot metal but thermal transfer was ridiculously slow.

Are there any other options?

Best regards,

Sheaker

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Why do you have solid methane?  You can entomb it in a metal door and it will exchange heat with the door very quickly.  Just be sure to have mesh tile on the side so that the liquid can escape.

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22 minutes ago, psusi said:

Why do you have solid methane?

That's how my process works. I am condensing sour gas to solid methane because it is easier to store and to transport.

 

I will try to use metal doors and mesh tile as You mentioned but i didn't saw similar setup before. If You have screenshot I would appreciate.

 

Thank You for Your reply.

Best regards,

Sheaker

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Methane has a very bad conductivity of 0.03. Debris follows the lower conductivity rule which will be the methane in virtually all circumstances. Running it through supercoolant, doors, or whatever will not help. Shift plate do not interact with debris and will not help. Your options are to make lots of small piles (which is what a conveyor is) and/or melt it with something very hot. Considering you have already tried a conveyor through hot material, you are best off not making solid methane in the first place.

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I can't seem to find a thread now that mentioned it but AFAIK, the idea was that when you close a mechanized airlock, it will try to push what is in it to an adjacent open tile.  If the only such tiles are mesh tiles, then solid debris can't be pushed there, so is trapped in the door where it very quickly exchanges heat with it and melts, then the liquid can be pushed into the mesh tile.  Take two horizontal doors with wall on the left and mesh tile on the right and a dropper on top to drop the ice,  You need the top door to close first and prevent the bottom door from pushing the debris back out on top.  In your case, when the door closes, the ice should just pop up on top of it.

4 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Methane has a very bad conductivity of 0.03. Debris follows the lower conductivity rule which will be the methane in virtually all circumstances. Running it through supercoolant, doors, or whatever will not help.

Nope; entombing ice in a door vastly increases the thermal conductivity.

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16 minutes ago, psusi said:

Nope; entombing ice in a door vastly increases the thermal conductivity.

Do you ever tire of making factual statements about things you are ignorant of?

 

Ice has a conductivity of 2.18. That is higher than things you might be otherwise running the ice through and therefore putting it in a door in order to reach that 2.18 is helpful. But a door is not necessary, it could be anything with a conductivity higher than 2.18. Methane is 0.03, very few things are worse. And those things aren't much worse. Putting methane in a door only helps if you would otherwise be running it through one of those few materials and it wouldn't help much. Off the top of my head, those materials are: Carbon dioxide gas at 0.015, Chlorine gas at 0.008, and Oxygen gas at 0.024. Seeing as he mentioned conveyors in supercoolant, it is unlikely he is trying to melt methane in one of those gases. Therefore a door does not help.

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2 minutes ago, psusi said:

In your case, when the door closes, the ice should just pop up on top of it.

It was not happening. Methane was locked inside.

Methane2.png.0de65e8503099ae7801a814e58fada0d.png

 

But just to be sure I created what You described, tested it and it is still to slow. I can not heat 826kg of methane per cycle with this setup

 

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6 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Do you ever tire of making factual statements about things you are ignorant of?

Do you ever get tired of being a ****?

6 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Ice has a conductivity of 2.18. That is higher than things you might be otherwise running the ice through and therefore putting it in a door in order to reach that 2.18 is helpful. But a door is not necessary, it could be anything with a conductivity higher than 2.18.

What does being higher than 2.18 matter?  Thermal transfer is based on the mean of the two materials, with a significant penalty if one of them is debris.  The door just has to have higher conductivity than the oxygen or whatever else the debris would be sitting in to help.  Actually don't debris only exchange heat with the tile they sit on, rather than in?  In that case the door wouldn't be any better than sitting on a metal tile, except for the fact that the "debris penalty" seems to go away and it is treated as a normal solid <-> solid interaction if not better.

 

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Please, Gentleman. No aggression.

It looks like I get significant improvement running conveyor rails under hot metal tiles made of thermium. I just need to make wise heating system and automation to make sure it heats methane just to the right temperature. I am starting with something like this:

Methane3.thumb.png.acfa1e06fc0889a6d5ca3f614975df7a.png

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58 minutes ago, sheaker said:

Please, Gentleman. No aggression.

It looks like I get significant improvement running conveyor rails under hot metal tiles made of thermium.

Thermium really isn't needed. Aluminum metal tiles (if available) are only slightly "worse" (205 thermal conductivity to Thermium's 220) and even Diamond window tiles ("only" 80 TC, still better than most other refined metals) work amazingly well for heating/cooling things on conveyors. 

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15 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

Thermium really isn't needed. Aluminum metal tiles (if available) are only slightly "worse" (205 thermal conductivity to Thermium's 220)

I know but there is no Aluminum available. BTW I am very sad that I am unable to farm some plants just because of initial conditions. It would be awesome to be able to get them from space.

16 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

even Diamond window tiles ("only" 80 TC, still better than most other refined metals)

Copper and Gold has 60 so difference is not significant compared to diamond. But thermium with 220 should make a significant difference compare to diamond and others beside aluminum. I have a lot of petroleum and oxygen so creating 48 (I concluded this will be enough) tiles of thermium would need 4800 kg so it is well within my possibilities. I will try gold (I have well tamed geyser) later. For now it is made from thermium and works better than expected. Here is preliminary design of my boiler. Any thoughts? Thanks!Methane4.thumb.png.910c715cbc346f1078507fdeb2b30e68.png

 

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2 hours ago, sheaker said:

Copper and Gold has 60 so difference is not significant compared to diamond. But thermium with 220 should make a significant difference compare to diamond and others beside aluminum.

I have other uses for copper and gold so I use diamond almost exclusively when running cooling/heating via conveyors. Diamond works extremely well so you might find you don't need aluminum or thermium. 

Just giving options. :-D

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Tempshift plates, like all buildings, cannot interact directly with debris. Debris heat transfer is independent of debris mass, so that's a big reason why conveyors work well. (25kg chunks transfer 40 times faster than a single 1T chunk)

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