Iron volcano-powered 10kg/s hybrid flaking petroleum boiler

[sushieater]

This is a sandbox prototype petroleum boiler that uses partial flaking. 10kg beads are dropped and partially flaked on a ceramic flaking plate. The stuff that's not flaked gets boiled in the bottom chamber. There is a 21x21-tile staircase heat exchanger and an additional 7 heat exchange segments in the bead drop tower.

Hot petroleum first flows through the tower heat exchange segments, so there is pretty much zero risk of pipe damage. The staircase has crude oil in the pipe. The tower heat exchanger has petroleum in the pipe.

The boiler is powered by an iron volcano and uses 214g molten iron per second (measured average over 30 cycles). That's 204KDTU/s.

A steel pump is used to pump the hot petroleum. The pump is cooled and tricked into pumping by dropping 20g/s of cold petroleum on the right side (the pump is at around 180°C).

The tempshift plate at the bottom output spillway reliably converts any stray oil that spills over into petroleum. There is a huge amount of (intentional) bubbling (in the air and the boiling chamber) and it looks really nice in operation.

No space materials are used. Steel and aluminum is required.

The startup was very messy and I had to rebuild the petroleum pump 3 times. When there is a layer of petroleum on of crude oil in the output spillway, it takes heat damage. Once everything is warmed up, it works reliably and flow up or a down adjustments don't cause any issues.

The staircase heat exchanger by itself can be be extremely finicky with highly efficient boilers and cause state change (crude oil -> petroleum) pipe damage on flow adjustments. This is mitigated by the additional bead drop tower heat exchanger.