Superheating - make steam, petroleum or even magma!

[Rattja]

So a few days ago I decided to pick the game back up and play around with all the new stuff they added, and since I know a bunch of ways to cool things down, I decided to look into how I could heat things up in an attempt to find a good way to make petroleum.

At the time I could not find anything on this, as most people either used magma, the oil refinery or simply let things overheat and rebuild them when they break. I wanted to find a better way, and after a ton of experimenting I think I found one. I realize it's not the first time a design like this has been made, as I saw one based on the same trick while looking around some more today. However the point of this is to highlight the potential of this thing, as it is...well.. a bit insane and I haven't seen anyone build it quite like this.

So I present to you the basic design idea here:

Note the temperature, that is where it seems to cap off. This is after letting the tepidizer just run for a few cycles. 

The nice thing with this one is that it is entirely possible to build this in a normal game, as all you need is some kind of liquid for cooling, a small portion naphtha (just to block the liquid so any amount will do) and clorine (not too much, around 1k seems to work well).

This thing will never overheat, never break, and the only thing you need to watch out for is to not make too much heat cause if you use something like wirebridges to pull heat out of it, they can and will melt if not careful. If that happens they can simply be replaced from the outside, keeping your dupes nice and safe.

So how does it work?

The room at the top is just cold petroleum, and it's only function is to cool down the liquid under it through the metal tiles. There is no need to use petroleum though, any liquid will work, but the colder it can get the better it is. Petroleum is rather nice for this but oil, water, or anything else will work just don't use naphtha... The idea here is to exploit the heat transfer thing that liquid does, and it then cools down the tepidizer. At the bottom there is a bit of naphtha to keep it from spilling into the chlorine area.

You don't need the room at the top, the only important thing is to somehow cool down this bit of liquid

That top part should be as small as possible, the less liquid you have there the more efficient it will be. I would not advice going much over 1kg

Also notice that even though the tepidizer is running with full power, and has been doing so for several cycles, it is still pure blue cool despite having chlorine at 50 000 C* + at the other end. That is because chlorine just plane sucks when it comes to heat transfer and the liquid at the other end cools it down far more than it could ever heat it up. You CAN use other gases, but it will make it a LOT slower. If anything you might want to use something like CO2 though, as it can make it a bit easier to control.

Also, just to give you an idea of how compact you can make it and what you can use it for, here is my fully automated petroleum maker. All it takes to run it is a tepidizer and a pump with a 1100g valve, thats it. Doesn't overheat, doesn't break and no silly cycling needed. Only requires about 1kw of power as well, as the pump hardly runs at all.

As a final note, I have seen it sometimes produce rockgas and magma where the chlorine is, but not quite sure where it comes from or what is causing it. I suspect it is whenever I use something else than abyssalite for walls but haven't looked too much into it. So you could have a larger room under it with chlorine and produce magma out of nothing, although I don't really see a use for that.

So thoughts?

[Saturnus]

I think most people are just waiting for it to be repatched, really. The superheating gases with a tepidizer was around for a long time but finally got patched a few months ago. Then with oil upgrade it came back, so I think many aren't too bothered experimenting with it for a survival game build and relying on it as they figure it will soon be patched whereas magma systems aren't likely to go any at any time

[The Flying Fox]

I too have been having a bit of fun with this myself over the last few days.  Here is my current proto refinery setup.

 

The stuff on the far right doesn't do anything for the current build, I was just messing around with cooling the natural gas with the wheezeworts, but it wasn't quite good enough.

 

The tepidizer is setup in a similar way with a naphtha lock with 10K/gs of the stuff.  It has low thermal conductivity so it also resists heat from moving out of the right side of the chamber and into the left cooling side.  Then, there's a pocket of crude oil because it has high conductivity to move the heat away from the machine and into the polluted water coolant.  The current pocket of gas I've been using is O2 and CO2, but I suppose with a naphtha lock, I could just use CO2 for the double air pocket.  I found chlorine to be quite.. reactive with metal anything once it reaches those extremely high temperatures and it tends to convert to metal chunks.  xD

 

As for the actual refinery room, I filled it with chlorine due to its very low conductivity and because it's a heavier gas.  Crude is dripped into the pocket of the hot plate and quickly vaporized into natural gas where it then floats to the top of the chamber and gets away from the hot plate, reducing the amount of extra heat the natural gas picks up with chlorine preventing very little of the heat to leak into the room.  There is also a mechanized door that opens and closes depending upon if the hydro-switch detects a build up of liquid into the pocket.  (Meaning the hot plate no longer has enough heat to vaporize the oil)  And it closes, passing more heat to the hot plate.  (Apparently mechanized airlocks no longer conduct heat when open.)  This further reduces the amount of wasted heat going into the natural gas.  Currently, the valve feeding the crude into the refinery room is set for 120G/s but I'm sure it could handle much more.

 

I'm sure it could be further improved by possibly using the incoming crude oil to 'cool' the natural gas, but I haven't gotten to that point just yet.

The Lab.sav

[Rattja]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

I think most people are just waiting for it to be repatched, really. The superheating gases with a tepidizer was around for a long time but finally got patched a few months ago. Then with oil upgrade it came back, so I think many aren't too bothered experimenting with it for a survival game build and relying on it as they figure it will soon be patched whereas magma systems aren't likely to go any at any time

I kinda expect it to get patched at some point yeah, cause this is a bit silly and uses several exploits. Patching any of those would most likely break it. But I would like there to still be a way to actually be able to heat things up to some decent temps for creating steam or petrol.

Anyways, for now this is a very simple and effective way to do it, so even if you were to put this up in a base its not a huge investment so not a huge deal when it stops working.

[Lifegrow]

3 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I think most people are just waiting for it to be repatched, really. The superheating gases with a tepidizer was around for a long time but finally got patched a few months ago. Then with oil upgrade it came back, so I think many aren't too bothered experimenting with it for a survival game build and relying on it as they figure it will soon be patched whereas magma systems aren't likely to go any at any time

This. Pointless worrying about systems built on bugs that have already been shown to be remove-worthy  

Most of my current tinkerings have been revolving around magma truth be told.

[Moggles]

36 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

This. Pointless worrying about systems built on bugs that have already been shown to be remove-worthy  

Most of my current tinkerings have been revolving around magma truth be told.

I share the sentiments of you and @Saturnus. I played with tepidizer overheating for an hour a few updates back and decided it was just broken. I have developed an assumption that it is a bug that will eventually be fixed (on a tangent I feel the same way about naptha physics, that **** is so dumb). Anyway opinions aside if any of the weirdest game mechanics make it out of early access I will happily start abusing them with mild disappointment.

[Heinermann]

What about using a massive amount of refrigerators made of Abysalite? That doesn't appear to have an upper bound on heating either, although it is a lot slower.

[UristMcKerman]

So this way is the most power/petroleum efficient and is still too bad for running petroleum generators?

[The Flying Fox]

The design could be tweaked, I'm sure, to allow more petroleum production.  Although, it seems silly to me to use it for petroleum generators when you could instead further vaporize it into natural gas to run more efficient natural gas generators.  I suppose petroleum generators are more space efficient though.  The design I posted can clearly handle the amount of natural gas needed for 2+ natural gas generators and have extra heat to spare for other things.

 

Also, I too agree that it's fairly broken that the tepidizer can super-heat gases around it, but, given the design of the machine and the physics in ONI, it might be difficult to solve unless they detect that the machine is submerged from all it's tiles.  That, at least, would be an easy fix, but maybe they're leaving it bugged for now until they add something later.  As it is, now you can make tons of sand if you want and the metal refinery is much smaller then anything that could be created to replace it using the tepidizer.  

[Rattja]

I guess it could be tweaked, as you could for example pull 2x bridges out up or down and have more surface area. The one I posted above produces 1100g/s worth of petrol. Played around a little and seems like just reducing the valve to 1000 would make it create natural gas at 1kg/s, but you would need to then cycle the tepidizer slightly to prevent it from melting the bridge.

Haven't looked too much into it yet but if you want to convert it into power, you should be then able to run up to 16 natural gas generators off this, which is more power than you'd ever need. With it's 3000g/s a petroleum generator isn't even gonna run constantly and would be pointless to use as it barely covers the energy cost of making the petrol in the first place. Unless I am missing something here, haven't had time to actually test it.

I agree that it is a buggy thing that could be fixed at any point, and somewhere down the road most likely will. But we don't know when and currently this is the only known way to heat something up yourself to such high temperatures without constantly painting in new things through the debug menu. So if not for a normal game it can be used to test system as a "what if we had a way" kinda thing. So as long as it's in the game I'll use it and see what I can create with a reliable heat source.

I for one find this sort of testing interesting, and wouldn't write it off just because its based on a bug/exploit. You might end up discovering weird things, like that you can create magma out of nothing if you somehow get the temp high enough. Not useful but it's a thing.