How to get large amounts of power in rocketry upgrade?

[onlineous]

16 hours ago, asaioki said:

Well i guess that depends on how much oil you want to cook and how consisent, i'm pretty sure i am not wasting any heat in my design that you can see in my previous post, i tried using a volcano as well but it just cools down too quickly.

It's hard to fathom everything without piping scheme's. Where and how do you transfer your heat? I get the idea that you transfer the heat of the middle petroleum chamber into the crude oil. The problem with that is that you use only one heat exchanger stage. A heat exchanger works way better in stages.

13 hours ago, Carnis said:

Pictures & flowrate please

 

At the moment I use the system only as a backup of a backup (I have wayyyyyyy too much energy anyway). Number one is hydrogen: (you need to get rid of that stuff anyway), natural gas (the geyser, fertilizer maker and oil well produce that anyway), and a few solar panels (didn't really need them, but I found it a nice challenge). I must say I tend to run my bases with energy conservation in mind. I don't use aquatuners and only 1 thermoregulator in my whole base. 

Currently the throughput is not that big, because it's a backup (that's why the gold isn't solid, but hot enough to be liquid). I used to run a full petroleum generator from it, for hunderds of cycles. 

As you can see from the pictures the piping does most of the work in 8 heat exchanger stages. The two crude oil inputs enable me to introduce extra heat into the system if the throughput has to be increased. The top crude oil input extracts heat from the regolith on top of my bunker tiles.

The end cooling is done by running the water for my base through the bottom reservoir. 

The automation is really simple, the door closes and transfers heat when the bottom tank drops under a certain level.

[Carnis]

I like this idea of staged recapture, might Make a prototype. If it can Be made sufficiently Stable in such a way, that a counter flow igneous conveyor does not overheat, a very simple automation could be Enough For 10kg/s petroleum from one volcano.

[asaioki]

2 hours ago, onlineous said:

It's hard to fathom everything without piping scheme's. Where and how do you transfer your heat? I get the idea that you transfer the heat of the middle petroleum chamber into the crude oil.

Not at home right now so cant really post pictures. But I drop preheated oil (100-250 degrees varying) into the metal tile chamber below the magma chamber that I keep at a temperature of 425 degrees Celsius. After that I drop it into the cooling chamber below. It produces almost enough petroleum to keep 3 generators run non stop.

[Carnis]

Yeah, My goal is 5 Gens. Already have a working build but its toi messy, this would be simpler.

[onlineous]

1 hour ago, Carnis said:

Yeah, My goal is 5 Gens. Already have a working build but its toi messy, this would be simpler.

Where do you get that oil from? Do you have several oil wells? (I have only one).

1 hour ago, asaioki said:

Not at home right now so cant really post pictures. But I drop preheated oil (100-250 degrees varying) into the metal tile chamber below the magma chamber that I keep at a temperature of 425 degrees Celsius. After that I drop it into the cooling chamber below. It produces almost enough petroleum to keep 3 generators run non stop.

Then you lose quite a lot of heat indeed. The oil in my last preheating stage is between 350 and 390 degrees, depending on how much oil I run through the regolith heat exchanger at the top of my base. I'm actually surprised that you don't overheat your liquid pump. I extract a lot of heat and still need some cooling of the bottom tank.

[asaioki]

3 hours ago, onlineous said:

Then you lose quite a lot of heat indeed. The oil in my last preheating stage is between 350 and 390 degrees, depending on how much oil I run through the regolith heat exchanger at the top of my base. I'm actually surprised that you don't overheat your liquid pump. I extract a lot of heat and still need some cooling of the bottom tank.

Well I'd assume the pre heating you do also requires some thermal energy. I cool the petroleum in the chamber below the metal tile chamber down to 115 degrees by running 50 degrees oil thru it (preheating that oil at the same time) and only then the door opens up, So it's impossible to overheat the pump.

[Saturnus]

3 hours ago, onlineous said:

Where do you get that oil from? Do you have several oil wells? (I have only one).

Maps have 2 or 3 oil wells normally but rarely just one. My current map also only have one (unless I'm blind).

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Carnis Do you not use tempshift plates on purpose? At least in the areas where the radiant pipes don't touch liquid I.e the edges

Otherwise I like your build!

What do you think about putting automated doors on the edges of every level so they hold the liquid until it's ''ready'' to drop to the next level? This way you would probably have more control over the system 

7 hours ago, onlineous said:

 

21 hours ago, Carnis said:

Pictures & flowrate please

 

[Carnis]

19 minutes ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

@Carnis Do you not use tempshift plates on purpose? At least in the areas where the radiant pipes don't touch liquid I.e the edges

Otherwise I like your build!

What do you think about putting automated doors on the edges of every level so they hold the liquid until it's ''ready'' to drop to the next level? This way you would probably have more control over the system 

 

its @onlineous build, mine is (but its too complex to build): 

 

 

There are 2 oil wells on my map, and after 200 cycles Ive only touched the surface of my oil reserves, then there are slicksters too to be had.

[onlineous]

28 minutes ago, asaioki said:

Well I'd assume the pre heating you do also requires some thermal energy. I cool the petroleum in the chamber below the metal tile chamber down to 115 degrees by running 50 degrees oil thru it (preheating that oil at the same time) and only then the door opens up, So it's impossible to overheat the pump.

Pre-heating is done to recapture the heat in the system. I preheat using the heat left over in the petroleum. When I preheat half of the oil to 300 degrees (the other half goes in at around 70 degrees at the bottom of the system) using regolith the oil goes into the heat chamber around 390 degrees (the highest was 398 but of course I don't want to overcook the system so I limited regolith preheating)

 

 

25 minutes ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

@Carnis Do you not use tempshift plates on purpose? At least in the areas where the radiant pipes don't touch liquid I.e the edges

Otherwise I like your build!

What do you think about putting automated doors on the edges of every level so they hold the liquid until it's ''ready'' to drop to the next level? This way you would probably have more control over the system 

 

I don't think tempshift plates would add something in my build. The oil in the pipes already really closely reaches the temperature of the 8 stages of preheating. It's usually only a few degrees under the petroleum in the preheating stage. Tempshift plates also have the risk of tying two heating stages in together and sycing their temperature, which would beat the purpose of the system.

The doors might indeed improve the build, because they could let me further fill the second tile of the heating stage without making the system bigger. I'm not completely sure how heat exchange works with a tile of petroleum that is only filled with a few kilograms. On the other hand: the oil in the pipes already leaves each heating stage at approximately the temperature of that stage, therefore I would not gain much by increasing the efficiency of the heat exchange in each stage.

[StarSquid]

One word: Critters

If you have enough space, hatches can provide a renewable supply of coal. I've found, however, that after a certain point it becomes very, very difficult to set up a reliable coal generator system. At this point in my (initially no stress, but at this point more like sandbox) save I'm using a blend of power sources. I've got natural gas from geysers, duplicants, and refining, coal from hatches, solar panels, and petroleum from molten slicksters. In theory I think molten slicksters fit what you're looking for. My only problem is that I'm not sure the carbon dioxide consumption will be sustainable without also burning some coal or natural gas.

In the future I'm going to try and power a steam generator with heat from meteor impacts, if it works I'll post it here.

[asaioki]

8 hours ago, StarSquid said:

One word: Critters

If you have enough space, hatches can provide a renewable supply of coal. I've found, however, that after a certain point it becomes very, very difficult to set up a reliable coal generator system. At this point in my (initially no stress, but at this point more like sandbox) save I'm using a blend of power sources. I've got natural gas from geysers, duplicants, and refining, coal from hatches, solar panels, and petroleum from molten slicksters. In theory I think molten slicksters fit what you're looking for. My only problem is that I'm not sure the carbon dioxide consumption will be sustainable without also burning some coal or natural gas.

In the future I'm going to try and power a steam generator with heat from meteor impacts, if it works I'll post it here.

Well my experience with critters is that they're pretty underpowered a single pacu for example needs 28ish pufts to get fed which in return require even more morbs.

Only hatches and slicksters seem somewhat viable and even then hatches will eventually eat up all the rock in the map if you rely on them (sure this might take maybe thousands of cycles), but I aim to make my bases sustainable for an infinite time even if I wont play the game for that long.

[onlineous]

11 hours ago, StarSquid said:

One word: Critters

If you have enough space, hatches can provide a renewable supply of coal. I've found, however, that after a certain point it becomes very, very difficult to set up a reliable coal generator system. At this point in my (initially no stress, but at this point more like sandbox) save I'm using a blend of power sources. I've got natural gas from geysers, duplicants, and refining, coal from hatches, solar panels, and petroleum from molten slicksters. In theory I think molten slicksters fit what you're looking for. My only problem is that I'm not sure the carbon dioxide consumption will be sustainable without also burning some coal or natural gas.

In the future I'm going to try and power a steam generator with heat from meteor impacts, if it works I'll post it here.

I would be surprised if you can 'generate' enough C02 to feed to the slicksters. Apart from that: I also need the CO2 to generate polluted water in order to get dirt to keep my sleet wheat happy.

2 hours ago, asaioki said:

Well my experience with critters is that they're pretty underpowered a single pacu for example needs 28ish pufts to get fed which in return require even more morbs.

Only hatches and slicksters seem somewhat viable and even then hatches will eventually eat up all the rock in the map if you rely on them (sure this might take maybe thousands of cycles), but I aim to make my bases sustainable for an infinite time even if I wont play the game for that long.

Depends a bit on what you consider exploits. I was (and am) thinking about melting regolith using a volcano. I've been told that you 5 double the heat in the system. The generated heat would be used to run a steam engine (using a door pump, which could be considered an exploit as well). The resulting igneous rock could be fed to hatches.

The only thing holding me back: I already generate way too much power, and solar power seems to be easier and require less dupe time. I really want to try it though!

[Carnis]

@onlineous staged heat recapture, made a test with that + conveyors. Very stable 386 Celsius preheated oil, when it passes through the system. Very easy to setup, and simple automation. Input is 76C oil, output is 110C igneous and 110C petroleum. 10kg/s for petrol and below 1kg/s for igneous.

[onlineous]

26 minutes ago, Carnis said:

@onlineous staged heat recapture, made a test with that + conveyors. Very stable 386 Celsius preheated oil, when it passes through the system. Very easy to setup, and simple automation. Input is 76C oil, output is 110C igneous and 110C petroleum. 10kg/s for petrol and below 1kg/s for igneous.

Nice and compact, those heat recapture stages! Was it build in survival? The difference for me is that I try to keep the system accessible to dupes in exosuits, because I tend to mess up, or want to change things every once in a while. Great system though!

[Carnis]

its obviously a debug build, but so much simpler than the gas build, that I built in both debug & survival. Would be dupe accessible, but dupe access would be unneeded.

[StarSquid]

On 9/23/2018 at 7:41 AM, asaioki said:

Well my experience with critters is that they're pretty underpowered a single pacu for example needs 28ish pufts to get fed which in return require even more morbs.

Only hatches and slicksters seem somewhat viable and even then hatches will eventually eat up all the rock in the map if you rely on them (sure this might take maybe thousands of cycles), but I aim to make my bases sustainable for an infinite time even if I wont play the game for that long.

Oh, yeah, hatches, slicksters, and dreckos are the only ones worth bothering with, and dreckos aren't really useful for power generation.

Hatches are actually sustainable, at least theoretically. If you have a volcano of any sort you have an infinite supply of rock, and even if you don't hatches can eat organic foods, especially if you breed up some sage hatches.

On 9/23/2018 at 10:41 AM, onlineous said:

I would be surprised if you can 'generate' enough C02 to feed to the slicksters. Apart from that: I also need the CO2 to generate polluted water in order to get dirt to keep my sleet wheat happy.

I feel like the geysers make a really big difference in this case. I have a carbon dioxide geyser and a polluted water geyser, so both of those resources are relatively abundant for me.

 

In other news, I tested both the meteor-powered steam generator and an attempt at a petroleum boiler.

I think the steam generator is viable, but it's very difficult to get the water up to temperature. Even extremely conductive materials can't transfer heat fast enough, so you'd probably need to use hydrogen or petroleum to transport the heat. After that it's just a matter of cooling the steam down, and pumping the water to where it's needed. You could probably use an exploit  to make this easier. (I must admit I don't know very much about the exploits, other than that they make steam generators work much better).

The petroleum boiler needs more work. It's very difficult to cool the sour gas to its condensation point without damaging ventilation ducts. The easiest way would probably just be pumping it into the chamber around a Thermo-Nullifier in batches, then pumping out the natural gas and repeating. I haven't figured out a continuous process.

[dallion]

1 hour ago, StarSquid said:

and even if you don't hatches can eat organic foods, especially if you breed up some sage hatches

they will generate less coal if they ate food

[onlineous]

On 23-9-2018 at 4:41 PM, onlineous said:

I would be surprised if you can 'generate' enough C02 to feed to the slicksters. Apart from that: I also need the CO2 to generate polluted water in order to get dirt to keep my sleet wheat happy.

Depends a bit on what you consider exploits. I was (and am) thinking about melting regolith using a volcano. I've been told that you 5 double the heat in the system. The generated heat would be used to run a steam engine (using a door pump, which could be considered an exploit as well). The resulting igneous rock could be fed to hatches.

The only thing holding me back: I already generate way too much power, and solar power seems to be easier and require less dupe time. I really want to try it though!

I decided to try and get the steam generator running and managed to do so.

The plumbing is quite easy. The pipe on the top left was used to pump the water into the system and has been disconnected. The bottom pipes transfers crude oil through the heat exchanger chambers, which is used (in a different part of the base) in my crude oil --> petroleum cooker. 

There is quite al of automation (and I'm quite sure it could be simplified). The top left automation system is used for the doorpump. The top right automation is to regulate the flow of magma to the bottom and to retain as much heat as possible in the chambers. The heat is used to melt regolith, to provide even more magma (although at the moment no regelith is being melted, because I have enough magma). The bottom part of the automation is used to enable and disable the conveyor loader, based on the temperature of the petroleum and a pulser (without the pulser the conveyor loader would cycle way too much igneous rock through the conveyors.

I'm not running the system full blast, since I have way too much power anyway. To run it faster I would need another doorpump. At the moment the abundance of cold(er) steam at the top cools the generator and the air below enough to make the turbine spin down. My estimation is that it run's for 1/3th of the time. 

The magma falls on tungsten tiles. If I dropped it directly into the petroleum the petroleum sometimes vaporized to sour gas.

Last but not least: the igneous rock is being picked up and loaded onto a conveyor. It cycles through the petroleum to help with equalizing the temperature in the whole petroleum tank. Excess igneous rock is transported through the heat exchanger chambers and dropped in the room on the right. I might start feeding it to hatches in the future, but I haven't had time yet to get some hatches from space (all the starting hatches are dead).

[StarSquid]

On 9/26/2018 at 9:48 PM, dallion said:

they will generate less coal if they ate food

They do? I'm not really sure why that would be the case.

[Carnis]

12 hours ago, StarSquid said:

They do? I'm not really sure why that would be the case.

If they eat cooked foods they generate almost no coal.

But If you Feed them dirt (sages), then the conversion rate is 100%, they generate More coal.

Problem is, dirt is better For glossy dreckos & other organics are really expensive to mass produce.

[The Flying Fox]

Yes, a staged heat exchanger is definitely key for trapping as much heat into a system as possible.  My oil refinery runs just fine off my gold volcano.  Here's when I started it going about 250 cycles ago:

And now:

 

I would actually argue that letting the petroleum pool in each stage like @onlineous shows in his design is probably not the best idea.  It obvious works well, of course, but is thermally 'laggy'.  The temperature of the incoming oil will always be dominated by the temperature of those stages because there's just so much mass in each of them.  Moreover, the temperature of each stage will be more uniform because each stage has so much mass and petroleum has decent-ish thermal conductivity.  What you really want for a thermal exchanger is a perfect (Or as close as you can get) gradient of temperature.  Thus, having a thermal exchanger where the out going product closely matches the incoming product, in mass, is usually better.  In my case, I have no cooler for the petroleum as it's coming out around 82C while the oil is coming in around 73C.

 

Admittedly, I haven't attempted to run this design past it's current setting of 1250G/s of Oil although I did test the debug prototype to much higher amounts and it could certainly handle it.  I'd imagine that my gold volcano could keep pace as well as I'm definitely not using the entirety of it's thermal output.  My storage/dropper tank of liquid gold has nearly 50 tons of it at 2560C 

[wachunga]

Another thing worth mentioning is that the more drops or levels or stages the better. Along a horizontal run, each tile of petroleum touches others and will transfer heat the wrong way. From a certain point of view, the "ideal" exchanger is very tall and just one tile wide. Each petroleum tile is isolated and there is no counter productive heat flow between tiles. Of course that's not practicable to build. So my rule of thumb is to make the exchanger as tall and as with as many levels as reasonable. Then widen it to achieve the necessary efficiency. A 1kg/s exchanger can be much smaller than a 10 kg/s one.

I like to make each level dupe accessible to ease construction. This does mean the exchanger is less space efficient than strictly necessary, but I think it's a worthwhile trade off. I also make the drops 2 tiles wide in an effort to prevent "sticking" that sometimes happens. Droplets effectively don't exist while a slug of petroleum sticking to the wall allows heat transfer the same way as a horizontal level does, ruining the efficiency of the drop. This may no longer be a problem, but it was in the past so it's become a habit of mine. My builds end up something like:

That works reasonably well up to 4kg/s (preheating to within ~25C). More than that and you should really widen it some as you start needing to draw too much heat out of your source. Also note that the efficiency of the exchanger seems to increase when you play at a higher speed. At least for me, 3x speed gets the preheat temperature about 5C higher than at 1x speed.

Crude to Petro.sav

[Carnis]

4 hours ago, wachunga said:

Another thing worth mentioning is that the more drops or levels or stages the better. Along a horizontal run, each tile of petroleum touches others and will transfer heat the wrong way. From a certain point of view, the "ideal" exchanger is very tall and just one tile wide. Each petroleum tile is isolated and there is no counter productive heat flow between tiles. Of course that's not practicable to build. So my rule of thumb is to make the exchanger as tall and as with as many levels as possible. Then widen it to achieve the necessary efficiency. A 1kg/s exchanger can be much smaller than a 10 kg/s one.

I like to make each level dupe accessible to ease construction. This does mean the exchanger is less space efficient than strictly necessary, but I think it's a worthwhile trade off. I also make the drops 2 tiles wide in an effort to prevent "sticking" that sometimes happens. Droplets effectively don't exist while a slug of petroleum sticking to the wall allows heat transfer the same way as a horizontal level does, ruining the efficiency of the drop. This may no longer be a problem, but it was in the past so it's become a habit of mine. My builds end up something like:

That works reasonably well up to 4kg/s (preheating to within ~25C). More than that and you should really widen it some as you start needing to draw too much heat out of your source. Also note that the efficiency of the exchanger seems to increase when you play at a higher speed. At least for me, 3x speed gets the preheat temperature about 5C higher than at 1x speed.

What I linked above had first 2 pools that stabilise heat to 403 and 385C. Then dripping petrol.

It worked with 10kg/s without issue.

But I was using a concurrent conveyor, so My magma was chilled from 1725C to 110C.

I dont think there is much room For improvement, but it would Be curious to see If it could run at 10kg off of iron.

*

What @onlineous pools of petrol add is heat stability. Pool 1 chills igneous to 400C preventing Pipe breaks in pool2.

Pool2 has high thermal mass, so oil is always preheated to pool2 temp (375-386).

A third pool would indeed Be redundant & My testing says they clamp the temp roughly -50K/pool.

[onlineous]

7 hours ago, The Flying Fox said:

Yes, a staged heat exchanger is definitely key for trapping as much heat into a system as possible.  My oil refinery runs just fine off my gold volcano.  Here's when I started it going about 250 cycles ago:

And now:

 

I would actually argue that letting the petroleum pool in each stage like @onlineous shows in his design is probably not the best idea.  It obvious works well, of course, but is thermally 'laggy'.  The temperature of the incoming oil will always be dominated by the temperature of those stages because there's just so much mass in each of them.  Moreover, the temperature of each stage will be more uniform because each stage has so much mass and petroleum has decent-ish thermal conductivity.  What you really want for a thermal exchanger is a perfect (Or as close as you can get) gradient of temperature.  Thus, having a thermal exchanger where the out going product closely matches the incoming product, in mass, is usually better.  In my case, I have no cooler for the petroleum as it's coming out around 82C while the oil is coming in around 73C.

 

Admittedly, I haven't attempted to run this design past it's current setting of 1250G/s of Oil although I did test the debug prototype to much higher amounts and it could certainly handle it.  I'd imagine that my gold volcano could keep pace as well as I'm definitely not using the entirety of it's thermal output.  My storage/dropper tank of liquid gold has nearly 50 tons of it at 2560C 

I agree: just letting the petroleum flow, meanwhile transfering heat is the way to go (as long as there is enough pipe distance to effectively transfer the heat of course. What might be a problem for me: petroleum is a backup for me, which means the refinement rate greatly varies, which might make things harder to regulate, with the risk of breaking pipes. I might try it with a small reservoir at the top and a doorlock to regulate petroleum flow. 

I can't completely figure out how you heat the petroleum reservoir at the top to the right temperature without overcooking it.

2 hours ago, Carnis said:

What I linked above had first 2 pools that stabilise heat to 403 and 385C. Then dripping petrol.

It worked with 10kg/s without issue.

But I was using a concurrent conveyor, so My magma was chilled from 1725C to 110C.

I dont think there is much room For improvement, but it would Be curious to see If it could run at 10kg off of iron.

*

What @onlineous pools of petrol add is heat stability. Pool 1 chills igneous to 400C preventing Pipe breaks in pool2.

Pool2 has high thermal mass, so oil is always preheated to pool2 temp (375-386).

A third pool would indeed Be redundant & My testing says they clamp the temp roughly -50K/pool.

Uhm, I don't use igneous rock to heat petrol in my refinery setup? I have a doorlock link with the liquid gold. The disadvantage of this system is that it's hard to extract gold as long as it's liquid. In that regard actually using a heated petrol tank would be better, but harder to regulate.