Magma-powered petroleum and steam

[KittenIsAGeek]

On this particular run, I decided to challenge myself and not use a water sieve for my fresh water.  This meant that I would need to boil polluted water for all my base needs.  Using a building such as the Thermo Aquatuner worked -- but it was too slow to keep up with my base needs and used a hella lotta power.  The steam generated using buildings was not hot enough to run the steam turbine, and cooling the steam back down to a usable temperature was somewhat of a problem.

So.. why not use magma?  That worked like a charm -- and the problem became one of heat management.  With some work I found some methods for cooling the steam down that worked and I found some methods that didn't.  Radiant pipes filled with 80c oil straight from the well? Nope.  Doesn't work.  The steam quickly overwhelms the pipes.  Another problem I had to work through was that condensing the steam had a tendency to cool the turbine as well.  Putting the condenser to the side helped considerably.

And then I thought.. why not make petroleum as well?  I've made natural gas using magma, but petroleum is a bit trickier.  Turns out that adding the petroleum to the mix stabilized the temperatures.  And so, after far too much time spent experimenting, I finally got a model that works.  The steam turbine has been running continually for six cycles.  It produces 2050g/s of clean water and 6kg/s of petroleum -- both at usable temperatures.  It is cooled by the output of one slush geyser (average rate of 1919g/s over 102.1 cycles).

I have to go to work now, but I'll post details after work if anyone is interested.

[Khullag]

another debug mode build... cool job though with stabilizing turbine

[Denisetwin]

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I have to go to work now, but I'll post details after work if anyone is interested.

interested! what a cool looking build!  Congrats on the ingenuity!

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

22 minutes ago, Khullag said:

another debug mode build... cool job though with stabilizing turbine

I started off without the debug, but after building and changing things for 400 cycles (which gets frustrating) I turned on the sandbox and started over.  I am fairly confident I can build it in live mode now that I know what works.

[Sevio]

I'd be interested in a closer explanation.

I also have some questions about specific parts of the build:

• Can you tell us what the purpose is of the dead-end receptacles in a huge tank of petroleum?
• Why are there liquid shutoffs in a completely enclosed room of polluted water? It looks like that might be somewhat inconvenient to build in survival and the shutoffs shouldn't need cooling.
• What's the purpose of the hot plate under the right side of the steam turbine?
• Since this turbine doesn't use steam reheating and the steam is immediately condensed after it is used, it looks like it will demand quite a bit of heat from the magma. How fast do you think it would solidify and exhaust the heat from that lake and how do you plan to get more heat to the machine to keep it running?

[KittenIsAGeek]

I'm still at work, so can't look at my details yet, but I can answer some of your questions, @Sevio.

1. The dead-end rooms for things like petroleum and water are because this was done sandbox mode as a proof of concept. It isn't hooked up to anything. Yet.  However, I wanted to keep an idea on the ratios of what was being produced.
2. The liquid shutoff and valve are in their own little room with polluted water because no reason.  I'll move them later.  Basically they were in vacuum and overheating, so I used the fill tool to toss some PW in there and solved the problem.  But I can probably place them better when I rebuild it in live mode.
3. The hot plate under the right side of the steam turbine has a couple of uses.  First, it helps normalize the petroleum temperatures.  Without it, variations in liquid densities could sometimes have a bit of crude or petrol flashing into natural gas and creating a problem for the whole system.  It ALSO helps maintain the temperature of the steam turbine.  Before I put it there, sometimes it would lose temperature and shut down.
4. The demands are minimal once things get going.  The door to the magma doesn't stay shut very long.  I haven't done the math yet, but I think I could probably run it NP off a metal or minor volcano.  Most of the heat is re-distributed, not completely lost.

[Neotuck]

how quickly does the magma lose heat?

[KittenIsAGeek]

And now for the in-depth analysis of this build... where to start... 

I suppose first I should outline my goals for the build.

1. Use magma as a heat source.
2. Purify water by boiling as a substitute for using the water sieve.
3. Make petroleum (and not natural gas) by boiling crude oil.
4. Produce electricity as a byproduct.

 

Using magma as a heat source.

Spoiler

There are several methods of doing this.  Its been done by many people in many different ways.  Here's my method:

Spoiler

I considered while setting this up that heat rises and cold settles.  ONI physics reflects this -- heat transfer is more efficient when the source of heat is underneath the place that needs to be heated.  Second, it is very important to use high-temperature materials when building against magma.  Your door should be wolframite, the metal tiles need to be tungsten or steel.  The power and automation wires MUST also be steel or tungsten.  These items will be getting very hot and other materials will not hold up.

Spoiler

Copper and gold both melt at 1084c,  If you build a door or automation wires using copper or gold, they WILL melt and cause you all sorts of issues. 

Also, in this area, you definitely want to use insulated abysallite tiles for a couple of reasons: First, abysallite is one of the toughest materials in the game.  If you're building this without the sandbox, you're going to be one tile away from magma for this area.  Ceramic will not hold up -- trust me, I know from experience.  Second, you don't want any of the magma heat going anywhere except where you want it.  If the heat 'leaks' out, your magma will cool faster than necessary and you'll have problems in the rest of your design.

It isn't necessary to copy my design exactly.  I've had equally good results using two doors, or metal directly against both sides of the door with no tempshift plates.  I just thought this looked nice in this particular case.

 

I'm going to skip to the third point here, since boiling crude into petro is the next step in my finished design.  

Spoiler

I tried several different techniques.  @The Flying Fox had a great method that worked splendidly which I copied shamelessly from here:

 

Spoiler

The idea is that the process is far too hot to use a Thermo Sensor, but fortunately crude oil is more dense than petroleum.  The lowest hydro sensor is set for "below 800Kg."  This controls the flow of crude oil into your boiler.  If the crude builds up on the sensor, then something is wrong with your heat source and it turns off the valve and stops the flow.  The top hydro sensor detects petroleum.  It is set to "below 700Kg." There are two cases that will cause the door to close, heating up the metal tile.  The best case is that there's not quite enough heat in the system and the crude isn't changing into petroleum fast enough, which allows the petroleum to build up on the sensor.  As soon as the crude starts boiling again, the door will open and heat will no longer be applied to the metal tile.

There is a potential problem at this point, however, which must be considered while using dupes to make this part of the system.  If any gas (natural gas from too much heat, CO2 from dupes exhaling, etc) gets into the petroleum flow, it will cause a blockage and petroleum will back up.  This triggers a 'false positive' on the petroleum sensor, making the door close as if there was not enough heat in the system.  With the door closed, even MORE heat will flow in, flashing petroleum to natural gas.  Because of the temperatures, this is very difficult to fix without the toolbox.  It is important then to make absolutely certain when you build it that there is a vacuum in the petroleum flow path.

It is also beneficial to heat up the crude oil on the way to the boiler.  This has the advantage of also cooling down the petroleum.

Spoiler

When I re-build this, the crude/petro heat exchange path will be a little larger.  Right now the crude is only warming up to about 180c and for the best efficiency it should be close to 300c. At the other end of the line, temperatures are where they should be.  The crude reservoir is 84c, and where the petro is being pumped out, the temperature is 84c.  Perfect!

OK, so we've got heat and we've got a system to turn crude oil into petroleum.  Now for boiling the water and (bonus!) producing electricity.

Spoiler

During my attempts at building in survival, I learned that while boiling Polluted water into steam is easy, it is difficult to do cleanly and consistently.  Some problems I encountered were off-gassing into PO2, the temperature dropping too low to boil the water, and other such minor nuisances.

Spoiler

The important parts of this system are:

• The hot plates on the right side of the steam turbine help to normalize temperatures.  A property of the turbine is that they (basically) turn heat into electricity.  Therefore heat needs to constantly be transferred into the system.  Unless you're boiling your water at 300c, you're going to eventually end up with steam that is too cool to keep the process going unless you add heat to the system.  In this case, we can both cool the petroleum reaction down and heat the turbine up.  Until I figured this out, the generator would not run consistently AND I would occasionally get natural gas build ups.  The metal tile directly over the crude vent is around 320c.  The next one to the left is 300c and the final one is 295c. The petroleum is coming out at around 350c, so the turbine has a huge impact in cooling the system down.
• The hot plate under the water boiler.  Again, we're pulling heat out of the petroleum to do the boiling.  This is waste heat that was introduced by boiling crude into petroleum.  It is important to note that the ONLY heat removed from the magma is that used to boil the crude into petroleum.  
• The pool of petroleum partially covering the PW vent.  There are several reasons that I ended up going with petroleum -- it helps to normalize temperatures and eliminates off-gassing.  In my first build, the vent was above the petroleum, but I kept getting PO2 blocking the flow of steam.
• The airflow tiles as a wall and the vacuum gap with temp shift plates on the left side.  I tried many different methods of condensing the steam, and this is the only method that worked reliably and consistently.  Radiant pipes could not keep up with the flow of steam.  The airflow tiles aren't strictly necessary, but they do prevent water from falling back onto the steam generator and cooling the system down. I also tried condensing steam above the generator, and that had the problem of blocking the flow, resulting in pressure problems preventing the turbine from running.

The polluted water reservoir is also very important and has two functions.  Cold water from my slush geyser is pumped in and keeps the reservoir completely full on a continual basis.  As the steam condenses, it transfers heat from the steam into the polluted water.  PW has a higher specific heat than pure water, so this works out well.  Ideally the water will be close to the boiling point before it is piped in under the steam turbine. 

My current set-up is not ideal yet and needs some more refinement.  At present, the top left reservoir is simulating my slush geyser.  The top right is the steam condenser where the slush geyser water gets piped.

Spoiler

The bottom reservoir is staging for the final run to the boiler.  The petroleum is piped through radiant to transfer some additional heat into the water.  This will eventually max out at about 85c.  After two cycles it is only at about 50c.  After eight cycles it was holding around 80c.  Because of this, the boiling rate (at 50c) is limited around 2500g/s.  The closer to the boiling point the water is when it drops onto the hot plate, the more water you can boil.  At 80c it would process 3kg/s before the boiler would lose temp.  The flow control valve is currently set to 2055g/s.  This is an important setting.

Spoiler

With one opening on the steam turbine, about 2000g/s of steam will flow through the system.  I found (by trial and error) that at 2050g/s, steam would sometimes drop below the threshold to run the turbine and it would stop long enough for the pressure to build up again.  At 2060g/s, steam would eventually build up to unreasonable levels.  The pressure is always fluctuating, but 2055g/s seems to be optimum.  If the circled block is removed, the balance point seems to be about 4105g/s.  HOWEVER, because of the temperature differential between the hot reservoir and the boiling point, my current design will not handle a rate that high.

The thermo sensor controls the pump and is set to "above 160c."  This ensures that the PW boils away almost immediately.  If the crude boiler stops and temperatures drop, we don't want to get PO2 into the system, so the pump turns off.  

The auto sweeper and conveyor loader simply remove the dirt that results from the reaction.  Currently I'm not doing anything with the dirt.  However, it is hot (157c at the receptacle) so when I do my re-design, I'll ship it through my hot water pool to recover some of the heat.  I put the sweeper on a clock sensor so that it only runs for a short period of time.  Otherwise it would run continually and waste the power produced by the turbine.

And the byproduct: Electric power!  There are currently 5 pumps (6 when I pump out the clean water), one shutoff valve, one sweeper, one conveyor loader, and one door for a maximum potential load of 1690 watts.  Eyeballing the numbers it looks like the average draw is 480 watts.  I can do the math, but I don't really feel the need to calculate EXACTLY what the average draw is.  The turbine generates 2000 watts, so even after I add an oil well to the system and everything ran at once, I would still gain electric power.  Since the fuel (heat) is a potentially renewable resource (volcano, etc), this could probably run continually.  

One other note: Since I am currently processing 6000g/s of crude, it will take two oil wells to sustain this system.  Each oil well requires 1000g/s of clean water.  Currently I'm only producing 2055g/s of clean water, so in the very long term, I will only break even on the water.  I need to do more math, but I think that if I can recover more heat and bring the 'hot' pool into the 100c or 105c range, I could probably process 4000g/s which would keep the turbine running continually and provide more clean water than necessary to keep the system running indefinitely.  That said.. after 10 cycles, I barely touched the crude pool I stuck my pump in.

1 hour ago, Neotuck said:

how quickly does the magma lose heat?

Not very.  The only heat "taken" from the magma is used to boil the crude into petroleum.  With a small redesign to bring the crude closer to boiling point (taking more heat from the petroleum) before hitting the hot plate, it could become extremely efficient, as seen in crude --> nat gas boilers shown in several posts on this forum.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Addendum:  I added some logic for shutting the system down.  For example, lets say your petroleum reservoir is full or you don't need any more clean water.

Spoiler

The switch connects to both the water pump and the heat source (magma).  For the pump, I used an AND gate. Pretty straight forward.  The door needs the output from the switch to be inverted and the use of a XOR OR gate -- basically if the switch is off, we want the door to stay open no matter what the sensor says.

*** EDIT *** Note that the picture is wrong. Needs to be an OR gate, and not an XOR gate.

It works very nicely.  It takes a bit of time to get going again and the only drawback is that everything runs hot after restart.  

[Sevio]

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Currently I'm only producing 2055g/s of clean water, so in the very long term, I will only break even on the water.

Your system is producing enough petroleum to run 3 petroleum generators continuously so if you count that you will not only have an even bigger energy surplus but also 2250 g/s of polluted water that you can boil using an aquatuner. (since you said sieves are off-limits) The cooling from that aquatuner could potentially supplement your slush geyser and/or counter any heat from your petroleum generators.

Or instead of aquatuner boiling, you might even be able to work in an additional water boiling step at a lower temperature that bypasses the steam turbine and goes straight into your clean water reservoir after being condensed.

Edit: I did some re-reading and it looks like you already have some ideas for how to increase the boiling rate, also that 2250 g/s of course isn't really much of a surplus since the boiler takes 2055 g/s polluted water to run.

[Oozinator]

You miss a pump in the condensed water section..

[KittenIsAGeek]

Yeah, I've been re-working things a bit.  I'm now stable at 4112kg/s of polluted water, but shutdown/restart breaks things, so I'm still tweaking it a bit.  At the moment my stable stats are as follows:

• about 4100 kg/s of clean water at 50c
• 6kg/s of petroleum at 54c.
• dirt is reaching storage at 42c, 
• Boiling chamber is stabilizing around 170c.

My steam turbine still runs continually.  I put a wall of insulated abyssalite tiles around some magma and it took 5 cycles to solidify 16 tiles of magma.  I still need to lengthen my crude/petro heat exchange loop -- crude is going into the boiler only at 180c.

9 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

You miss a pump in the condensed water section..

Yeah, its in the math, it just isn't built yet.  This is a proof of concept, not a production item -- I don't have anywhere to send the clean water. Yet.

Similarly, it isn't connected to my slush geyser yet. Though, at 4.1kg/s of PW, I'll need a second slush geyser to keep up.  Or cool the output from the petro generators.  

 

 

[Carnis]

I bet this won't run for very long in live mode.

Have you done any approximations of magma consumption?

There is a major heat deleter of Steam turbine included and also polluted water itself has 6x the heat capacity of magma.

*

This also lacks the energy that is created on crude - NG conversion.

[Sevio]

@Carnis Actually I'm wondering now if the way this steam turbine is built with the hot plate under its right ports, it is (or could be) acting as a heat generator. I remember seeing people using tempshifted neutronium to trick the steam generator into thinking it is hot enough. The hot plate, when it's at petroleum conversion temperature should act the same. When that happens, the turbine will accept any temperature steam and output it at 425 K (151.85 C).

So if the boiled polluted water is steamed at less than 151.85 C, it will become hotter when it goes through the steam generator.

[Carnis]

21 minutes ago, Sevio said:

@Carnis Actually I'm wondering now if the way this steam turbine is built with the hot plate under its right ports, it is (or could be) acting as a heat generator. I remember seeing people using tempshifted neutronium to trick the steam generator into thinking it is hot enough. The hot plate, when it's at petroleum conversion temperature should act the same. When that happens, the turbine will accept any temperature steam and output it at 425 K (151.85 C).

So if the boiled polluted water is steamed at less than 151.85 C, it will become hotter when it goes through the steam generator.

You could be right.

Ive only Limited experience with ST.

Still 15 tiles of 1600kg magma sounds like a lot of heat in 5cycles.

Not what an iron volcano could produce.

[Sevio]

34 minutes ago, Carnis said:

Still 15 tiles of 1600kg magma sounds like a lot of heat in 5cycles.

That's a lot yeah, although it could still be used all the way down to around 600 C probably before you have to look for another heat source.

Redesigning it to pump the magma and limiting flow to 1 kg/s to prevent pipe breakage could allow much more flexibility and efficiency with the heat source, drawing magma in small amounts and using up nearly all the heat before dumping it out of a vent as rock.

[Carnis]

33 minutes ago, Sevio said:

That's a lot yeah, although it could still be used all the way down to around 600 C probably before you have to look for another heat source.

Redesigning it to pump the magma and limiting flow to 1 kg/s to prevent pipe breakage could allow much more flexibility and efficiency with the heat source, drawing magma in small amounts and using up nearly all the heat before dumping it out of a vent as rock.

Using aze's magma dropper + vacuum conveyor Will work The same without The need for sub 1kg packet exploit. Magma would have to Be pitcher pumped into a reservoir to enable IT though, as IT needs to drop the magma.

[Denisetwin]

12 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Using magma as a heat source.

I think I'm missing the trick to building right next to the magma, if I break into the magma in the oil fields, it instantly solidifies for several blocks.  I've tried building with corner builds and that worked kinda, but it really limits how you can build.  What am I missing?

[Sevio]

Just now, Denisetwin said:

I think I'm missing the trick to building right next to the magma, if I break into the magma in the oil fields, it instantly solidifies for several blocks.  I've tried building with corner builds and that worked kinda, but it really limits how you can build.  What am I missing?

To keep the magma liquid, before you break open any access to magma you need to create a vacuum area, accessible only through a liquid lock. Only allow duplicants through in an exosuit and never let any gas touch it. and it will stay liquid.

[Denisetwin]

1 minute ago, Sevio said:

To keep the magma liquid, before you break open any access to magma you need to create a vacuum area, accessible only through a liquid lock. Only allow duplicants through in an exosuit and never let any gas touch it. and it will stay liquid.

THANK YOU!!

[Sevio]

As far as limiting pipe flow to prevent breakage goes, I'm not convinced it's an exploit. It's strange with liquid -> solid but it makes sense for liquid -> gas and gas -> liquid. I can't think of another reason that they added in a 1 kg limit where pipes don't break than to allow us leeway with temperature changes in pipes. Maybe someone who has dived into the game code and/or patch note knowledge from way back can elaborate why this was originally added in?

[Carnis]

1 hour ago, Sevio said:

As far as limiting pipe flow to prevent breakage goes, I'm not convinced it's an exploit. It's strange with liquid -> solid but it makes sense for liquid -> gas and gas -> liquid. I can't think of another reason that they added in a 1 kg limit where pipes don't break than to allow us leeway with temperature changes in pipes. Maybe someone who has dived into the game code and/or patch note knowledge from way back can elaborate why this was originally added in?

The issue that arises is what @AnotherBoris brought up.

You can preboil crude oil at heat capacity 1.69, then turn it into ngas at 1700 degrees generating virtually infinite energy, as the cooling natural gas will now have 2.191 specific heat capacity.. but heating it up consumed 1.69 * K * g.

Compared to open system where you "lose out" on 1200 degrees worth of delta T @ 2.191 - 1.69 * K * g.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Yes, going straight to nat gas is a lot more efficient than to petroleum.  Also, I'm converting 6kg/s which is a LOT.  Mostly with this build I was looking fro long-term stability of the conversion system.  Right now, I'm pretty happy.  Everything stabilizes at 6kg/s petroleum and 4kg/s water.  

I played around with the steam turbine for a long while, and there are two methods for keeping it hot enough: 1) Boil the water directly with the magma or 2) Make a hot plate on the non-boiler side to trick the turbine.  Everything else I've tried fails to provide stability.  The crude boils to petroleum around 400c.  The entering crude cools the petroleum considerably -- even with abysallite tiles instead of metal against the turbine, the petroleum leaves the boiling chamber around 300c.  6kg of 300c petroleum doesn't have enough heat energy to boil 4kg of 100c water into 260c steam.  The best I could do was about 217c, and that wasn't enough for the steam turbine to start.

The steam turbine is a very finicky beast.  Its high operating temperature means that most other buildings you might use in conjunction with it will break down.  If you look on the forums, any build that will run the steam turbine continually requires some sort of trick to maintain either, pressure, or both.  The extremely high heat capacity of polluted water also makes it a poor choice for boiling unless you have a very hot source of heat.  Using magma directly to boil clean water works considerably better.  Or boiling crude -> nat gas and using 900c nat gas to boil the water works with smaller quantities.

Because this is a prototype "proof of concept" that I'm putting together to get an idea for what works, I'm making certain assumptions:  

1. The heat source will last indefinitely.
2. There will always be 6kg/s of available crude near 80c.
3. There will always be 4110g/s of slush geyser output (-10c polluted water).

These may be a little unrealistic in a survival play, but my end goal is a system that can be started and stopped at any time, and will run without any player interaction.

Just in case anyone is curious.. the reason for the numbers was "how much crude can I boil into petroleum without connecting the hot plate directly to the magma" and "what's the most water I can boil that will run the steam generator?"  Each "slot" on the turbine accepts something like 2kg/s steam as input, so I needed 4kg/s of steam for two slots.  I can't boil enough PW to produce steam for continual operation with 3 slots open.

[Sevio]

@KittenIsAGeek I thought that if you tricked the steam turbine with a hot plate below one of its ports, it would accept any temperature steam. Is that not the case? Does the steam turbine not work with 120 C steam when the hot plate on the right is above 230 C?

[KittenIsAGeek]

Yes, with the hot plate at 290c because of the petroleum, it will take any temperature steam.  If you're doing it WITHOUT the hot plate, then your steam needs to be at least 230 C.