Cryogen Mk4 - Liquid Methane burning Natural Gas Generator Block

[Hjoyn]

This is a natural gas generator block, but designed to burn liquid methane as a companion build to my Tower of Methane sour gas boiler that outputs liquid methane at -174°c. This system takes in said liquid methane and outputs solid co2 at 80-90°c along with water at 1-2°c. If you want polluted water instead of clean water as an output, there is another variant of this system that runs the generators at -140°c and produces polluted water at 40°c.

Ceramic was used for most insulating components, although there are some insulation tiles and pipes at critical points. Mafic rock can likely be used for insulated pipes for everything except the liquid methane. Copper was used as a generic conductive material. Steel was used as a catch all material, you can use any alternative that won't melt. The two main heat exchanger pools are filled with petroleum. The transformer/battery area as well as the center sweeper and conveyor loader area are filled with hydrogen. There is a thin layer of super coolant in the turbine room, as well as small (<30g) amounts on the sweepers in the co2 freezing rooms. The automation wires going off the bottom of the screen lead to the source of the liquid methane, toggling those instead of a valve avoids liquid methane sitting in pipes.

The images are below, and a blueprint file is attached for those with the blueprint mod.

cryogen mk4.blueprint

[degr]

I still can't understand what kind of benefit you achieve by storing methane as liquid?

Also I found large generator block is a bad idea. Reason is amount of materials for wires - better transport natural gas to small generators blocks (6-12 generators, with gas pipes made from igneous rock)and make electrical circuits where you need it, then build large generator block and build long-long wires from refined metal.

[Hjoyn]

Liquids are far easier to transport than gasses. Liquid pipes have 10x higher throughput and liquid pumps have 20x higher throughput and efficiency. 

Moving gas requires gas pipes, which are terribly inefficient. Multiple generator blocks also increases the overhead cost required for each block. Refined metal, especially steel, is extremely abundant in late game, particularly when making steel for heat, and thus is a non-issue.

[degr]

May be it make sense when you process 20kg of oil, with 1000 aquatuners, and then you heat natural gas with 1000 heaters, and you have 100500 generators in same place, but from my experience, better transfer gas initially. Because 1kg of gas can supply 11 generators for 100% uptime. Let's say, 12 generators for close to 100% uptime. You can divide your asteroid for 20 parts, and build 20 rooms with 12 natural gas generators inside of each, and supply each part of your map with "local" energy, from 1kg/sec of gas.

As I said before, you need to build large amount of wires to supply different parts of map with such design. Of course, you will have enough metal on cycle 2864, if there will be at least one alive duplicant. Also, could you please show colony summary with energy report, I mean, how many produced, how many used? I'm curious how many energy your boiler spent to make methane, and then heat gas back, like, see efficiency of this colossus.

[Hjoyn]

Power wires transfer far more energy more compactly and more efficiently than gas pipes, and centralized generation reduces overhead. The generator block uses about 8kw, the sour gas boiler 5kw. Total generation is about 120kw. 

[GreezyHammer]

Why? Because you can!

But seriously, Klei really needs to add a cryo methalox rocket engine between Petroleum and LH.

Then it would really make a lot of sense to produce lots of LM.

Thoughts?

[nikk]

@Hjoyn Is there any way to build it smaller without losing efficiency?

[yoyo13]

I cant figure how much times dupes have to spend to build this colossus but Good work ! 

[Hjoyn]

On 5/8/2021 at 1:23 AM, nikk said:

@Hjoyn Is there any way to build it smaller without losing efficiency?

It's mostly vertically tiled, so yes.