Magma powered petro boiler

[HeatEngine]

Just wanted to share a petroleum boiler my dupes built in our current playthrough. Nothing new or ground breaking, but combines a bunch of game mechanics in a neat way. Enjoy!

Spoiler

 

 

 

[ghkbrew]

I was just lamenting that I couldn't make a waterfall heat exchanger without a volcano higher up. Pumped magma to the the rescue!

P.S. you should get a nice boost to exchanger efficiency if you mirror the setup. The petroleum will form a continuous waterfall instead of beads. So you'll double you contact surface.

[HeatEngine]

2 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

I was just lamenting that I couldn't make a waterfall heat exchanger without a volcano higher up. Pumped magma to the the rescue!

P.S. you should get a nice boost to exchanger efficiency if you mirror the setup. The petroleum will form a continuous waterfall instead of beads. So you'll double you contact surface.

Thought you'd lose some to petroleum exchanging heat with tiles above and below... I'll play around with it, thanks!

This setup heats up crude from ~80C to ~380C and cools petro down to 125C using aluminium pipes

[ghkbrew]

9 minutes ago, HeatEngine said:

Thought you'd lose some to petroleum exchanging heat with tiles above and below... I'll play around with it, thanks!

Hmm, you're right.  I just tested in debug and falling liquid tiles exchange heat exactly like stationary ones.  I could have sworn they didn't.  Still, doubling the effective length of the exchanger may make up for that effect.  Time to do some science!

11 minutes ago, HeatEngine said:

This setup heats up crude from ~80C to ~380C and cools petro down to 125C using aluminium pipes

yeah, that's pretty good.  What's the throughput? Does it run at a full 10kg/s

Ok, so that was disappointing...

Less than a degree of difference.  I still think the waterfall looks cooler

[misotoma]

It does exchange heat.. that’s why if magma falls anywhere that might melt tubes, ladders, wires and even mesh tiles.. it’ll eat those suckers for breakfast lol. Breaking any vacuums  

[ghkbrew]

5 minutes ago, misotoma said:

It does exchange heat..

Let me rephrase that.  I didn't think that two vertically adjacent tiles of liquid in free fall would exchange heat with each other.  Obviously they should, I was expecting a bug that doesn't exist.

Still, the effects are mitigated in this instance because heat can't ever flow up the column of liquid.  At every tick when heat is exchanged across a 1 tile distance, the tiles themselves move down 1 tile.  So heat doesn't travel up the column, but some portion of it "stands still".

[nakomaru]

I love it. Deliberate yet simple, and efficient for its size. Thanks for the inspiration, gonna try some modifications of this.

[0xFADE]

Did someone come up with a name for that magma debris side popper?  I've seen it for awhile but it wasn't given a name from what I remember.  They had heat transfer on one of the sides in contact with the magma but I guess you are accomplishing that with a temp shift plate.

[ghkbrew]

10 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

Did someone come up with a name for that magma debris side popper?

I nominate my first reading of your descrption: the "debris side pooper"

[nakomaru]

Thanks for the project tonight. I reproduced your exchanger going from 80C to 372C. (401C source)

Spoiler

Best I could do with the same height (20 tiles of exchange) but wider was 388.3 C. Insulation is unnecessary if in vacuum.

This surprisingly beats an ordinary zigzag pattern of 20 tile height and more width (384.5 C out).

Spoiler

[misotoma]

How much heat does it eat though? Because I can counter flow heat exchange up to 395c but it chews a bit of heat. 

23 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

So heat doesn't travel up the column, but some portion of it "stands still".

They really should make a game that’s much more closely related to actual physics. This should be the new way of making young kids learn science in a fun way. The way you word it.. makes me feel we are physicists of an imaginary universe lol

[wachunga]

Waterfall exchangers are great!

5 hours ago, nakomaru said:

This surprisingly beats an ordinary zigzag pattern of 20 tile height and more width

The heat backflow in zigzags really is unintuitively strong, presumably due to the 625x liquid to liquid multiplier. Hard to tell if you have conveyor bridges in your wide waterfall, add them if not. Ought to help things out. One of my "in development hell" projects is a non-space materials glass gasifier that does the same wide waterfall thing but with magma. I may finish it one day.

Spoiler

 

3 hours ago, misotoma said:

Because I can counter flow heat exchange up to 395c but it chews a bit of heat.

How much heat a boiler consumes is directly tied to the efficiency of your counterflow. You can't have a good counterflow boiler that eats a lot of heat, it's a non sequitur. I venture to guess your hot plate is connected to your liquid flow and tricking you into thinking your counterflow is more efficient than it actually is.

[misotoma]

9 minutes ago, wachunga said:

tricking you into thinking your counterflow is more efficient than it actually is.

That’s why a noob like me has to ask the hard questions lol. Indeed I understand my petrol boiler isn’t necessarily efficient but besides being inspired from these builds it would be nice to know more details like how much heat is actually needed to cook the oil. In any case I’m gonna use one of these builds as my new go to in survival plays. Since magma is so scarce nowadays. 

[wachunga]

Well the math is pretty simple if you are the sort of person that does math. Compare the temp differences between crude and petro at both ends of your exchanger, the differences should be around the same. If at the boiling end you have 405C petro and 395C crude but at the other end you have 100C crude and 200C petro, your exchanger is borked. There's a bit more to it, but that's the easy at a glance test.

[misotoma]

5 minutes ago, wachunga said:

but at the other end you have 100C crude and 200C petro, your exchanger is borked  

Makes sense. Thanks for helping me see that detail. Gonna sandbox these builds now. 

[nakomaru]

Yeah, zigzags can't be too wide or they lose too much to backflow (petrol-petrol transfer). I first tried a bit wider one and got even worse numbers so I quickly tried a couple variations before using that one. A 4 width exchanger also performs worse (below), so about the original width seems nice.

Spoiler

I forgot to add bridges in the final set after removing them for quicker testing. I reach 390C with the update, and also changed the naphtha tile to a door with automation to initiate the waterfall.

I rate this at 96.5% efficiency for heat recovery. You can see the math and put in your own numbers here. The heat needed to cook is the sum of the heat transfer.

Bonus: output matches too.

[HeatEngine]

That's a pretty sweet design, @nakomaru! Might go with a 3 tile wide version of it in my next playthrough, gives a pretty decent increase in efficiency (~15C on the crude) and would be fairly easy to build. Shipping rail bridges take quite a bit of material, so might skimp on those too :P

[nakomaru]

It's nice that you can put a ladder in and have everything be dupe accessible for modifications later too. Just start with the waterfall and add whatever when you want.

If you care about boiler energy, 18K is a big difference. With an optimal heater and accounting for phase change loss, the total boiler heat required for the wide exchanger is 22.6J/g. The required heat for the straight drip shot is 52.9J/g.

Spoiler

[psusi]

I have several questions:

1. Why is that magma not being forced up so that it comes into contact with the pump and melts it?
2. The magma is dripped into mesh tile surrounded by insulated tiles.  How the heck is it transferring its heat to the diamond windows?
3. To make the beat work the petrol has to flow over a different liquid right?  On the material overlay it looks like it is different, but in the normal view, it looks just like petrol.  What the heck is it?

[misotoma]

1 hour ago, nakomaru said:

the total boiler heat required for the wide exchanger is 22.6J/g. The required heat for the straight drip shot is 52.9J/g.

Thank you @nakomaru much praise to you. I enjoy learning about the game and you are of huge help when it comes to that. At least now I can see the zigzag method will go a long way with maps having limited amounts of magma to cook oil.. or just for efficiency sake at least.

Also do you play the game in degrees Kelvin?

29 minutes ago, psusi said:

I have several questions:

1. Why is that magma not being forced up so that it comes into contact with the pump and melts it?
2. The magma is dripped into mesh tile surrounded by insulated tiles.  How the heck is it transferring its heat to the diamond windows?
3. To make the beat work the petrol has to flow over a different liquid right?  On the material overlay it looks like it is different, but in the normal view, it looks just like petrol.  What the heck is it?

1. There should really be a better video on youtube (Francis John has one) that explains the range of liquid pumps and how to trick the range to only pull up a certain amount without being in contact/submerged with said liquid. Magma is also very vicious or at least in this game the physics allows for it to pool up to a certain amount.. meaning it doesn't over flow into the chamber it just sits there because of the way the tiles are built blocking more of its "flow".

2. When magma falls into 2 sections of mesh tile it pools on the bottom tile and when phase change occurs the igneous rock that is created is forced out because of the 2nd mesh tile occupying the space above. This shoves the raw mineral into the only space available which has liquid lead and sits there at full temperature while the doors slowly exchange heat into the boiler.

3. That's liquid lead I believe.. which has safe temperature range from magma to solid rock and oil to petroleum.

[psusi]

22 minutes ago, misotoma said:

Magma is also very vicious or at least in this game the physics allows for it to pool up to a certain amount.. meaning it doesn't over flow into the chamber it just sits there because of the way the tiles are built blocking more of its "flow".

I still don't understand how.  Small amounts won't flow sideways, but there are a bunch of full tiles to the left there that should not only keep the tile under the pump full, but push it out into the tile above.  I mean, that's how magma escher waterfalls work right?

37 minutes ago, misotoma said:

When magma falls into 2 sections of mesh tile it pools on the bottom tile and when phase change occurs the igneous rock that is created is forced out because of the 2nd mesh tile occupying the space above. This shoves the raw mineral into the only space available which has liquid lead and sits there at full temperature while the doors slowly exchange heat into the boiler.

Weird... I would have thought that the igneous would just become entombed.  Still, the magma has to cool first before it solidifies, so how is it doing that?  Also I guess you're pulling out 600 ish degree igneous rock through that diagonal there from time to time?

 

[misotoma]

2 minutes ago, psusi said:

Small amounts won't flow sideways

In classic I had builds that tile up 3 liquid pumps in cascade succession.. so all the magma that pools up on one side slowly becomes pumped out.. so yeah the way the tiles are being used in that image is the way you want to build this contraption. Magma won't push upwards.. it's just ONI physics. I can have a pool of magma building up but it won't push up because it's restricted its flow.

4 minutes ago, psusi said:

would just become entombed

aha yes indeed that can happen if the magma pools up too fast and is not cooled down quickly enough.. creating rock tiles instead of chunks. But since oil is constantly delivered at 10kg/s I believe is what cools down the small amounts of magma immediately once it touches the bottom mesh tile (which the temperature shift plate exchanges heat out of the magma from that corner)

And well you can leave the rock pile up in the chamber if you want since new rock that gets dropped in brings in some heat again. I think it works like that lol.. at least, again Francis John has a video regarding steam turbine magma builds like that. I personally don't do these anymore.. I cool down huge pools of magma from volcanoes (collected into one pit) into rock by using hydrogen and steam turbines - which are swept away by conveyor rails (you could melt regolith this way) and then use the rail of boiling rock to produce sour gas or petroleum or steam turbine energy.

[TripleM999]

30 minutes ago, psusi said:

I mean, that's how magma escher waterfalls work right?

Escher waterfalls only work, because more liquid, than is normal for particular element per tile is forced into a tile. (with gas locks the liquid is teleported into the tile). If pressure is higher, than is normal for a given liquid, only then the liquid begins to expand upwards. Under regular circumstances liquids don't reach this pressure, and, contrary to our physics, it won't level out in height.

38 minutes ago, psusi said:

Still, the magma has to cool first before it solidifies, so how is it doing that?

There is a tempshift plate behind the thermo sensor and the liquid lead, which transfers heat from liquid magma to the diamond tiles.

[nakomaru]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

The magma is dripped into mesh tile surrounded by insulated tiles.  How the heck is it transferring its heat to the diamond windows?

Been said now, but here's a picture.

(hint: move the liquid vent one tile up so it does not spawn in a liquid magma tile into the world)

Spoiler

If there was too much magma, it would solidify in the mesh tile itself. But it is below the threshold to do that (probably around 1.5T), so it turns to debris.

When it turns to debris it looks at the surrounding 9 tiles. There is only 1 tile there that isn't a tile already. It's the same tile circled above. Debris poops out there.

2 hours ago, psusi said:

To make the beat work the petrol has to flow over a different liquid right?  On the material overlay it looks like it is different, but in the normal view, it looks just like petrol.  What the heck is it?

It's lead, but naphtha is probably easier to work with. You can also use a door to initiate the waterfall.

2 hours ago, misotoma said:

Also do you play the game in degrees Kelvin?

I play in C, but thermodynamics plays in K.

1 hour ago, psusi said:

I still don't understand how.  Small amounts won't flow sideways, but there are a bunch of full tiles to the left there that should not only keep the tile under the pump full, but push it out into the tile above.  I mean, that's how magma escher waterfalls work right?

Water would in this case. Water is compressible under its own weight.

Magma is not. If you do some extreme dripping you can kind of force it to compress, but even then it hardly budges.

[psusi]

Weird... what property of magma causes this strange behavior?  Why will it not push up, it is fine to top off a partially pumped cell?