What Obsession looks like (sour gas boiler)

[superscooper]

So, have you ever wondered what would happen if the ballroom was on fire, and, instead of escaping like a sane person, you FINALLY spend your last dollar on that 100th cup of coffee?

In case if you still thought we were in Kansas, Toto...

Ok, real talk, I need help.

A LOT of help.

(Actually, not too bad there)

OK, preamble. Shared this on the Redditt when it was still "in development".

Everyone and their 3rd Aunt was pushing me towards just using a boring old meta boiler. Hindsight being what it is, really should have just used a boring old meta boiler. But, you see, our family has an issue with being told what we can or can't do. Specifically, don't tell us what we can't do. If you do that, we'll burn the ocean and outer space to the ground just to prove you wrong. And, so, thus began the insanity of what it is you see before you.

First things first. Yes, it is 10kg/s capable. Yes, I actually built it in my survival game. No, I would not recommend to anyone to try this at home. No, I will not say how many hours of my life are now dust just in the automation.

Explaining what that garbage is actually doing would be the lovecraftian equivalent of staring cthulhu straight in the face and then licking its cheek. We're just not even gonna go there. So, I'll just tell you what it does/can-do.

1. 10kg/s oil conversion capable. Rock stable. Requires no scavenging pumps from either the sour gas or natural gas exchangers.

2. Separates the exchangers with an organic liquid lock of methane, thus requiring no liquid pumping to a separate chamber. Also requires no tepidizer.

2. Has "Performance" and "Economy" modes. Performance mode runs (or enables) everything flat-out. Economy mode utilizes a tunable automatic flow control circuit that will automatically throttle oil conversion to minimize power consumption and maximize efficiency.

3. Sour Gas Boiler and Geothermal Power mode selection. Geothermal mode puts the boiler section to 'sleep' and proceeds to function exclusively as a geothermal power station. Yes it is hot-switchable.

4. Has a 'Panic Stop' button for emergency shutdown functionality. Flipping that switch will forcibly shut down oil flow through the vent and the shutoff, and more importantly, force-open the temperature control doors to isolate the heat source from either the boiler or steam chambers. If only Chernobyl had that redundancy.

5. In the event there WAS a gas containment failure, the way it has been built,  shutting it down entirely and giving the gas enough time will cause it all to (eventually) condense into methane and settle into the pool at the bottom. In laymen's terms, you won't need to Hoover it out. It will return itself to a vacuum.

6.(?) The bit at the bottom was duct taped on after the fact. See I don't like wasting resources. Heat is a resource. After the ejected magma does the truffle shuffle through the adjacent steam room, it still had lots of temperature in it (200C give or take). So, I JB welded those extra turbines on at the bottom. And, since there's turbines, they need cooling. Ya know, since we're doing some cooling already, why not add a cooling block to chill the waste-rock once all of the usable heat was eaten? And hay, that big enormous steam chamber conveniently has 5 turbines, which can output up to 10kg of water! Let's just tack on the capability of desalinating salt water while we're at it. Then send that output through the cooling block. Throw a robo miner in there just in case I feel frisky and dump in polluted water instead...

AND THAT IS WHY IT TAKES ME ALMOST 2000 CYCLES TO MAKE A SOUR GAS BOILER.

 

-fin-

 

Addendum: That odd-looking poorly-utilized space in the top left of the infernal machine originally housed an automatic power switch-boarding system which I gutted in the final build. I hate heavy-watt. Problem being that even though I could make it run power-positive, a 2kw conductive umbilical was insufficient to charge the batteries fast enough to make the switch-boarding viable. So it was scrapped.

[superscooper]

Addendum 2: Even in sour-gas mode, the injector door to the steam room is still utilized. The way the automation is set up, once the temperature falls below sour gas flashpoint the injector door slams shut and dumps most of its remaining heat into the adjacent steam room. Once 250sec has passed, then magma changeover occurs, that door reopens, and the waste magma goes through its second cooling stage doing the boney-maloney in the primary steam chamber. There are 9 buffer gates that will allow that igneous rock to remain in there for 'up to' 3 cycles, before ejecting it into the final-boss steam chamber at the bottom, which in turn will hold the rock for that same time period. That way both chambers are utiltized at "all" times.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I'm glad that there are others out there who also dedicate far too much time to building cool contraptions.  

 

[degr]

Way to complex with automation, I'm too stupid to build such machine.

In case if natural gas suddenly will go up inside of sour gas chamber I believe it will stop to work, because nat gas may and will block flow (at least, until the moment your boiler transform and vacuum all gas from right side.

[superscooper]

2 hours ago, degr said:

Way to complex with automation, I'm too stupid to build such machine.

In case if natural gas suddenly will go up inside of sour gas chamber I believe it will stop to work, because nat gas may and will block flow (at least, until the moment your boiler transform and vacuum all gas from right side.

The automation is actually less complex than it really looks, and can be broken down into essentially 3 sections: the petroleum boiler circuit, the automatic flow control circuit, and the mode selection circuit. I've just pushed to condense everything it all into a single "brainbox", which is why it appears complex. Here's a picture of the Model C where the automation still exists in a more 'exploded' format.

There you can also see the power switchboard that was scrubbed from the final (model E) design. The following model, the model D, is where I added the "Mode Selection" to offer pure Geothermal operation, which is why that circuit is absent. That is also the revision where I finally was able to make 10kg/s reliably operate.

Notice that the model D still has scavenging pumps for errant (stray) gas. At that point, the pump was purely vestigial, as, it no longer produced errant gas chunks. Even at 10kg/s operation. Errant gas was tested for, and tested for a very very VERY long time.

Just in my survival game alone, the model E has around 500 cycles of operation under its belt. Debug testing of the model D was done for over 300 cycles. During that combined time, the models D and E produced exactly zero stray gas chunks. When the model D performed as reliably as it did, one of the (many) design streamlines that BECAME the model E (which is finally what was posted to the forum, here) was removal of the vestigial stray gas pump. The final feature that was added was the Boiler Panic Stop, so, in the event that hundreds of cycles of testing was wrong, I could still shut it down at the drop of a pin and allow the gas to correct itself. That has not been needed. In a combined 800 or so cycles of testing and operation, the models D + E produce no stray gas. Even in 10kg/s operation. When I said rock stable, I meant it.

The models A-C *would* produce stray gas, but only if they were pushed past their 'happy' operating zone. This is also why they still had pumps to account for that, though it didn't really matter if they did or did not. If they were pushed too hard and created errant chunks, consistent testing showed you were about 1-2 cycles away from "washing away" the methane transition gate (the liquid lock) in sour gas, heat-soaking the system, and completely breaking it. The heat exchangers have been significantly improved and fine tuned since then.

So, why doesn't it produce stray gas?

My theory is that it comes down to the transition gate itself. Unlike most boilers, the sour gas isn't slamming into a (cold) wall. Not enough pressure is permitted to build up to upset the transition of the temperature itself. That sour gas pressure itself is what monitors and dictates how much oil to feed it if you run it in Economy mode, and the atmo sensors that control that are visible in every model C through E (the model C is the revision that implemented automatic flow control). The backpressure of the gas sort of self-feeds the liquid methane through the liquid lock. So, really very ironically, the fact that the exchangers are open to each other means that they are LESS likely to create stray gas, instead of more.

The mark 1 model E was my final revision of the concept and design, which is why I actually built it in my proper game. I would be happy to share any of my save files if anyone wanted to actually see it in operation, or review the test beds.

I have been casually picking away at a mark 2 design, which is even more condensed and streamlined. Goal is to make it smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. Been slow-going because trying to condense all of the automation even further has been an absolute slog.

I have also been working on a "lite" model. Goals for that one being to be as 'braindead' as possible (very very little automation), as cheap as possible (least amount of expensive materials), self-powered, and stable at 5kg/s. It's close, just needs more fine tuning.

As a final teaser to what I mentioned at the end:

Spoiler

Spoiler