Update broke boiler, not sure why. Not flacking anymore?

[melquiades]

Hi there!
My sour gas boiler broke down with this new update, but i don't really know why, I understand that the update fixed a bug with heat transfer, but i don't know how this set up was being affected by that:

What i do is just dump crude oil on a counterflow stream of sour gas. Make a long enough "road" for the sour gas to be cool enough for transfering to a room to be liquefied by the cooling made by those 2 aquatuners. The "excess cooling" is dumped into a supercoolant pool that i either use to cool really hot rocks or just cool the steam generated when flash boiling salt water, when it is active.

The thing is that the crude oil is converting to petroleum way earlier on the road than before, there is no excess cooling anymore, and the sour gas will eventually be getting pumped hotter into the liquefying room and stop working.

This was a shitty inefficient set up, but it was working for thousands of cycles:

 

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Any idea why it stopped working?

Any help is appreciated.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, melquiades said:

The thing is that the crude oil is converting to petroleum way earlier on the road than before

This is precisely what the update fixed.  If you ever had hot high mass (sour gas to the left, where the boiling occurs) next to cool low mass gas (sour gas to the right of the boiler), then the game could swap temperatures, resulting in heat loss. You have the exact needed conditions to result in this heat loss. You actually have this happening along the entire run of your boiler. 

In addition, you also have the proper conditions for a gas flow bug (improper average value) that is not yet fixed to affect your build, resulting in even more heat deletion (and possibly even a similar left-to-right liquid flow bug).  These last 2 bugs are not as massive as the temp-swap bug that was fixed (at least in this build). 

My worry, upon fixing the temp-swap bug, would be that things like what you built above would stop working. Your build was not correctly extracting the heat that it needed to, so the update broke it. Unfortunately, it was doing a great job before the fix. You'll need to add a steam turbine somewhere along the path to cool things down. One bonus now is that computations about how much heat should be extracted are close to correct (so you can theoretically design the build before laying down bricks). 

Hope that helps

[melquiades]

Thank you for taking the time to analyze that mess xD I had no idea there where so many heat transfer bugs!

Plopped 2 steam turbines on top of what was my salt water boiler, but i only manage to remove a meager 2º from the sour gas.

I guess i'll have to decommission that boiler, it served me well =(

[mathmanican]

1 minute ago, melquiades said:

guess i'll have to decommission that boiler,

My spiral boiler might be dead too. Haven't played with it yet...

[melquiades]

1 minute ago, mathmanican said:

My spiral boiler might be dead too. Haven't played with it yet...

People tend to drop colonies if something goes horribly wrong, i persevere! Hopefully you will find a way.

What i think i can do with mine is to control the amount of heat the boiler pours into the sour gas, the excess will have to be deleted with a, or lots of steam turbines.

I have another setup that uses geothermal to boil crude oil to petroleum and it is doing perfectly fine so far:

 

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I think i will end up doing something similar but starting with petroleum.

[OxCD]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

My spiral boiler might be dead too. Haven't played with it yet...

I'm starting to worrying about my 3-PONG...

[TripleM999]

17 minutes ago, OxCD said:

I'm starting to worrying about my 3-PONG...

Many SG boiler designs are affected, especially if they have horizontal gas parts with temperature and pressure gradients.

[OxCD]

11 minutes ago, TripleM999 said:

Many SG boiler designs are affected, especially if they have horizontal gas parts with temperature and pressure gradients.

Headshot ^^ I'll go check ASAP.

[melquiades]

Update,

I made a major MAJOR revamp of the design, I rearranged the pipes and fitted 2 additional lines of sour gas so i could dump more older crude oil to the system (now it can handle up to 8 Kg, but by trial and error, i found out the cooling is enough for 7,5~ Kg). I scrapped the cooling pool, added 2 steam turbines on top salt water flash boiler, i removed the heat transfer from the main heat transfer corridor.

Placed many diamond tempshift plates and thermium radiant pipes and the heat transfer from the sour gas pipes to the steam went up to almost 30º (!).

The liquefying room stopped clogging and the boiler was functional again!

THEN i figured out when trying to cool down the turbines that I could use the residual coolness of the resulting natural gas to directly cool the incoming sour gas, so i used a supercoolant loop with diamond tiles to transfer the heat, and the turbines became so cool they became non functional!

BUT

This stupid thing right here will completely DESTROY the boiler and I HATE IT:

 

Spoiler

300 grams, GRAMS of petroleum are holding back over 200 kg of crude oil from flowing heating even more the sour gas and flashing more crude oil to petroleum where they are not supposed to!

What i did in the previous design was to have a "stair", the liquid tried to go on top of each other and somehow keep flowing, but i don't have more space! down below is neutronium and lava!

 

Currently it looks like this (added a mod to destroy the pois on top):

AND

I found some really weird bug, petroleum floating on top of sour gas:

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, melquiades said:

300 grams, GRAMS of petroleum are holding back over 200 kg of crude oil

You could put an airflow tile underneath the current insulated tile, and then delete the insulated tile.  That would probably fix this issue (though your petro may continue to back up more and more without having cooling in the region. What you need is more cooling earlier in the loop (closer to the boiling plate).

1 hour ago, melquiades said:

petroleum floating on top of sour gas:

This is normal behavior (even before the patch) for partial melting. Notice the steady 5kg under the "floating" petro.  What is happening is that you are constantly flaking the petro.  Unfortunately, this also means you are using more power than you want to use in order to convert the gas, because the flaking algorithm uses the SHC of the sour gas (1.898) instead of the SHC for the petro (1.760) in energy calculations.  So you are spending more energy than needed to boil the petro. 

I see enough room (if you move the liquid reservoir) to add a steam turbine in this region.

You could even use a gas loop of 1kg steam to move cooling left even more.  

[melquiades]

Thank you for the pointers, I'll try them tomorrow, or maybe the day after, i got an ONI overdose xD

[mathmanican]

25 minutes ago, melquiades said:

ONI overdose xD

Is that even possible? 

[0xFADE]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

Is that even possible? 

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.

[melquiades]

Update:

The boiler is functional again, i don't like it, but it works.

I placed the suggestion @mathmanican made, and included a steam turbine to draw heat, I placed it near the place crude oil was changing to petroleum, it was kind of finicky to set up. I also placed a heat exchange column between the incoming and outgoing sour gas/natural gas. There is no "excess cooling" anymore, or very little.

The crude oil is not flowing on its own anymore, it is being pumped and dropped right on top of really hot petroleum, i had to find the right length of the pipe to isolate or to place as radiant by trial and error.

There is a huge gap that could probably be shortened, because there shouldn't be any heat exchange there, or is it?
 

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Now the next problem would be to pump out more natural gas before the liquid vent dropping liquid natural gas over-pressurizes.

This was a mishap that happened during the modifications *facepalm*:

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, melquiades said:

don't like it, but it works

We all got used to free heat deletion and designed systems around it without realizing the issue. I do recall seeing many comments from people stating that systems should be overheating, but the reply was always something like, "I agree. But it works. ONI magic." I'm glad you fixed it. Someday I'll revisit my spiral boiler.

[OxCD]

2 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Someday I'll revisit my spiral boiler.

You sure it's that much broken now ?

I mean most of heat exchange are done using bridges, no ?

[mathmanican]

51 minutes ago, OxCD said:

You sure it's that much broken now ?

Your 3PONG only had a couple spots where it would be hit, so it's probably fine (I assume you tested it).  I used horizontal tunnels quite a bit. I figure this image will help provided others with a view of trouble spots. 

The red circled parts are the areas that will have issues. These are the only places where cool low mass gas is next to hot high mass gas. Every single one of these tiles added a 5% chance for massive heat loss.  To be honest, before the update, most of the cooling was accomplished before the top red circle ended.  My hope is that the steam turbine in the middle, which almost never ran, can compensate enough to keep cooling.  I had a door built right at the end of this circle because I assumed I would need it to help cool.  Turned out to not be needed (because of the temp-swap bug). 

I haven't done any math on it, nor opened that file since the update.  Instead, I started a new base, briefly played with esher waterfalls, read peer reviewed journal articles about CoViD so I can be an informed citizen, kept up on reading the forums because it provides a great distraction, worked my regular job, cared for sick kids, etc...  Maybe next week. Gotta sleep though to keep immunity up.  

These forums provide a wonderful place to come socialize.  I don't know anyone personally, but you're all fun to interact with. Thanks for the great community. 

 

[beowulf2010]

3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

These forums provide a wonderful place to come socialize.  I don't know anyone personally, but you're all fun to interact with. Thanks for the great community. 

Agreed. These forums (for the most part) remind me of the easy comradery (sp?) I felt over on the City of Heroes forums on GameFAQs more than a decade ago.