Volcano powered petroleum refinery

[wachunga]

First off this is rather unnecessary, but the engineering challenge was fun. Maybe you want a massive amount of petroleum. This was built in game, not difficult with some forethought and planning. 

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The basic idea is to use a counter flow heat exchanger to heat incoming crude and cool outgoing petroleum. Magma provides the final bit of heating to convert the crude to petroleum. Heat needed from the volcano is minimized and the petroleum is cooled to a pumpable temperature.

Magma drops into a chamber with a layer of molten gold. It will sit on top of the gold until it freezes whereupon it drops into the gold layer as a pile of igneous rock. These piles will continue to provide heat to the gold and the rest of the contraption. This was done to avoid solid tiles of igneous rock building up and blocking the works. The gold will solidify and remelt as temperatures fluctuate throughout the eruption cycle.

Diamond shift plates, metal (first tungsten then iron) tiles, and a wolframite door transfer heat to the petroleum conversion point. A temperature of ~410 is maintained to avoid wasting heat and creating natural gas. There is a previous post about this automation here. As crude is converted, a column of petroleum rises and spills into the heat exchanger.

In the exchanger, pipes are radiant gold, tiles don't matter and are insulated abyssalite for testing purposes. It takes longer to reach equilibrium with tiles soaking heat. Occasionally (usually after a reload) liquid will adhere at each drop instead of dripping. This reduces the efficiency of the heat exchange and is to be avoided. Automation shuts everything down until the adhesion has cleared. Petroleum drops into a holding tank off screen.

Incoming crude is conditioned to a set temperature (within about 2 degrees) with the stuff on the far right. A loop of cold polluted water is linked to the incoming crude as necessary with automated doors. As the polluted water gets too hot, it exits the loop to be cooled by an aquatuner off screen. Radiant iron pipes and gold amalgam doors are used in this section for their relatively lower conductivity to improve precision.

The couple atmo sensors simply provide a manual override. Pitcher pumps were used to initially bring everything up to temperature with magma from below (the ladder leading down). Vacuum everywhere to enable dupe access.

Crude gets heated from ~85C to ~380C. Petroleum gets cooled from ~410C to ~115C. Adding more layers to the exchanger improve these numbers but with a strong diminishing return. My 74.4kg/s, 50s every 6042s volcano is more than sufficient to convert a constant 10kg/s of petroleum. The next task is to dispose of the ~1000C igneous rock that accumulates. It's like spent nuclear fuel.

 

[Kabrute]

if you are already taking the steps to cook the crude to petrol, why not go a full step further and cook it to natural gas?

[wachunga]

Because I already have 2 natural gas geysers overpressurizing. I don't need the gas and besides making natural gas is easy and not an interesting challenge.

 

[Lifegrow]

Ooooh @wachunga I haven't revisited this idea since the radiant pipes were introduced...

You've piqued my interest again, you swine!

Would be nice if you included a working save file for us to have a tinker with.x

[wachunga]

It's way less obnoxious than before the update. I think I'm going to look at steam generators deleting the heat from all the igneous rocks as my next project. They are wonky enough to be challenging with room for clever solutions to stupid problems.

Added a save which I missed the request for initially. Don't judge my base! It's been mostly ignored for 50 cycles at least.

 

petro test.sav