Low-tech 2kg/s sour gas boiler

[sushieater]

I haven't seen much on pre-space sour gas boilers. If I were to to believe in the Wiki, I would be inclined to think they aren't very viable.

In reality, they are extremely viable with pre-space technology with an efficiency far surpassing petroleum boilers.

My boiler design can refine 2kg/s of oil at a power cost of 1365kW with cold oil (0°C) or 2125kW with hot oil (95°C). That's almost 12000kW worth of natural gas power.

With hot oil, it can be run with a gold volcano as a heat source. With cold oil, it works with any volcano better (as in more heat) than a gold volcano.

The bottom counter-flow heat ex-changer is based on 2 ez-bead bead pumps (1kg/s oil each) that exchange heat between incoming crude oil and sour gas.

The top heat exchanger exchanges heat between the sour gas and methane/natural gas as well as the sulfur.

I've had major heat-bleed issues with thermo regulators in steam rooms (even with ceramic piping), so they are cooled with conduction panels (hot cooling loop with crude oil into steam room).

There are 15 thermo regulators (3 cooling loops) with hydrogen used for cooling (with hot oil, the uptime is 61%).

Most of the heat exchange stuff is made from aluminum - if that's not available, it would have to be a lot larger or loose efficiency,
The thermo regulator loops are entirely controlled by the condensation sink temperature, which is set to -175°C. It's safe to activate 5 in a row (resulting temp of -245°C), since the hydrogen temp leaving the condensation sink will be almost exactly -175°C (or less). Thermo regulators have weird buffering (more than aqua tuners), so bypassing them reliably (without occasional cold damage) is quite problematic.

(The liquid pump in the natural gas room is there, because there is some ONI bug and I get some liquid methane at room temperature. This forces the conversion to natural gas.

(I'm using liquid iron pumped by a mini liquid pump as heat source in the screenshots. Temperature of of the sour gas conversion chamber is 550°C.)

(Liquid pumps can output larger than 1kg packets in some conditions, resulting in state change damage to the pipes. Thus, there are additional valves limited to 1000g/s in the condensation chamber.)

)

[Zarquan]

Love seeing pre-space builds.  Looks quite buildable in survival too!

I assume that lower theromosensor is in a tile of steam to operate as a heat battery/buffer.

I wonder how easy it would be to adapt this to plastic and naphtha instead of crude oil...

Out of curiosity, how resilient is this build against power failures?

[blakemw]

I've built pre-space ones, one of them I had fully operational by cycle 75.
 

The times I've built these, I've nearly always used an AETN because it's much more efficient and lazier (AETN doesn't need temperature control it only gets cold enough to condense sour gas, not cold enough to freeze liquid methane), though I've also done it with Thermo Regulators.

Typically I tune them to either 1 kg/s of Sour Gas, or 1 kg/s of Liquid Methane, either way staying at or below the 1 kg threshold for not breaking pipes, and to be quite honest, I can't use all the power of a 666 g/s build anyway. It's not unusual that at like cycle 500 I'm only using about 1.5-2 kW of "virgin" power (not including power recycled from SPOM, Metal Refinery and Aquatuner, and that may also not be counting contribution from random metal volcano tamers), furthermore there's a good chance a good chunk of that power is making Oxylite and if I started making Oxylite earlier in the game I tend to stockpile so much of it that I'd never feel the need to be running 2 Oxylite Refineries. So to be honest, I'd probably get away with just the 333 g/s version which doesn't bother with heat exchanging the sulfur.

Anyway that build is 4 years old, if I made it again today I'd still do it about the same except using Meters for valving.

[sushieater]

14 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I assume that lower theromosensor is in a tile of steam to operate as a heat battery/buffer.

Yes. It achieves a very stable temperature and prevents spikes/fluctuations. There is an aluminum temperature shift plate as well.

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I wonder how easy it would be to adapt this to plastic and naphtha instead of crude oil...

It will probably work fine, if the plastic is melted elsewhere and the naphtha cooled below 100°C.

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Out of curiosity, how resilient is this build against power failures?

This version doesn't have any fail-saves. In survival, I would cut off oil input if the condensation sink is too warm or if oil is pooling in the boiling chamber.

Melting the sulfur on the rails can be rather bad news. The good news is, there is very, very little sour gas at dangerous temperatures (even with 95°C input oil) in contact with the sulfur, the vast majority is in the bead pump section with very little mass. As long as there are no small sulfur packets on the rails, everything should be fine.

With 95°C input oil, things are very, very likely safe with some basic precautions. With <80°C input oil, I would bet my dupes lives on things being safe.

@blakemw: The problem I have with your build is that you are wasting ginormous amounts of high-grade heat (along with brute-force cooling, which may or may not be sustainable). I wanted to be able to run on a metal volcano.

I don't have an AETN. I only have a minor volcano and it's at the end of the world. The magma biome is at the other end of the world. I do have a couple of iron volcanoes and water that's conveniently located to some oil wells (unregular oil).

I didn't know beforehand, how much high-grade heat was going to be needed. I was very pleasantly surprised that an iron volcano will do far, far more than fine and even a gold volcano (by far the shittiest high-grade heat source) will do in a pinch. . (I want a petroleum boiler too, but it looks like it may require more than one iron volcanoe as heat source.)

I did experiment with additional cooling sources for the sour gas (so that the thermo regulators have less work). My initial (pessimistic) build had 4 additional aquatuner polluted water / ethanol cooling loops (to gradually cool the sour gas with more efficiency than the thermo regulator). With cool input oil, there isn't any efficiency improvement. With hot input oil, it's still rather minor.

(I have a cool salt slush geyser conveniently located and I will probably use it to cool the input oil.)

I would have been fine with a 1kg/s boiler, but the double bead pump worked better than than the single version (in terms of heat exchange), so there was no reason not to go with 2kg/s. This boiler is good enough (and sustainable) to not to upgrade it ever. I wouldn't feel comfortable with relying on / wasting insane amounts of high-grade heat from the magma biome (without having to upgrade things later).

[wachunga]

2 hours ago, sushieater said:

I want a petroleum boiler too, but it looks like it may require more than one iron volcanoe as heat source.

One iron volcano should be sufficient, unless you have a lousy volcano or boiler design. A good boiler can preheat crude to within 15C of the outgoing petroleum and utilize iron down to about 450C. Which means you roughly need a 270 g/s volcano for a 10 kg/s boiler. Average volcano is 300 g/s IIRC. You can also drop your boiler rate. I have trouble finding a use for more than 2.5 kg/s, dunno what the hell other people are doing that they need 10 kg/s.

[blakemw]

13 hours ago, sushieater said:

@blakemw: The problem I have with your build is that you are wasting ginormous amounts of high-grade heat (along with brute-force cooling, which may or may not be sustainable). I wanted to be able to run on a metal volcano.

In the comment on my post, I mention it's a "modular" build. In the long run the idea is to set up a countercurrent heat exchanger between Crude Oil and Sour Gas, so the Sour Gas gets cooled to Crude Oil temperature and the Crude Oil gets preheated to nearly boiling.

But the amount of heat required even without a counter-current heat exchanger is not very high, for my build, about 700 kDTU/s. A single magma tile will provide this much heat for about 5-6 cycles, a magma sea typically has somewhere between 500 and 10000 magma tiles depending on map, even at the low end it's thousands of cycles of heat.

I don't mind an unsustainable solution which will be good for thousands of cycles, if by some miracle I actually play that long, it's so deeply into the end game that Supercoolant and Therium can be taken for granted anyway.

[sushieater]

On 9/16/2024 at 11:14 PM, wachunga said:

One iron volcano should be sufficient, unless you have a lousy volcano or boiler design. A good boiler can preheat crude to within 15C of the outgoing petroleum and utilize iron down to about 450C. Which means you roughly need a 270 g/s volcano for a 10 kg/s boiler. Average volcano is 300 g/s IIRC. You can also drop your boiler rate.

I was concerned, because the best actually implemented (beyond) design in this thread (with a very sub-optimal boiling chamber) was using 352KDTU/s (with HUGE heat exchangers):

352KDTU/s would correspond to 370g molten iron per second. There are a lot of potential hidden losses that don't show up in theory crafting.

I prototyped a flaking boiler, that runs on 70g iron per second (bead drop with 50 heat exchange segments) for 5kg/s. I couldn't make things work reliably at 10kg/s with dropping two 5010g beads.

I also prototyped a boiler running at 10kg/s with an optimized boiling chamber (output oil at a an extremely steady 403.2°C) that uses 210g iron / second with a 42 segment bead drop heat exchanger.

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I have trouble finding a use for more than 2.5 kg/s, dunno what the hell other people are doing that they need 10 kg/s.

I want large amounts of plastic. I also want to use the petroleum for power for a while, until I get around to building the sour gas boiler. A large scale transport tube network requires a ton of plastic and power.

[wachunga]

3 hours ago, sushieater said:

I was concerned, because the best actually implemented (beyond) design in this thread (with a very sub-optimal boiling chamber) was using 352KDTU/s (with HUGE heat exchangers)

That thread used copper instead of aluminum. As you have discovered, aluminum is pretty good. Copper can be good also, you just need more pipe segments. If length is a concern, staircase and waterfall exchangers lend themselves to running in parallel. Instead of one long ass copper exchanger running 10 kg/s do two half length exchangers of 5 kg/s next to each other. Efficiency isn't as good a single exchanger, but you greatly reduce the height for a slight increase in width.

Oh and ignore the "Z" design, it's moronic.