Another Oil Boiler without Volcanos (Mk I)

[QuQuasar]

I'm going to call this one the Oilboiloiler.

My current seed (99) doesn't have any volcanoes at all, so this oil boiler was designed with heat efficiency in mind, not throughput. It works best when your heat source is small or irregular.

It's also smaller than most boilers I've seen. I do like to keep things compact.

The overriding principle here is "never cool oil, never heat gas". The two vaccum seals work to ensure that happens. This design is still a work in progress and there's still space for some safeguards, but it's quite functional in it's current state.

It's powered by glass from the forge, although the metal refinery or kiln might also be potential heat sources. I haven't experimented too much.

 

 

Overlays:

Spoiler

 

How it works:

Cool oil enters the pre-heating chamber, where it exchanges heat with recently-boiled gas. Meanwhile, a small amount of oil/petroleum in the vaporization chamber awaits enough heat to turn into gas.

The moment the petroleum in the vaporization chamber turns to gas, the heating plate is disabled (the door opens, establishing a vacuum seal) and more oil/petrol is dropped in from above. This displaces the natural gas, allowing it to be door-pumped upwards into the pre-heating chamber. The lowest door then opens, re-establishing a vaccum seal to ensure the natural gas is not heated unnecessarily.

From there it's just a regular cooling corridor, using slush as a cooling source. The vaccum seal above the pre-heating chamber ensures the oil in the chamber cannot be cooled unnecessarily (yes, I'm aware the radiant pipes in the corridor defeat the purpose a bit here. Am still adjusting the design).

[Kabrute]

I would remove every alternate tempshift plate starting with the one against the wall, otherwise awesome

[AzeTheGreat]

Oh wow, that vacuum oil dropper is so much more compact than my solution, I'm definitely going to consider a design closer to this.

Do you have any numbers on how much natural gas you can output per kg glass?

And what's your oil/petroleum temperature when it's being dropped into the boiling chamber?

[Zarquan]

Two questions: 

How much natural gas do you boil per kg glass?

How easy would it be to build this such that the glass is extractable for use in the colony?

 

[QuQuasar]

8 minutes ago, AzeTheGreat said:

Oh wow, that vacuum oil dropper is so much more compact than my solution, I'm definitely going to consider a design closer to this.

Do you have any numbers on how much natural gas you can output per kg glass?

And what's your oil/petroleum temperature when it's being dropped into the boiling chamber?

I don't have any numbers at the moment: I keep making improvements and haven't quite reached the point of doing number testing. I'm only sharing it now because the central conceit (the vaporization chamber) worked really well.

The pre-heating chamber seems to hover around 300C, but it's been slowly increasing over time.

7 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

Two questions: 

How much natural gas do you boil per kg glass?

How easy would it be to build this such that the glass is extractable for use in the colony?

 

Can't tell you off hand. It's not a huge amount compared to what a volcano can output, but it should easily be power-positive.

Extracting the glass would require a fair amount of additional thought. I'd want to find a way not just to extract it, but to ensure it transferred as much of it's heat as possible into the oil first. Something involving shipping rails, presumably.

[AzeTheGreat]

1 minute ago, QuQuasar said:

Extracting the glass would require a fair amount of additional thought. I'd want to find a way not just to extract it, but to ensure it transferred as much of it's heat as possible into the oil first. Something involving shipping rails, presumably

You could use a system like I used in my design.

[Sevio]

@QuQuasar You could replace the hydrogen in your heat source room with steam. (in survival you could even prep it with maybe 40 kg of water first and not need a high pressure vent) It has a higher thermal conductivity and greater heat capacity than hydrogen so temperature should vary less when you add new glass to the room or when the heating plate is active.

Edit: Or if you're looking for pure thermal conductivity, phosphorus gas but that might be difficult to prep in survival.

[onlineous]

22 hours ago, Sevio said:

@QuQuasar You could replace the hydrogen in your heat source room with steam. (in survival you could even prep it with maybe 40 kg of water first and not need a high pressure vent) It has a higher thermal conductivity and greater heat capacity than hydrogen so temperature should vary less when you add new glass to the room or when the heating plate is active.

Edit: Or if you're looking for pure thermal conductivity, phosphorus gas but that might be difficult to prep in survival.

Why not get rid of the gas altogether and conduct the heat through a few tungsten tiles?

I think I would place the heat chamber to the left of the vaporisation chamber. On the right and below you place tungsten tiles and you could connect the corner with a thermal shift plate. One of the bigger upsides is that you can extract materials. Just create a vacuum chamber and your dupes can safely travel in by tube.

Above on the right you see the same system, but using a volcano.

Btw: be careful you don't get the preheating chamber to hot: the conversion from crude oil to petroleum breaks the pipes. Therefore I preheat only to 300 degrees using the automated heat exchangers. The downside is: you loose heat (I really would like the temp sensors to be able to measure higher temperatures than 300 degrees), the upside is a really stable system, that regulates itself as long as the cooling on the left doesn't overheat (and in my experience two electrolizers are enough to keep the water from the water sieve around 60 degrees.)

(The big amount of petroleum in the vaporisation chamber is due to extra input because I use extra oil at the bottom to cool down the magma.)

[Sevio]

@onlineous This boiler relies on the glass forge, which produces molten glass in a pipe. It has to be sent to a liquid vent to get the heat out, so there must be 2 tiles of gas there. (one where the glass can spawn, the other where the gas can be displaced to before it goes back to the glass chunks) Solid chunks of glass only transfer heat with the gas/liquid they are inside and at 25% iirc with a solid tile they're resting on.

So not using gas may be possible but it would require a drastic rework of the build since you have to conduct heat down from a single metal tile in a U-shape and back up to a hot plate for the oil.

[onlineous]

27 minutes ago, Sevio said:

@onlineous This boiler relies on the glass forge, which produces molten glass in a pipe. It has to be sent to a liquid vent to get the heat out, so there must be 2 tiles of gas there. (one where the glass can spawn, the other where the gas can be displaced to before it goes back to the glass chunks) Solid chunks of glass only transfer heat with the gas/liquid they are inside and at 25% iirc with a solid tile they're resting on.

So not using gas may be possible but it would require a drastic rework of the build since you have to conduct heat down from a single metal tile in a U-shape and back up to a hot plate for the oil.

I actually don't know completely how the conduction of liquid or solid glass on a tungsten tile works. The upside is that a tungsten tile has really high heat transfer, especially if you would use a thermal shift plate to connect the corner. I noticed that ingneous rock (former magma) on one of my tungsten tiles exchanges heat efficiently enough to become the same temperature as the tungsten tile laying underneath in a time that could be quite acceptable for this purpose.

[Carnis]

The bottom doorpump is creative. I would add 2 walltiles around the lowest door on The top doorpump. The way IT now Works is, when The door closes, gas has 4 ways to go, so only 25% goes up. A normal 2way doorpump would be twice as effective. The gas would only have 2 ways to displace to.

[Sevio]

This build in the original post is a bit of a mouthful to pronounce, maybe we should nickname it the Olliebollie.

[QuQuasar]

On 7/7/2018 at 11:01 PM, Sevio said:

Edit: Or if you're looking for pure thermal conductivity, phosphorus gas but that might be difficult to prep in survival.

That would probably be easier than steam, actually. Use a storage compactor to drop a couple tons of phosphorus in at the start of the build. Once the glass melts it, it will displace whatever gas is already in the chamber (you’d need a small amount of gas to allow it to exchange heat with the glass). Wouldn’t even have to build any piping.

10 hours ago, onlineous said:

One of the bigger upsides is that you can extract materials. Just create a vacuum chamber and your dupes can safely travel in by tube.

There is a way to extract the glass from this design without any changes: dupes can't do it anymore, but an autosweeper in the right place can still pick stuff up through the bottom left corner. Extracting the glass still means extracting the heat, however, which reduces the efficiency of the design significantly.
    
I can offset this impact a bit by running the shipping conveyers through the pre-heating chambers, but it's still an impact, and this means hotter pre-heating chambers, which forces me to get rid of the radiant pipes.

I will provide a manual switch for it as part of the Mk II design.

10 hours ago, onlineous said:

Btw: be careful you don't get the preheating chamber to hot: the conversion from crude oil to petroleum breaks the pipes. 

In theory, the pre-heating chamber should balance itself out naturally between the incoming 80 C oil and the outgoing 540 C gas, so it should have an temperature somewhere between 300 and 400 C. The small amount of petroleum in the chamber in the screenshot is from brief moments of overheating as the oil is dropped into the vaporization chamber.

Even when I spam glass production with debug mode, I've been unable to break the radiant pipes, so that seems to work as theorized. It might be more of a problem with a volcano.

I'm still working on the Mk II boiler, which I plan to give two or maybe three pre-heating chambers to improve heat recycling. The hottest chambers won't have radiant pipes in them for this reason.

 

10 hours ago, onlineous said:

Therefore I preheat only to 300 degrees using the automated heat exchangers. The downside is: you loose heat

Losing heat is not an option for me. Heat is expensive to produce, requiring a lot of dupe time and power (you folks with volcanoes don't know how good you've got it), so I have no choice but to recycle it as efficiently as possible.

 

6 hours ago, Carnis said:

The bottom doorpump is creative. I would add 2 walltiles around the lowest door on The top doorpump. The way IT now Works is, when The door closes, gas has 4 ways to go, so only 25% goes up. A normal 2way doorpump would be twice as effective. The gas would only have 2 ways to displace to.

Fair assessment. That's not actually a door pump, though: it's a vaccum seal. The gas isn't being pumped out, it's just being allowed to leave in batches so that the recently boiled gas has time to equilibriate with the incoming oil.

 

1 hour ago, Sevio said:

This build in the original post is a bit of a mouthful to pronounce, maybe we should nickname it the Olliebollie.

That's not fair, you know I'm a sucker for stupid names. Olliebollie it is!

[onlineous]

11 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

Losing heat is not an option for me. Heat is expensive to produce, requiring a lot of dupe time and power (you folks with volcanoes don't know how good you've got it), so I have no choice but to recycle it as efficiently as possible.

If you don't care too much about making the system bigger you might be able to capture the best of both worlds combining the heat exchanging tower of Neotuck with the heat exchanger rooms (upto 300 degrees) in my system. I would not fill the heat exchanger rooms with petroleum though (as I did) but with some kind of gas with around 20 kg's of pressure. That makes them a bit less powerful, but it doesn't include heating up 800 kg's of petroleum per tile of heat exchanging chamber.

(yes the vaporisation room is way too full in this picture: that's because I pumped in a lot of hot oil from the bottom of the map. This is near the end of the dormancy, and I mined out the gold to be used in my base).

[Carnis]

15 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

There is a way to extract the glass from this design without any changes: dupes can't do it anymore, but an autosweeper in the right place can still pick stuff up through the bottom left corner. Extracting the glass still means extracting the heat, however, which reduces the efficiency of the design significantly.

Over Time, The mass of The remaining glass will start to steal heat, so you should collect it.

In aze's boiler, when I started looping sub 400C igneous The throughput suffers in a big way.

So you should incorporate some sweepers.

How does olliebollie compare to molten slicksters+petgen?

[DaveSatx]

great idea.   call it the Glass Oil Boiler (GOB)

[Kabrute]

Glass Oil Liquid Diffusion Energetic Nebulizer
or the Golden machine

[caffeinated21]

If you don’t care as much about space, you can extract the glass without giving up heat: build two, and alternate their use by some period. While each one is ‘dormant’ let the glass drop below it’s usable temperature for boiling, then sweep it up to preheat your next batch of oil 

[Sevio]

9 hours ago, caffeinated21 said:

If you don’t care as much about space, you can extract the glass without giving up heat: build two, and alternate their use by some period. While each one is ‘dormant’ let the glass drop below it’s usable temperature for boiling, then sweep it up to preheat your next batch of oil 

If you went with this idea, you would need two vaporization chambers but you could probably share the preheating chamber? Maybe stick the retrieved glass in there as well on a conveyor rail slowly going out of the build? I'm not sure how you would rate limit the glass so it has enough time to give off its heat to the preheater, maybe with a large conveyor snake and an automated autosweeper at the end that turns on only occasionally

[BlueLance]

On 07/07/2018 at 2:01 PM, Sevio said:

Edit: Or if you're looking for pure thermal conductivity, phosphorus gas but that might be difficult to prep in survival.

Could you please elaborate on that, is it better than hydrogen? Also it is extremely easy to get in survival, you can also melt phosphorite, and let it cool down, then you get solid phosphorous which has such a low melting point its ridiculous.

On 08/07/2018 at 11:13 PM, QuQuasar said:

Losing heat is not an option for me. Heat is expensive to produce, requiring a lot of dupe time and power (you folks with volcanoes don't know how good you've got it), so I have no choice but to recycle it as efficiently as possible.

regardless of whether there is a volcano, builds like this are extremely rare and very very well done, requiring a lot of knowledge and patience, Making use of every single bit of heat has the added bonus of it not bleeding into the world!

I really like the design.... i have volcanoes but I am using them for steam not oil. My issue is spending too much energy cooling something more than I have to.

Edit - Example is the steam comes out of the turbine, I only need to cool it enough to condense it but I am constantly setting my system to keep the cooling liquid at 60 or less.

[Sevio]

1 hour ago, BlueLance said:

Could you please elaborate on that, is it better than hydrogen? Also it is extremely easy to get in survival, you can also melt phosphorite, and let it cool down, then you get solid phosphorous which has such a low melting point its ridiculous.

Hydrogen has a conductivity of 0.168 and is well known as the ideal of the "traditional gases" for transferring heat because it has both the highest capacity and conductivity. At higher temperatures, Steam actually does better at both (0.184 conductivity and higher capacity than hydrogen) but when temperatures go even higher, Phosphorus gas has a conductivity of 0.236, better than hydrogen and steam, albeit a lower capacity. So that makes it the ideal gas for conducting the heat from the tile with the glass chunks to the vaporization chamber.

[BlueLance]

@SevioSo the higher the conductivity the easier it transfers temperatures? (I know that if something is conductive it transfers etc)

How does the capacity work though?

[Sevio]

@BlueLance Heat capacity defines how much energy (in Joules) it takes to heat 1 gram of a material by 1 Kelvin. The more heat capacity something has, the slower it changes temperature. If two materials of the same mass have 100 kelvin difference in temperature but one of them has 3 times the heat capacity, then if we waited for them to equalize the high capacity material will only change 25 Kelvins while the low capacity material changes 75 Kelvins.

High capacity materials can be helpful for liquids or gases that are used in pipes to transport heat (each packet in the pipe is worth more) or storage tanks that need to buffer temperature fluctuations. Low capacity materials are useful for things that you want to react quickly to temperature changes.

[BlueLance]

So if i wanted to cool a machine down, I would want to use a gas/liquid which has a high heat capacity, because it would be able to absorb 50c degrees (Just a random number) from the machine but maybe only heat itself up by 5 degrees?

So does the conductivity increase the amount of time this happens in? Sorry for picking your brains but I really want to understand this.

[Sevio]

@BlueLance In most cases the heat capacity isn't too important because there are usually things around that something that share in the heating/cooling.  The main reason to use liquids to cool things like thermo regulators and batteries is because they conduct heat so much better than gases.

If you are absorbing the heat of a thermo regulator or an aquatuner, or using active cooling with a thermo sensor and a liquid shutoff, it helps to have more heat capacity so the temperature doesn't fluctuate so wildly in a room. That capacity can come from putting liquid on the ground but also from tempshift plates (800 kg of material in the background adds a lot of heat capacity, even if solids don't usually have as much heat capacity as liquids!)

The downside of making a room very high heat capacity is that it can take a long time (and possibly a lot of power from your active cooling system) to get it to the temperature you want.