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Early game Refinery cooler/Crude boiler


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Disclaimer: There is a bug with the Metal refinery output which causes additional heat to be added if the output is not empty when a dupe finishes the job.  Because this system runs with very tight margins, as soon as the Dupe operating the Refinery reaches level 4 in tinkering, it will overheat - so currently it is not usable. (unless a timer or some other automation is set preventing jobs from overlapping)

So with that in mind, this is a system which uses the heat generated by the Metal refinery steel production to very efficiently boil crude to petroleum.  In my tests it was running stable producing above 5kg/s of petroleum while refining 1t of Steel per cycle.  It is very cheap and simple to build (easily doable in survival) and requires no exotic materials (needs some steel).

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1) Refinery and petroleum coolant reservoir.  The system needs around 2t of petroleum produced elsewhere to get started and can be disconnected from petroleum delivery afterwards.  The reservoir is used to smooth out the temperature spikes.  I do realize that the reservoir is leaking some heat, but it is negligible.  Once the system stabilizes, the petroleum going into the Refinery will be at around 390°C and will get heated to around 520°C when running steel jobs.

2) Crude oil staging - exactly 850kg of crude gets prepped here waiting to get dumped to the heating chamber.  The first batch must be dumped manually (no mechanism is provided here).

3) Heating chamber - not very elegant, but it must transfer the heat fast enough so that the coolant loop doesn't get over 400°C (suggestions for better solution are welcome).  The change between crude and petroleum is detected by using the lower density of petroleum, so once all crude changes both tiles will be filled (740kg in bottom tile and 110kg in top).   The hydro sensor detects this and starts the automation that first dumps the converted petroleum to chamber 4 and then dumps the prepared 850kg of crude to the heating chamber.  The automation makes sure the falling crude doesn't open the door when it passes the hydro sensor (it gets detected) or that no 2 doors are open at the same time.

4) Cooling / Preheating chamber - here we cool down the petroleum so it can be pumped and we preheat the crude before it gets sent further.  With input crude at 80 degrees, the temp sensor is set to below 255°C getting it preheated to around 230°C (the pump has to be steel).

5) Finished petroleum at around 250°C, pump has to be steel.

Layers bellow

Spoiler

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Save file: boiler4.sav

It seems too loud a name for such a plan.

almost all automation, reservoir, temperature control of liquids, heat insulation, ice biome, liquid valves are presented

... may be I do not understand correctly what an "early game" is.

I would describe it as more of a mid-game build frankly but it is easier than taming a volcano so there is that.

Through put could relatively easily be doubled by just turning the doors 90 degrees and have 2 tiles of crude oil being cooked at the same time. Would make automation slightly simpler as well. And I'd probably make a 2 stage heat exchanger to bring pre-heating and post-cooling up.

1 minute ago, Saturnus said:

And I'd probably make a 2 stage heat exchanger to bring pre-heating and post-cooling up.

2Saturnus:

i optimizing my 'boiler' that use liquid glass to make petrol and oil to cool glass. something like this.
ask for advice - how many exchanges would be enough? i khow about excess 4% of heat in petrol (from 1.76-1.69) and that heat from glass still exist in petrol. i plan first sensor active below 299C, last sensor active below 120C.

Spoiler

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50 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

I would describe it as more of a mid-game build frankly but it is easier than taming a volcano so there is that.

Through put could relatively easily be doubled by just turning the doors 90 degrees and have 2 tiles of crude oil being cooked at the same time. Would make automation slightly simpler as well. And I'd probably make a 2 stage heat exchanger to bring pre-heating and post-cooling up.

It can get all screwed up when multiple tiles of crude turn to petrol (it doesn't convert all at once even with a single tile), it will push the liquids in random directions.  Plus the throughput depends solely on how much heat one generates (without changing the preheating), i.e. the number of jobs ran in the Metal refinery.

On the other hand, 2 stage (or more) preheat is a great idea, could improve the throughput substantially but would be more complex - the system depends on 80 degree crude to get the petroleum to pumpable range.  It would need another preheat chamber with door to work.

1 hour ago, screepka said:

It seems too loud a name for such a plan.

almost all automation, reservoir, temperature control of liquids, heat insulation, ice biome, liquid valves are presented

... may be I do not understand correctly what an "early game" is.

:) For me, YMMV

EARLY:
30-50 cycles, operational spom, so all research you mention already done (reservoir is earlier in preview)
~50 cycles - Exo suits operational, exploration underway
~80 cycles - Oil and Cold biomes breached, some Wheezeworts available and (freestanding) oil pumped.
~100-150 cycles - Oil refinery, Petroleum generator, Cooling system + this done...
MID would be going to space
LATE would be big automated builds like NGG boilers (with space materials), 

IMO,

EARLY - 1-3 tier (in preview) techs + manual operations

MID - automation, insulation, solid transport

LATE - space & hi-tech mats

its more logicaly but "the taste and color ... all the markers are different" ("every man to his own taste")

Does this still work? I can't get part #2 (where the crude oil actually turns to petrol) to work properly for me. When it converts, it changes from 500g oil to 500g petrol (or whatever), so there's no change in mass and it doesn't activate the hydro sensor.

Apart from that it works really well, and nicely combines my love for making things complicated with my love for automation :D

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