Can we not have petroleum generator heating up internal fuel?

[Sleeeeeeeeeeper]

The petroleum generator exchanges heat with its content/fuel. This causes the ethanol inside to get flashed to gas if the generator is above 81c and the generator is turned off with ethanol inside.

While this behavior has been around for a long time (I believe), this should imo be fixed/addressed.

• Practically every other buildings do not exchange heat with its internal content. NGG do not heat up the NG inside. Nor ethanol distiller heating up the lumber, etc etc. Petroleum Generator is an exception than a norm.
• Currently, the petroleum generator running ethanol have an effective "overheat" temperature of 81c really. This is a gameplay issue and ethanol is already gimped in that 1) arbor tree loop is water negative compared to petroleum boiler and 2) you can't use it for petroleum engine for whatever reason and 3) you effectively cannot run ethanol petrol generator in a steam sauna no matter what you do (other than using a shut off for controlling incoming ethanol but that's really sub par.
• If the issue is balance, just make the petrol generator output temp the same as the input, not the building temperature. Electrolyzer does that (and prob a few others).
• It renders petroleum generator's building material practically irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the generator is made of steel or thermium when the content is getting flashed to gas left right and center.
• The overheat temperature is practically irrelevant and never a factor. I can put petrol generator inside an entire insulated block, and the incoming fuel is enough to keep it cool.

Can we please make it stop exchanging heat with its internal fuel. It really makes no sense imo.

[wachunga]

You are misunderstanding the mechanics of what is going on.

The contents of buildings acts as invisible debris (or bottles for liquid/gas) sitting on the ground. Debris does not interact thermally with buildings. The contents of the petroleum generator does not exchange heat with the building. However, both the contents and the building interact with the gas or liquid in which the generator sits. So this gas/liquid atmosphere acts as a bridge between building and contents.

A few buildings are flagged as insulated (metal refinery for example) and this prevents the contents from interacting with the surrounding atmosphere. But these buildings are the exception to the above behavior. The natural gas generator is not insulated and behaves the same as the petroleum generator. You just haven't noticed it for whatever reason.

The ethanol is being boiled by the surrounding gas, so keep that cool or put a bit of liquid on the ground and keep that cool instead.

[blakemw]

1 hour ago, Sleeeeeeeeeeper said:

Practically every other buildings do not exchange heat with its internal content. NGG do not heat up the NG inside. Nor ethanol distiller heating up the lumber, etc etc. Petroleum Generator is an exception than a norm.

This is factually in error. Most buildings, including NGG and Ethanol Distillery, do not have insulated storage, that is, the contents still exchange heat with the environment (contents never exchange heat with the building itself). Only a few buildings, like Metal Refinery, Glass Forge, Aquatuner and Thermo Regulator actually have insulated storage. Most buildings can be vacuum insulated to effectively give them insulated storage, but those which emit or consume gas or outgassing liquids resist such strategies.

For most buildings it just doesn't have any consequences.

On several occasions such as Glass Forge and Thermo Regulator, the devs have been merciful enough to add insulated storage to a building which previously didn't have it, since it was clearly causing enough of a problem to players - for example in the case of Glass Forge, generally it worked fine, but if the Glass Forge was sitting in a puddle of liquid (or in hydrogen gas) the molten glass would quickly reach freezing point then break the pipe when being emitted, and I think the devs just got sick of players complaining about it breaking pipes, like for all time more experience players could explain the whole thing about the molten glass actually being a bottle of molten glass sitting on the floor and exchanging heat with the liquid, and the high conductivity of liquid.... OR the devs could spare everyone that effort and just insulate the damn storage, mercifully they did the latter. In the case of the Regulator, it wasn't so much that it was causing frustration for players, but experienced players noticed and crunched the numbers and determined a Regulator in a steam chamber could easily be spending half of its cooling power just re-cooling its contents which were constantly getting heated by the steam (unless the player used elaborate stacked liquid lock strategy), it wasn't exactly a frustration causing thing but it made the Regulator even more bad than it already is, and the devs mercifully gave it insulated storage so it could be garden variety bad instead of appallingly awful.

 

In the specific case of the Petroleum Generator

The complaint seems to be that the lack of insulated storage interferes with implementing the exploit where the petroleum generator is heated up to increase the temperature of the outputs and produce free heat. "This is making it harder to do an exploit" is always a much weaker rationale than "this is interfering with the normal operation of the building", this is not to say it's impossible the devs could deem fit to give it insulated storage, devs can be whimsy sometimes, but there typically need to be very good reasons to implement changes to existing game mechanics.

Let's also look into what is involved to make the desired exploit work in spite of the lack of insulated storage, when you're exploiting you should always be willing to engage with technicalities to make the exploit work. Ethanol is emitted at 73.4 C, just a little below its boiling point of 78 C. Provided the "ethanol bottle" is sitting on a mesh or airflow tile and immersed in CO2, then the low conductivity of CO2 means it only gains fractions of a degree per second, e.g. between entering the Petroleum Generator and being burned it might heat up from 73.4 C to 73.5 C. Steam does have higher TC than CO2, but it's still not enough to bring the temperature of the Ethanol to over 76 C.

This leaves the main issue being ethanol sitting in the Petroleum Generator while it is turned off, which can be avoided using the shutoffs you don't want to use, or the residual ethanol chunks which are too small for the Petroleum Generator to burn (as it wants to burn 400 g per tick), these can flash into gas. In most setups, that leaked ethanol gas will subsequently be annihilated in pwater-steam-CO2 interactions, this represents a small amount of mass and energy loss. To minimize creations of ethanol leftovers the Petroleum Generator should be "well fed" while operating, feeding it dribbles of ethanol result in it leaking, and the losses can be bad, for example about the worst real world case would be feeding 500g/s from a single Ethanol Distillery, the Generator would burn 400 g, and the remaining 100 g would flash into Ethanol Gas, resulting a loss of 20%.

But this loss could be greatly reduced by using a Liquid Shutoff on a simple Timer set to 1/4, the Shutoff would then send 5 packets at once, in the 500 g/s case, it'd send 2500 g, of which 2400 g should be burned and 100 g leak, now the leakage has been reduced to only 4%. Meanwhile, if a full 2 kg/s of Ethanol is being produced, it'd just emit a 10 kg package once every 5s, and the Petroleum Generator would burn that over 5 seconds without interruption and without leakage. Hence strategies for minimizing the harm from pathological cases can be quite simple.

I personally think that superheated Petroleum Generators are not a very good strategy, better in most cases to just take the pwater at 40 C, but there are various strategies which can be employed to make a super heated Petroleum Generator work fairly well with Ethanol.

[wachunga]

6 hours ago, blakemw said:

players could explain the whole thing about the molten glass actually being a bottle of molten glass sitting on the floor and exchanging heat with the liquid

OMG, you just gave me PTSD remembering this era of ONI.

To the OP, I would add that if the problem stems from running the petroleum generator in an industrial sauna, then the solution is to stop making industrial saunas. Saunas are ******* stupid and serve effectively zero useful purpose. Building heat is VASTLY overestimated by the community and the community is clueless about how building contents interact with the hot steam inside a sauna.

[JRup]

7 hours ago, wachunga said:

The ethanol is being boiled by the surrounding gas, so keep that cool or put a bit of liquid on the ground and keep that cool instead.

I've found that the CO2 environment is less of an issue than expected, it should be noted that I keep it at non-boiling temperatures all the time. Also, the ethanol inside will heat up less quickly if an insulated tile is built below the TOI. The drop of liquid is better used to cool the generator instead of the ethanol as it doesn't heat up as fast.

Finally: If it's hot enough to have steam, switch to petroleum.

6 hours ago, blakemw said:

it wasn't so much that it was causing frustration for players, but experienced players noticed and crunched the numbers and determined a Regulator in a steam chamber could easily be spending half of its cooling power just re-cooling its contents which were constantly getting heated by the steam (unless the player used elaborate stacked liquid lock strategy), it wasn't exactly a frustration causing thing but it made the Regulator even more bad than it already is, and the devs mercifully gave it insulated storage so it could be garden variety bad instead of appallingly awful.

I triggered the conversation for the thermo regulator way back when. Here's my thought process:

• Aquatuner sometimes stores packets. Aquatuner is (thermally) sealed, no issue found.
• Thermo regulator sometimes stores packets. Thermo regulator is not sealed, big issue. Thermo regulator is being further discriminated against. This needs further insight from the community.

I will assume devs did the maths themselves. I didn't do any.

Relevant links in the spoiler:

Spoiler

And here's the bug report, 2 years to the date:

 

 

58 minutes ago, wachunga said:

the solution is to stop making industrial saunas. Saunas are ******* stupid and serve effectively zero useful purpose.

Agreed, although it will be a great learning opportunity for the gamer that builds it when they care to research why it doesn't work. If they do so.

Spoiler

The industrial sauna along with an old petroleum boiler design from the same person are responsible for many a headache, but I digress...

 

7 hours ago, blakemw said:

I personally think that superheated Petroleum Generators are not a very good strategy, better in most cases to just take the pwater at 40 C, but there are various strategies which can be employed to make a super heated Petroleum Generator work fairly well with Ethanol.

I fully agree with this. Polluted water at or close to 40°C is the best possible result as it's very useful in this temperature range. It's more convenient to cool the generator and allow for the hot ethanol (as produced by the distiller) to be burned as-is. I'll reiterate the need for an insulated tile below the generator...

I will preempt the idea of having the petroleum generator be "sealed": I say nay! It's a good thing to have that in the game to push some builds in curious directions. (Next thing that will happen if we acquiesce to such talk is that reservoirs will be next on the block...)

[Gurgel]

13 hours ago, wachunga said:

You are misunderstanding the mechanics of what is going on.

The contents of buildings acts as invisible debris (or bottles for liquid/gas) sitting on the ground. Debris does not interact thermally with buildings. The contents of the petroleum generator does not exchange heat with the building. However, both the contents and the building interact with the gas or liquid in which the generator sits. So this gas/liquid atmosphere acts as a bridge between building and contents.

I think I remember some similar effect with the Glass Forge: If it sits on a well heat-conducting, cold tile, glass comes out too cold due to the same effect, and then the glass hardens in your pipe. 

[pnambic]

4 hours ago, JRup said:

(Next thing that will happen if we acquiesce to such talk is that reservoirs will be next on the block...)

I'm pretty sure that has happened already. I had a discussion about reservoir thermal behaviour the other day on reddit and did some experiments:

Setup: two thermium reservoirs in a 2kg/tile hydrogen atmosphere, sitting on thermium metal tiles, all wrapped in insulite insulated tiles. All at 20°C.

Spoiler

 

 

Step 1: pump in 5000l of super coolant at 350°C into each reservoir (pipes are insulated insulite). No heat transfer.

Spoiler

Step 2: pour 2l of super coolant at 20°C on the left platform. No heat transfer.

Spoiler

Step 3: deconstruct the right reservoir. Heat transfer starts as expected.

Spoiler

I seem to distinctly remember that this was not what happened two or three years ago, but I can't find a change log entry or a bug report.

[JRup]

9 minutes ago, pnambic said:

I seem to distinctly remember that this was not what happened two or three years ago, but I can't find a change log entry or a bug report.

Builds that rely on this mechanic with reservoirs sometimes need a reload as "thermal contact" isn't always made when first filling the reservoir.

I couldn't say more about this as I don't know of the purpose of your experiment as well as your reddit post.

[pnambic]

6 minutes ago, JRup said:

Builds that rely on this mechanic with reservoirs sometimes need a reload as "thermal contact" isn't always made when first filling the reservoir.

I couldn't say more about this as I don't know of the purpose of your experiment as well as your reddit post.

That did the trick; the reservoir is transferring heat after reloading, as I expected/remembered it would. The whole purpose of the exercise was to figure out whether reservoirs indeed remained uninsulated. Thanks!

[Prince Mandor]

Are there some mod to see inside information window, has building insulated storage or has not? Similar to old mod showing is it industrial machinery?