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The Bead Flaker - A Crude To Petro Boiler Utilizing Partial Evaporation Mechanics


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I probably should clarify... I see the same unfinished (disappeared?) structures in the save.

The save file posted above is at cycle 817 while the post of the volcano with lava is at cycle 834

It could be missing-mod related but it seems to me more like a before and after 17 cycles built 

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OMG I'm so sorry had no idea that would happen. And yes the screenshot was made after last save but there should be magma cause it's been running for several hundred cycles. It's gotten slightly different with screenshot anyway so I made clean save file with no mod built in sandbox (hope it works). Exactly same stuff I've built in survival.

 

On 6/18/2021 at 3:13 AM, mathmanican said:

The most likely is that you have a packet that is not exactly 5010g getting through.

That was the problem. I fixed it to reroute the excess, gave some space and it looks like crude bleeding stopped. Right one is from last post and left is with the overflow. I probably need to run another few hundred cycles in survival to see it never does but it's even more stable than last one for over 200 cycles now.

 

1723381802_(116).thumb.png.cd90919a94687ff230a687fb53b5caf6.png

Spoiler

1264118901_(117).thumb.png.9ec1fa051507acf2610f2238a93eb875.png1056440326_(121).thumb.png.d7313096a5dd45aa33f76143f81d57c2.png

 

Petroleum Utopia.sav

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5 hours ago, W.J. said:

I fixed it to reroute the excess, gave some space and it looks like crude bleeding stopped.

Perfect.  If you see it start to bleed crude again, please share. I'm pretty sure that with proper handling of excess, all problems can be mitigated. 

There is one exception - save/load. Based on which tick of the game you load this at, it's possible for the bead configuration of the EZ-Bead pump to get out of sync for a single tick.  Autosaves don't have this issue, as they always save on the same tick (I believe, though I would be happy to be shown I'm wrong).  Manual saves on the other hand can suffer from this. As such, you should always plan for an eventual blob of crude oil slipping through because of save/load issues.  

If you stay to 5010g, and don't try to use 10020g, then the save/load issue isn't a problem. 

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I've decided to "harness" the power of this beady madness! (Also posting here to keep the thread alive, mwahaha!)

Since I had somewhat of a mishap dumping the heat from a leaky oil fissure into a salt water reservoir then the next step is to go up instead of down when it comes to energy...

I present a malted fueled inspiration, boiling the crude from the LOF with hot abyssalite energy!

The waterfall, temperature sensor is set to 410ºC and the igneous tile goes up to around 425ºC when triggered:

1324779139_WaterfallHEx.thumb.png.673ffb80dd53bbcb2b0cbf06ab5eca18.png

The abyssalite heat extraction. Simple as pie!

1471286840_Abyssaliteextraction.png.e843a655f186ce9bff4762edf9d2d375.png

I should probably get rid of the tempshift plate and change the bottom right corner of the bead frame to avoid the heat loss bug though...

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I was wondering how this bead system compares with the boilers I make.  To this end, I have conducted an experiment comparing a bead-based flaker and one of my flakers. 

While the bead flaker has less thermal contact with the boiler plate, the structure requires that the boiler plate must be either a solid (or certain liquids).  I hypothesize that the decreased contact with the hot plate that you get with the bead system is less significant than the ability to use chlorine as your "hot" plate, as chlorine has a significantly lower thermal conductivity than the next solid runner-up, salt.  To this end, I built two test boilers.

This is the experimental setup (reconstructed, as I forgot to take a screenshot at the beginning):

image.thumb.png.2230134fad987f2682580ed52652334e.png

The goal of this experiment is to attempt to measure the amount of petroleum generated per DTU by creating two systems with the same amount of energy above equilibrium.  The methodology of this experiment is as follows: 

  1. I build the structures.  All the insulated tiles are made of ceramic, all the metal tiles are made of steel, and all the temp shift plates are made of diamond.
  2. I paint in the boiling plates (500 kg salt on the top, 2000 kg chlorine on the airflow tile) at 400C.  (The 2000 kg chlorine was a typo, but these masses should not be significant)
  3. I build the temp shift plates and steel metal tiles at 400C.
  4. I paint in 500 kg of steam 537 C. (the heat source)
  5. I turn on the valve at 5020 and paint in the crude oil to the bottom one (around 20,000 kg crude oil starting at 390 C)
  6. I let them run until flaking ends
  7. I measure how much petroleum each system produced.

This is what it looked like at the end:

image.thumb.png.f8271e6ac519fec58ceb71b9fcd33710.png

I found that the bottom system produced significantly more petroleum than the top system:

  • The top (bead) system produced 10,354.3 kg petroleum at 403.2 C.  
  • The bottom (non-bead) system produced 16,919.4 kg petroleum at 399.7 C. 

It should be noted that on the non-bead setup, the source crude oil did heat up during this experiment, but that is a drain on the heat source and I don't think it helped the crude oil succeed.

Spoiler

Also, off to the side, I built a 100 kg/s flaking boiler using the bottom design.  It was running for the duration of the experiment without failure.  However, this design has flaws and I intend to fix it and build it in my new colony.  I plan to refine this design and use it in my new colony (which has very few volcanoes)

image.thumb.png.7ee86b0de51af35d0ff374153cd05ca3.png

 

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3 hours ago, Zarquan said:
  • The top (bead) system produced 10,354.3 kg petroleum at 403.2 C.  
  • The bottom (non-bead) system produced 16,919.4 kg petroleum at 399.7 C. 

As you can see from this numbers it is very important to have a good heat exchanger :)

Seriously, this is not "bead vs non-bead" comparison, this is "no heat exchanger vs simple heat exchanger"

Even if this heat exchanger is just petroleum cell next to oil cell

As you can see, even this basic heat exchanger transfer 3.5C (403.2 - 399.7) from petroleum to crude oil. You have 16 ton of petroleum, so this is 104'223 kDTU transferred. Or 15.87 kDTU per kg of oil difference, or +9.39C to oil

Try to use some heat exchange in bead version, or use hotter oil to compensate for this difference.

From mathematical point of view, this versions must be nearly identical (on oil temperatures slightly below flaking maximum), difference only in loosing 10/5010g in bead version, this is about 0.2%

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9 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

As you can see from this numbers it is very important to have a good heat exchanger :)

Seriously, this is not "bead vs non-bead" comparison, this is "no heat exchanger vs simple heat exchanger"

Even if this heat exchanger is just petroleum cell next to oil cell

As you can see, even this basic heat exchanger transfer 3.5C (403.2 - 399.7) from petroleum to crude oil. You have 16 ton of petroleum, so this is 104'223 kDTU transferred. Or 15.87 kDTU per kg of oil difference, or +9.39C to oil

Try to use some heat exchange in bead version, or use hotter oil to compensate for this difference.

From mathematical point of view, this versions must be nearly identical (on oil temperatures slightly below flaking maximum), difference only in loosing 10/5010g in bead version, this is about 0.2%

I am feeding in 390 C crude oil to simulate a heat exchanger superior to the one used in the OP, which only achieved 387 C.  You don't want your heat exchanger much better than that because if the crude oil is too hot, it will not be able to flake.

I think this is a bead vs non-bead comparison, as the ability to have that tiny amount of heat exchange at the boiler is something the bead boiler can not do.  Additionally, two ticks next to the chlorine may well transfer less heat than the one tick next to the salt, as chlorine has about 1/50th of the thermal conductivity.

You also assume that the petroleum got to 403.2 C in the bottom heat exchanger.  Never mind about that.  Unfortunately, determining the temperature the bottom system reached without contact with the crude oil is pretty much impossible.

My point is that I don't think the bead version is more efficient than the standard flaking boiler, with the built in last minute heat exchange at the boiler being a benefit of the design rather than an experimental error.

EDIT:  Although, an identical heat exchanger working on different petroleum temperature inputs would result in different output crude temperatures from the heat exchanger, so perhaps this could be significant in a real world scenario.  I'm not sure how significant that would be.  I could re-run the experiment with the starting crude oil in the bottom system starting a couple degrees colder. 

EDIT 2: But you would also need a beefier heat exchanger to handle the larger masses.  Since the bottom scheme goes through 25 kg/s of petroleum, it will need to be larger.  Conversely, you are heating an additional mass of crude oil in the bead system as compared to the output petroleum.  Perhaps I need to make a 25 kg/s bead based system so that I can run identical heat exchangers.

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Very interesting. I think the main reason for the greater production of the chlorine flaker is the last minute heat exchange as already stated. Flaking produces 402.9C petroleum, so if the final output petroleum for the chlorine flaker is only 399.7C then about 3C went to heating the crude. It becomes a contest between flaking 390C crude and 393C crude. We would expect each 393C flaking event to require about 23% less heat (402.9-393 vs 402.9-390) and produce about 30% more petroleum overall. This is all rough napkin math of course, but the experiment shows about 63% more production.

Where is the rest of the salt flaker's heat going? Some of that is overheating the produced petroleum. That's pretty minor though, only an extra 0.3C (overall output temp of 403.2 vs the 402.9 that flaking produces). How about to the ceramic insulated tiles? The chlorine flaker goes much faster at per tick while the salt flaker goes per second. The faster you use the heat in your steam source, the less time the shift plates can waste heat to the insulated tiles. Is this meaningful enough to account for the discrepancy? No idea. Something to try would be replacing the insulated tiles with airflows and/or replacing the shift plates with conveyor bridges. How does eliminating heat wasted to the tiles change the overall production numbers?

Another question is does the salt flakers greater petroleum heating even matter. Chlorine does have a much lower conductivity, but cell-cell conduction is governed by the geometric average. We have sqrt(2*0.444) vs sqrt(2*0.008) or 0.94 vs 0.13. Still a substantial difference but much less than one might think at first. Furthermore while the salt flaker produces a hotter petroleum, it's heat exchanger would produce a hotter crude. The heat isn't 100% recaptured, but you get back most of it.

The question is does the salt flaker's hotter petroleum output break the boiler in a way that the chlorine flaker wouldn't? The two problems would be making the crude too hot to flake or outright boiling the crude while still in the pipes. Use an intermediary heat source instead of going directly off a volcano or core magma and you can easily constrain it to between 430C-450C or some such. At that range any overheating is pretty meaningless IMO. The real problem comes from stopping the flow in your exchanger, intentionally or accidentally.

At any rate I found the chlorine solution quite intriguing and stimulating of further thought (much of which I didn't write because the post is too long already). I don't think one is inherently better than the other. Rather they have different characteristics which may or may not be useful to your specific situation and that you may or may not find more fun to implement. Nicely done.

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48 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Where is the rest of the salt flaker's heat going? Some of that is overheating the produced petroleum. That's pretty minor though, only an extra 0.3C (overall output temp of 403.2 vs the 402.9 that flaking produces). How about to the ceramic insulated tiles? The chlorine flaker goes much faster at per tick while the salt flaker goes per second. The faster you use the heat in your steam source, the less time the shift plates can waste heat to the insulated tiles. Is this meaningful enough to account for the discrepancy? No idea. Something to try would be replacing the insulated tiles with airflows and/or replacing the shift plates with conveyor bridges. How does eliminating heat wasted to the tiles change the overall production numbers?

I think I discovered a flaw in my experiment.  When the heat source gets too cold, it fails to flake.  On the bead version, I considered the experiment done at that point as the system clogged up.  However, my flaking machine allows for the crude oil to sit under the chlorine until either the chlorine is hot enough to cause flaking or the crude oil is hot enough.  Therefore, I stopped my flaking machine later in the process than the salt system.  I don't really think that that would be significant though, as the vast majority of the time is spent in the clean flaking stage.  But this could cause a problem.

I think you might be right about the ceramic insulated tiles.  I think they absorbed a lot more heat in the bead trial compared to my design due to the timeframe.  I need the temp shift plates, but I can put in insulated insulation tiles instead of ceramic around the tempshift plates

48 minutes ago, wachunga said:

How does eliminating heat wasted to the tiles change the overall production numbers?

EDIT:  I notice you made the following point yourself later. 

I think your question makes a flawed assumption.  You assume that heat removed from the boiler plate via conduction is wasted heat.  This is only the case if you do not have a good heat exchanger.  Extra heat in the petroleum ends up as extra heat in the crude oil, which then reduced the amount of heat needed to flake the crude oil later.  I bet only a tiny amount of heat will make it through a good counterflow heat exchanger.

48 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Another question is does the salt flakers greater petroleum heating even matter. Chlorine does have a much lower conductivity, but cell-cell conduction is governed by the geometric average. We have sqrt(2*0.444) vs sqrt(2*0.008) or 0.94 vs 0.13. Still a substantial difference but much less than one might think at first. Furthermore while the salt flaker produces a hotter petroleum, the heat exchanger produces a hotter crude. It's not 100% recaptured of course, but you get back most of it.

I'm not certain, but I think in the bottom system, the petroleum is only in contact with the chlorine for one or two ticks.  I can't see it being in contact for more than two ticks, therefore only half the heat is transferred.

48 minutes ago, wachunga said:

The real problem comes from stopping the flow in your exchanger, intentionally or accidentally.

If the crude oil stops flowing, then eventually you will end up with either less than 5010 grams of crude oil under the chlorine or petroleum under the chlorine.  Heat will flow from the chlorine to the crude/petroleum, but not nearly as fast as the heat can be dumped in to the chlorine.

If the heat stops, the crude will just stack up under the chlorine.  The one tile of petroleum at the end stops it from flowing out.  Once again, the heat can be pumped in to the chlorine faster than it can be sapped out in to the crude oil.

However, it is quite difficult to turn off and disconnect the crude oil from the heat source.  This is possible with a solid heat source.

48 minutes ago, wachunga said:

How about to the ceramic insulated tiles?

The problem is getting the heat in to the insulated tile.  Insulated tiles use a different formula to determine thermal conductivity, not the geometric average.  If you can find a way to pump enough heat in to an insulated tile (any would do), I would be quite interested in using it in my design as well as the bead design.

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I reran the bead experiment with insulated insulation tiles and letting it run until the heat source was completely depleted. and got 13,179 kg of petroleum.  There was a chunk of ceramic in the petroleum I missed that invalidated the temperature results, but I have no reason to think they would be different from the first trial.

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1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

If you can find a way to pump enough heat in to an insulated tile

Ultimately I gave up on using an insulated tile as donor. It works ok at that 5kg/s flow rate once you reach steady state, but starting up is fiddly. And higher flow rates is out of the question. Also I wasn't able to bring down the temperature of the intermediary chamber as much as I would like. Ideally the goal is to suck as much heat out of the magma or whatever. Practically speaking there isn't a huge gulf between going from a 1727C eruption down to 500C vs 425C, but I know the difference is there and it ruins the build for me.

47 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

got 13,179 kg of petroleum

Neat. That brings it in the ballpark of what one would expect just off a rough estimate based on the preheating from the petro-crude interaction in the chlorine build. Of course the chlorine is losing heat to the insulated tiles as well, but it ought to be meaningfully less. I think the numbers are close enough to theory that I wouldn't be contemplating bugs or unknown mechanics as an explanation for the performance difference in the builds. Which was one of my thoughts when I first saw the numbers, "I wonder if something buggy is going on here".

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1 minute ago, wachunga said:

Ultimately I gave up on using an insulated tile as donor. It works ok once you reach steady state, but starting up is fiddly. Also I wasn't able to bring down the temperature of the intermediary chamber as much as I would like. Ideally the goal is to suck as much heat out of the magma or whatever. Practically speaking there isn't a huge gulf between going from a 1727C eruption down to 500C vs 425C, but I know the difference is there and it ruins the build for me.

I don't really care about how hard it is to start as long as it eventually starts without duplicant or player action.  If you have a good approach, please share pictures.

4 minutes ago, wachunga said:

Neat. That brings it in the ballpark of what one would expect just off a rough estimate based on the preheating from the petro-crude interaction in the chlorine build. Of course the chlorine is losing heat to the insulated tiles as well, but it ought to be less. I think the numbers are close enough to theory that I wouldn't be contemplating bugs or unknown mechanics as an explanation for the performance difference in the builds.

Keep in mind that the other build has the same bug, so its number should also be higher.  Right now I'm running my modified version using my pipeless counterflow heat exchanger (which can process around 250 kg/s of petroleum/crude oil).  Unfortunately, it takes a long time to get to temperature.

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3 minutes ago, wachunga said:

It might not be linking correctly. This is the best I got before giving up on the idea:

image.thumb.png.512d72c81987dfad4515177c3ee416e5.png

I doubt it is suitable for your high flow purposes.

Yeah, I am going for 100 kg/s with 4 boilers. 

One thing we do need to keep in mind is how much heat can we get out of the heat source.  If we can use a heat source as low as 405 C, we can get more petroleum per unit magma than one where the heat source has to be at least 410 C or 420 C.  I assume that insulated tiles take a hotter heat source.  Note this doesn't matter as much if your heat source is rockets and is completely irrelevant if it is a metal refinery.

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Hmm

I'd put this together just recently, I'm hoping to get an opinion if that's not too much to ask...

I've been wanting to make a petroleum cooker for a leaky oil fissure and was mostly successful. However, the boilers above seemed to spike some curiosity about different donors.... Does a conveyor bridge on its lonesome count?
 

Of course, the heat source is just a stand in and the setup doesn't start up gracefully after shut down, but it is doing 10kg without much more to it... crude starts hot because this was intended for a leaky oil fissure, but then I thought "why not ramp it up?"

IIRC: if I set the heat source to 405ºC then it only does from 326 g/s up to 1500 g/s

 

 

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5 minutes ago, JRup said:

Hmm

I'd put this together just recently, I'm hoping to get an opinion if that's not too much to ask...

I've been wanting to make a petroleum cooker for a leaky oil fissure and was mostly successful. However, the boilers above seemed to spike some curiosity about different donors.... Does a conveyor bridge on its lonesome count?
 

 

Of course, the heat source is just a stand in and the setup doesn't start up gracefully after shut down, but it is doing 10kg without much more to it... crude starts hot because this was intended for a leaky oil fissure, but then I thought "why not ramp it up?"

IIRC: if I set the heat source to 405ºC then it only does from 326 g/s up to 1500 g/s

 

 

This approach is not actually flaking.  Instead, you are boiling the bead.  You can tell because the petroleum is more than 5 kg.  It could be interesting as an alternate classic boiler design.

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53 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

This approach is not actually flaking.  Instead, you are boiling the bead.  You can tell because the petroleum is more than 5 kg.  It could be interesting as an alternate classic boiler design.

I shall traverse the ways of boiling first then. Any LOF is pretty low volume to be useful as a primer in boiling... Or a gateway into crude to petro transmutation addiction.

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@Prince Mandor, I built and ran a new experiment with identical counterflow heat exchanger designs.  I created two full 25 kg/s boiler setups, one with my flaker and one with a bead flaker.  Since the quantity is over 10 kg/s and I want the crude oil to have the same temperatures for consistency, I used my pipeless counterflow heat exchanger v2, which has been tested up to 100 kg/s.  

Spoiler

 

These are the two boilers:

Boiler 1:  My flaker.  The boiler plate is 1000 kg chlorine.  The thermosensor for the input is at 435 C

image.thumb.png.8cd8e6d4c41d2b3182c4dfa310516855.png

Spoiler

image.thumb.png.41838313e4697db8ac35d63585ebbe69.png

image.thumb.png.6d084deae85f09752106f7a55c61124b.png

 

Boiler 2:  Bead Flaker.  The boiler plates are 500 kg salt.  The temp sensor is at 410 C.

image.thumb.png.80abafe5999b4688f9d19ab0ccbad947.png

Spoiler

image.thumb.png.4e141ae8f95e0ef83d41e3a6952f1544.png

image.thumb.png.cced220a336e615a5e67225ba45b341d.png

Since there are too many variables here to run a quick experiment, I let this run for about 100 cycles to reach an equilibrium at max speed (with alt-z active).  I measured the output petroleum by measuring the inlet to the petroleum reservoir.  The input crude oil is at 80 C at 25 kg/s (or 25 kg/s + 50 g/s on the bead design)

Boiler 1 produced 25 kg/s petroleum at 114.7 C.

Boiler 2 produced 25 kg/s petroleum at 115.5 C

These result seems to imply that boiler 1 (non-bead boiler) uses marginally less heat to produce the petroleum than boiler 2 (the bead boiler).  From the output temperature numbers, I conclude that Boiler 1 uses 35,200 DTU/s less than Boiler 2.

However, the benefit boiler 1 has could easily be offset by the higher temperatures required from the heat source (435 C on boiler 1 vs 410 C on boiler 2).  This is irrelevant if the heat source is rockets or metal refineries.  However, if I use a volcano as my heat source, this becomes relevant.  I could use the output hot igneous rock is used to heat the middle boiler plate itself then the crude oil directly before it hits the boiler, which should offset this deficiency. 

It should be noted that the crude oil entering boiler 1 is 379.1 C and the crude oil entering boiler 2 is 383.3 C.

I will leave the experiment running overnight in case either boiler is not at equilibrium.

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