A Calculator to take the tedious part out of making Petroleum Boilers.

[DangerTeddyBear]

(It's back in working order.)

While it's not perfect does it help a lot to take out the tedious part out of making petroleum boilers when using volcanoes. The heat exchange part, where you otherwise would have had to sit and wait to see if it was consuming to much or to little magma relative to your volcanoes avg output.

If I can figure out how will I make it so that you set the extra amount of KDTU/s you want, then it does the rest but far from a pro at using google sheet.

If you don't wanna use it is the formula here:

((Kg/s Of Crude Oil * Crude Oil SHC) * (Crude Oil Input Temp - Petroleum Output Temp)) + ((Kg/s Of Magma * Magma SHC) * (Magma Input Temp - Igneous Rock output temp))

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j-7gE-TEeubBCUD_JoO3v10-P29CSQDqfI0yUb1QxS8/edit?usp=sharing

[TheMule]

While interesting, I don't see the purpose of this.

You build the boiler, you run it, you add a valve to set the amount of oil, which is a requirement to start almost every boiler with an exchanger. If you run out of magma, decrease the amount of oil, or find a way to enlarge the heat exchanger. But usually that's not what happens.

Usually you build a boiler, 99% of the times with a overkill exchanger if we're talking magma volcanoes, you run it and end up with a large pool of magma, which you can find a different use for if you want, or let the volcano overpressurize.

Now, if you tie this to a specific exchanger design, like the waterfall one (the best we've discovered so far, IIRC), and a specific radiant pipe material (e.g. copper), and we're talking metal volcanoes (e.g. copper), this can be extremely useful, in computing how high the waterfall should be.

One of the biggest advantage I find in the waterfall design is the small thermal mass involved, meaning it approaches equilibrium very quickly, making it perfect for this kind of analysis. Other designs may involve more mass (even ceramic insulated tiles contribute). In my old serpentine designs I always used airflow tiles to reduce that.

 

That said, while it totally understand people have different styles, today I think a petroleum boiler is so easy to build with space materials that it's way easier to go there and grab some niobium and fullerene with petroleum rockets fueled by a refinery (with a very termporary space setup) and after a few cycles build something like this:

It's so simple that litteraly you don't need the pipe layer to understand it (I'm not lazy, I can't launch the game now and this is an old pic).
Crude oil flows up in a radiant pipe inside the waterfall. The last segments are ceramic to be safe (the exchanger begins right below the mech door).
Petroleum flows up too, behind the ladder (ignore the closed vent) and enters the icebox right below the thermium AT. The AT grabs just the right amount of heat from the outgoing petroleum to cook the crude oil (the boiling chamber is quite a standard one).

This is simple to build (in a vacuum), very cheap, it requires thermium/niobium for the AT, and a bit of supercoolant for the very short  AT loop (striclty speaking, not necessary, but it makes things efficient and easy - it's just you don't care about the coolant temp). Piping is aluminum but gold/copper would do.

IIRC, oil enter at about 95C and petroleum leave the exchanger at about 125C, the whole system at 105C. I'm not sure because this isn't my current colony and anyway I was running it not at 10kg/s because my petroleum tank was full, and I had so much water on the map that I didn't need the extra from the generators. Precise flow control was kinda the theme of the colony anyway, so I tried to match the flow with the actual power needs.

But the point is, the AT barely runs, and anyway the system is closed (thermally). It's self balancing in the sense that a shorter less efficient exchanger only makes the AT run more often.

 

So thanks to the findings of people on this forum, today I've stopped looking for (magma) volcanoes in a new map, I don't care, I just go to space then I build a boiler.