Controlled Temp Petrol Factory

[JukedByLife]

Found a gold volcano in my latest max difficulty episode so I designed this petrol factory around that. Let me know what you think.

 

[blash365]

the pseudo-thermo-sensor is ingenious. kudos for that.

[Carnis]

Gold makes very little heat so preheating your oil with petrol instead of using Steam to delete heat would skyrocket the efficiency.

[JukedByLife]

4 minutes ago, blash365 said:

the pseudo-thermo-sensor is ingenious. kudos for that.

Thank you!

2 minutes ago, Carnis said:

Gold makes very little heat so preheating your oil with petrol instead of using Steam to delete heat would skyrocket the efficiency.

This was just showcasing the factory. I plan on preheating with metal refineries.

[The Flying Fox]

I also agree that your idea of transferring heat using a constantly changing small drop of gold is pretty cool.  A door could be used from the hydro-sensor but this basically bypasses that for an even smaller device.  Neat!  The rest of your automation is also fairly nice and clean as well.  Although, for an oil-to-petro boiler I might suggest this design instead:

It has a constant output flow and it can be throttled basically however you wish, and the constant output flow allows for a much more efficient heat-exchanger design to use as little heat as possible and cool the petroleum.

 

How it works is by actually detecting the speed of the reaction taking place using the top hydro-sensor.  Once the machine is primed with the first batch of petroleum, the bottom sensor is basically unused.  That idea is probably a little confusing at first without actually watching what the temperature/hydro/pressure sensors are doing in detail over short periods of time.  The short answer is:  What the sensors are reading is actually an average over a certain short time-frame.  In the pictures I've shown, you can see that the top tile is filled with 548.9 KGs of petroleum.. but the sensor is actually showing 647.1 KGs of petroleum.  What's happening is some of the petroleum is falling into the bottom tile after a drop of oil just converted to petroleum which you see in the next image, there's 201 KGs of petroleum in the bottom tile. 

 

Since the machine is designed to constantly drip oil down into the bottom tile, the petroleum that falls into the bottom file is constantly being pushed back into the top tile, only for it to rapidly drop back down into the bottom tile when the oil boils into petroleum.  When the petroleum is pushed back into the top tile, it'll be over 740 KGs so the extra spills over and out of the reaction pit and into the thermal exchanger.  So, since this is happening very fast (Basically within a second or less), the hydro-sensor ends up reading only an averaged amount of petroleum in that top tile.  In this case, around 647 KGs.  When the reaction speed slows or stops entirely (There's not enough heat) then suddenly the hydro-sensor reads the full amount of petroleum in that tile  of 740 KGs (Although the sensor is set to 720 KGs just in case) and that trips the door to close (Because of the NOT gate) and injecting new heat into the reaction pit.  Since a full tile of petroleum has quite a high thermal mass, it doesn't heat up very hot above the boiling temperature that you need, keeping the temperature of the out flowing petroleum very stable.  And because it's temperature stable, it can run off just about any heat source as long as it's over the boiling temperature.  (Obviously, it at least needs to be at least over 415-425C to work properly.)

 

The Buffer gate is set to 10 seconds and it keeps the flow of oil going for that short amount of time while the door is closed and reheating the reaction pit.  If the door needs to be closed longer then that, it probably means the heat has run out and it automatically stops dripping more oil into it.  The element sensor is there to detect if there's a backlog of oil building up and, if there is, shuts off the input flow valve leading into the heat exchanger.

[crypticorb]

I have yet to experiment with petroleum precision boilers, and this is excellent insight on some of the methods.

@JukedByLife one thing I noticed in your clever gold transition sensor is that the gold transfers heat into its adjacent tile almost exactly half the time. I'm wondering if this could be used somehow to essentially divide the rate of transfer of heat in half in other situations? Perhaps with a material that has a borderline melting/freezing temperature that is slightly closer to the target temperature of petroleum.

One other thing that comes to mind with these precision builds: have you considered using 1000g limited liquid pipes? Liquids that are valve limited to 1000g packets do not change states in the pipes, but will wait until they exit the pipe to change. If you could use this concept, all that would be needed would be to heat a medium to within the 399.9C - 538.8C range and pump the crude oil through it.

A quick experiment showed that the medium you pump it through needs to be about 430C to get the crude to transition when it exits the pipe.

 

Edit: further thought on this concept.

Why not use magma? Run a radiator through magma with something like normal obsidian pipes, and use steel pipe thermal sensors to detect any 1000g packets of crude oil that have reached 430C target, and filter them out. Once inside the filter pipe, use the space material insulation for pipe construction, to prevent further heating. I'll do a test to see if this is viable.

Edit: it turns out liquid pipe thermo sensors are 300C limited too. :C

[Yucie]

This was a neat method, but how do you intend to deal with the gold chamber on the left to prevent it from turning into a solid gold tile?  Losing half mass to such a problem would be a major efficiency loss.

[The Flying Fox]

14 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I have yet to experiment with petroleum precision boilers, and this is excellent insight on some of the methods.

@JukedByLife one thing I noticed in your clever gold transition sensor is that the gold transfers heat into its adjacent tile almost exactly half the time. I'm wondering if this could be used somehow to essentially divide the rate of transfer of heat in half in other situations? Perhaps with a material that has a borderline melting/freezing temperature that is slightly closer to the target temperature of petroleum.

One other thing that comes to mind with these precision builds: have you considered using 1000g limited liquid pipes? Liquids that are valve limited to 1000g packets do not change states in the pipes, but will wait until they exit the pipe to change. If you could use this concept, all that would be needed would be to heat a medium to within the 399.9C - 538.8C range and pump the crude oil through it.

A quick experiment showed that the medium you pump it through needs to be about 430C to get the crude to transition when it exits the pipe.

The problem is, there really isn't any material within the temperature range of either oil-to-petroleum, or for the conversion into sour gas.  You not only need a material that converts at around the right temperature, but also converts back to itself whenever it phase changes.  The only thing in the game that's 'close' is mercury.  It converts from a liquid to a gas at 356C and then back, but obviously that's too cold and can't be had unless you're in debug.

 

And yes, you can readily use the limited 1000g oil in pipes to make a boiler if you wish.  You could even do this back when you could get natural gas instead of sour gas which could make for pretty ridiculous amounts of natural gas without basically needing any external heat once you got the thing running.  You could blow well past the phase change temperature and since the conversion to natural gas is exothermic, it could basically self-heat.  So, for myself, I usually try to avoid taking advantage of this particular feature, if I can.

 

35 minutes ago, Yucie said:

This was a neat method, but how do you intend to deal with the gold chamber on the left to prevent it from turning into a solid gold tile?  Losing half mass to such a problem would be a major efficiency loss.

When the gold turns solid, it does not loose mass.  You only loose mass when you dig the solid tile up.  Solid tiles are also only formed when the amount of the liquid metal/magma product in a tile is more then around 600KGs.  A 'Dropper' device can be made that only lets a small measured amount drop from an above holding tank into a cooler tank and prevent it from forming solid tiles.

[RonEmpire]

very cool and clever.

[JukedByLife]

First off, thank you for all the compliments on this build. It took some time so I'm glad it's useful.

5 hours ago, The Flying Fox said:

I also agree that your idea of transferring heat using a constantly changing small drop of gold is pretty cool.  A door could be used from the hydro-sensor but this basically bypasses that for an even smaller device.  Neat!  The rest of your automation is also fairly nice and clean as well.  Although, for an oil-to-petro boiler I might suggest this design instead:...

1

 

I designed this system around a volcano + turbines for cooling so dropping the petrol down was a simple solution that worked perfectly. A constant stream pumped into the cooling chamber would have wasted energy. I did consider a drip + overflow but ultimately this is the route I took. Thank you for sharing your build + explanation, it gave me some great ideas for other projects. How much can this produce? Or if you're unsure, how much is the drip valve set to?

Edit: Nvm I saw the amount in SS.

 

2 hours ago, crypticorb said:

I have yet to experiment with petroleum precision boilers, and this is excellent insight on some of the methods...

 

Flying Fox covered this pretty well. I know about the 1000g packet thing but I'm not sure that would produce any more or less and also that's already been done before. One of the things I enjoy most is creating designs like this with clever use of mechanics. Also, you could most definitely use magma for this or any other boiler builds but eventually it cools down. Volcanos produce forever with little maintenance.

 

1 hour ago, Yucie said:

This was a neat method, but how do you intend to deal with the gold chamber on the left to prevent it from turning into a solid gold tile?  Losing half mass to such a problem would be a major efficiency loss.

Flying Fox is correct but I do plan on mining it out. I'm not worried about the loss because this will continue producing forever & I have an iron volcano that I'm setting up the same way. These 2 setups coupled with the turbines will generate all the power I need for many cycles.

[JonnyMonroe]

Man I didn't think I'd still be seeing defraction tower type designs after rocketry but people still do them.

These days I prefer to just mass convert with a simple self regulating thermium aquatuner build. Volcano powered designs are a bit limited on throughput even with a good heat exchanger and a regular volcano powering it.

[Saturnus]

4 hours ago, crypticorb said:

A quick experiment showed that the medium you pump it through needs to be about 430C to get the crude to transition when it exits the pipe.

Oddly enough the evaporation temperature of supercoolant is 436C so a system that uses that as the temperature control would work phenomenally well. 

2 hours ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Man I didn't think I'd still be seeing defraction tower type designs after rocketry but people still do them.

These days I prefer to just mass convert with a simple self regulating thermium aquatuner build. Volcano powered designs are a bit limited on throughput even with a good heat exchanger and a regular volcano powering it.

I think most people have built their petro-cookers long before they have access to space materials in large amounts because it's almost a prerequisite to getting petroleum fuelled rockets going on a regular basis. In debug mode you could naturally do want you like. Why do I assume you use debug mode? Because niobium has plenty high overheat temperature for a petro-cookers and most other designs which tells me you haven't really done this in a survival game. I could be wrong though but then you now know that thermium is not needed.

[JonnyMonroe]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

Oddly enough the evaporation temperature of supercoolant is 436C so a system that uses that as the temperature control would work phenomenally well. 

I think most people have built their petro-cookers long before they have access to space materials in large amounts because it's almost a prerequisite to getting petroleum fuelled rockets going on a regular basis. In debug mode you could naturally do want you like. Why do I assume you use debug mode? Because niobium has plenty high overheat temperature for a petro-cookers and most other designs which tells me you haven't really done this in a survival game. I could be wrong though but then you now know that thermium is not needed.

I use thermium over niobium because of the mass gain in refining it. I would have to do many, many extra launches otherwise.

 

And i have done this in survival. I launched multiple petroleum rockets fueled by my 2 refineries before building any cooker. I just siphoned off some of the petroleum that went to my petro generator whilst working towards rockets and by the time I had a petrol rocket ready I had 4 reservoirs of petroleum to launch with. Volcanic oil cookers are interesting to build but they've never been necessary and still aren't, even for petroleum rockets.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

I use thermium over niobium because of the mass gain in refining it. I would have to do many, many extra launches otherwise.

I get that but you can multiply niobium by making it into thermium, and then use the rock crusher. 5kg niobium + 95kg tungsten -> 100kg thermium -> 50kg niobium + 50kg sand.

[Neotuck]

5 hours ago, JukedByLife said:

Flying Fox is correct but I do plan on mining it out. I'm not worried about the loss because this will continue producing forever & I have an iron volcano that I'm setting up the same way. These 2 setups coupled with the turbines will generate all the power I need for many cycles.

Is that in a vacuum?  I'll give you fair warning that your sweeper and robo-miner will overheat regardless of what material you make them out of

[Mullematsch]

11 hours ago, The Flying Fox said:

I also agree that your idea of transferring heat using a constantly changing small drop of gold is pretty cool.  A door could be used from the hydro-sensor but this basically bypasses that for an even smaller device.  Neat!  The rest of your automation is also fairly nice and clean as well.  Although, for an oil-to-petro boiler I might suggest this design instead:

It has a constant output flow and it can be throttled basically however you wish, and the constant output flow allows for a much more efficient heat-exchanger design to use as little heat as possible and cool the petroleum.

 

How it works is by actually detecting the speed of the reaction taking place using the top hydro-sensor.  Once the machine is primed with the first batch of petroleum, the bottom sensor is basically unused.  That idea is probably a little confusing at first without actually watching what the temperature/hydro/pressure sensors are doing in detail over short periods of time.  The short answer is:  What the sensors are reading is actually an average over a certain short time-frame.  In the pictures I've shown, you can see that the top tile is filled with 548.9 KGs of petroleum.. but the sensor is actually showing 647.1 KGs of petroleum.  What's happening is some of the petroleum is falling into the bottom tile after a drop of oil just converted to petroleum which you see in the next image, there's 201 KGs of petroleum in the bottom tile. 

 

Since the machine is designed to constantly drip oil down into the bottom tile, the petroleum that falls into the bottom file is constantly being pushed back into the top tile, only for it to rapidly drop back down into the bottom tile when the oil boils into petroleum.  When the petroleum is pushed back into the top tile, it'll be over 740 KGs so the extra spills over and out of the reaction pit and into the thermal exchanger.  So, since this is happening very fast (Basically within a second or less), the hydro-sensor ends up reading only an averaged amount of petroleum in that top tile.  In this case, around 647 KGs.  When the reaction speed slows or stops entirely (There's not enough heat) then suddenly the hydro-sensor reads the full amount of petroleum in that tile  of 740 KGs (Although the sensor is set to 720 KGs just in case) and that trips the door to close (Because of the NOT gate) and injecting new heat into the reaction pit.  Since a full tile of petroleum has quite a high thermal mass, it doesn't heat up very hot above the boiling temperature that you need, keeping the temperature of the out flowing petroleum very stable.  And because it's temperature stable, it can run off just about any heat source as long as it's over the boiling temperature.  (Obviously, it at least needs to be at least over 415-425C to work properly.)

 

The Buffer gate is set to 10 seconds and it keeps the flow of oil going for that short amount of time while the door is closed and reheating the reaction pit.  If the door needs to be closed longer then that, it probably means the heat has run out and it automatically stops dripping more oil into it.  The element sensor is there to detect if there's a backlog of oil building up and, if there is, shuts off the input flow valve leading into the heat exchanger.

Could I get a save file or some more detailed information on your design? Maybe you can point me towards a video in which you showcase it. 

[JukedByLife]

5 hours ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Man I didn't think I'd still be seeing defraction tower type designs after rocketry but people still do them.

These days I prefer to just mass convert with a simple self regulating thermium aquatuner build. Volcano powered designs are a bit limited on throughput even with a good heat exchanger and a regular volcano powering it.

I'm playing on max difficulty so it's quite a bit slower than a standard run, I'm around cycle 500 and nowhere near rockets yet.

48 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Is that in a vacuum?  I'll give you fair warning that your sweeper and robo-miner will overheat regardless of what material you make them out of

I understand the auto-sweeper will but why the robo-miner. I assumed it didn't actually make contact with the metal. Am I wrong? Also, I'm working on a cooling system for the sweeper but the system would need some minor alterations to the design.

[crypticorb]

25 minutes ago, JukedByLife said:

I understand the auto-sweeper will but why the robo-miner. I assumed it didn't actually make contact with the metal. Am I wrong? Also, I'm working on a cooling system for the sweeper but the system would need some minor alterations to the design.

Robo-miners generate heat, just like any other powered building. All powered structures will generate that heat into itself, and if sitting in a vacuum, will eventually melt itself.

[JukedByLife]

3 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Robo-miners generate heat, just like any other powered building. All powered structures will generate that heat into itself, and if sitting in a vacuum, will eventually melt itself.

I did not consider that. I think it will take quite a while though as it rarely ever turns on and once the system is running at full the gold should never accumulate enough to form a block. The sweeper is still an issue but I think ill manage and if not I don't mind repairing it every 100 cycles or so

[Nitroturtle]

In my experience, buildings that generate heat, when in a vacuum, will overheat very very quickly.  I'm with @crypticorb on this one, I think you're going to have issues with this build immediately.  Though if you're using one of the higher temp materials, that may buy you a little time.  Just remember, without anywhere for the heat to go, it's just going to keep rising till the machine eventually melts.

[crypticorb]

9 minutes ago, JukedByLife said:

I did not consider that. I think it will take quite a while though as it rarely ever turns on and once the system is running at full the gold should never accumulate enough to form a block. The sweeper is still an issue but I think ill manage and if not I don't mind repairing it every 100 cycles or so

You could probably extend that by hundreds more cycles if you place a single normal block under it, and a small amount of petrol. With some clever rearrangement you could probably get a drip cooling setup for crude oil flowing over tiles and wick that heat away.

[JukedByLife]

3 minutes ago, Nitroturtle said:

In my experience, buildings that generate heat, when in a vacuum, will overheat very very quickly.  I'm with @crypticorb on this one, I think you're going to have issues with this build immediately.  Though if you're using one of the higher temp materials, that may buy you a little time.  Just remember, without anywhere for the heat to go, it's just going to keep rising till the machine eventually melts.

 

I was expecting this for the sweeper so I'm fine with the occasional replacement, and as my last post, I don't think the miner will have anything to do once the first batch solidifies because at 13kg/s it should solidify seconds after hitting the plate.

4 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

You could probably extend that by hundreds more cycles if you place a single normal block under it, and a small amount of petrol. With some clever rearrangement you could probably get a drip cooling setup for crude oil flowing over tiles and wick that heat away.

 

This is similar to what I was thinking (oil drip with aquatuner loop), although I haven't messed with it yet. Just thinking about placement I don't see how the sweeper would reach the bottom of the gold reservoir and sit in the cooling pool. I'll have to do some testing, thank you for the feedback.

[crypticorb]

4 minutes ago, JukedByLife said:

This is similar to what I was thinking (oil drip with aquatuner loop), although I haven't messed with it yet. Just thinking about placement I don't see how the sweeper would reach the bottom of the gold reservoir and sit in the cooling pool. I'll have to do some testing, thank you for the feedback.

I just had an idea spawned from that comment. With the new high thresholds of overheating, you can technically refine crude oil directly with machines that can handle the high temperature.

A crude example, if you use a tepidizer made from thermium and pulse it based on a simple automation toggle, and fine tune the amount of crude oil allowed in the room with it, you could make a refinery.

I'm not sure it would be power efficient, but it's worth a thought.

[Neotuck]

Just now, crypticorb said:

I just had an idea spawned from that comment. With the new high thresholds of overheating, you can technically refine crude oil directly with machines that can handle the high temperature.

A crude example, if you use a tepidizer made from thermium and pulse it based on a simple automation toggle, and fine tune the amount of crude oil allowed in the room with it, you could make a refinery.

I'm not sure it would be power efficient, but it's worth a thought.

if you can refine oil at a rate that can supply one or more generator I think it would be power efficient

[JukedByLife]

8 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I just had an idea spawned from that comment. With the new high thresholds of overheating, you can technically refine crude oil directly with machines that can handle the high temperature.

A crude example, if you use a tepidizer made from thermium and pulse it based on a simple automation toggle, and fine tune the amount of crude oil allowed in the room with it, you could make a refinery.

I'm not sure it would be power efficient, but it's worth a thought.

I am aware of the tepedizer trick but I don't like to use these things as they remove a lot of the difficulty. I saw a thermium aquatuner based boiler, which would be fine, but I'm nowhere near rockets so that's not really in the cards.

6 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

if you can refine oil at a rate that can supply one or more generator I think it would be power efficient

If you're ok with using the pulse clock on a tepedizer then you can create a turbine setup that produces more power then it uses but this removes a lot of the fun IMO.