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Pipeless Counterflow Liquid Heat Exchanger v2


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A while ago, I designed a pipeless counterflow heat exchanger.  The main benefit of the setup was that it avoided the 10 kg/s limit that normal piped counterflow exchangers have.  Based on an idea posted by @mathmanican of having shorter contact points in a row rather than long switchbacks, I have designed a new modular pipeless counterflow heat exchanger. 

I intend to compare it to mathmanican's design at a future date.  I believe mine may perform better per size due to the direct contact between the petroleum and crude oil, but his could perform better due to the increased number of contact points in a somewhat smaller space.

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This time, I built it purely in survival, just to show I can.  I found a map with an exceptionally large number of volcanoes and oil wells that can take advantage of the high throughput.  I was fortunate enough to have a cluster of 4 volcanoes right next to each other.   It took forever to build, but I will never have to look at it again. 

The fact that I built it in survival means that I haven't bench marked this design thoroughly.  I am currently running it at 10 kg/s, but I am fairly certain it should be able to handle the 90+ kg/s as long as it is ramped up in 10 kg/s increments (much like the original design).

Everything in the heat exchanger is made of either mafic rock or iron ore, with the temp shift plates made of diamond. The buildings in the volcano and liquid pump area is steel or obsidian.

Quarantined Spacestation.sav (BAD-A-115148563-WLH)

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This design make heavy use of escher waterfalls.  It uses long escher waterfalls, where a higher pressure top gas and a low pressure bottom gas are used to keep the liquid down.  The crude oil flows down from the vents and right until it hits the switchback then left until it hits the boiler.  The petroleum flows from the boiler up and right until it hits the switchback, where it flows up and to the left in to the infinite compression petroleum tank.  I use carbon dioxide and chlorine for their low thermal conductivity.

I let this run for a while with incoming crude oil at 95.5 C, and I believe it stabilized with the crude oil entering the boiler at about 391.8 C and the petroleum exiting at 113.5 C.

I have not tested this in extremely high pressure settings.  The structure should be immune to any pressure damage (except the boiler plate), but high pressures may result in the crude oil displacing the petroleum, which could break the system.

I say this is modular because each of the contact points are identical and can be tacked on to each other as many times as you want.  Additionally, the switchback mechanism on the right can be mirrored to have multiple switchbacks if so desired. 

If I could have changed something, I would have run insulated liquid and gas pipes vertically to bring natural gas and crude oil up and water down to the oil wells, as I am now having to pipe my oil and water around this contraption, which is annoying.

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I made an addition.  On my boiler, I added a heat sink of 2 igneous rock tempshift plates and about 2000 kg steam.  This appears to stabilize the petroleum and make it emerge from the boiler closer at 410 C.  I did this because the crude oil going in to the boiler was at 399 C, which was a little too close for comfort with the petroleum going out at 420-440 C. 

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Unfortunately, to do this I had to sacrifice by build's lack of random buildings and debris.

EDIT:  After running this for a while, it seems to have settled at the crude oil entering the boiler at 388.2 C at 10 kg/s.

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