The Easiest Petroleum Boiler ever? <Insert derpy name here>

[0xFADE]

Very very nice.  I do love using things in unintentional ways. 

[Glassyfo]

18 minutes ago, Yunru said:

You could just exploit mini pump detection/operation areas.

Does that still work? I tested it with magma the other day and it couldn't detect liquid.

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, bleeter6 said:

Does that still work? I tested it with magma the other day and it couldn't detect liquid.

Yes. It has to been a certain way round though, not just sideways.

[Arcus2611]

7 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

I've tried for several minutes to think of any possible way that using the phase change of one material would give a more accurate temperature reading than a device specifically designed to measure the temperature and the only thing I can come up with is that you could possible type in the wrong number for the sensor.  So yeah, I guess that's a risk. 

The temperature sensor only measures the temperature for its tile. The risk comes from the heat being distributed unevenly.

[Craigjw]

I went to space 1/2 dozen times until I could bring back some niobium, then I created an oil boiler, it's no where near as elegant as this one though; I'm thinking of just rebuilding.

As Yunru suggested, a door could be opened to a cooling pool when the temperature reaches a threshold.  The input oil is heated by the hot petrol.

28 minutes ago, Arcus2611 said:

The temperature sensor only measures the temperature for its tile. The risk comes from the heat being distributed unevenly.

The issue I came across using supercoolant to register temperature is that if too much is used, it will be slow to heat up.  I've tried using supercoolant to register the temperature in a heatsink attached to a volcano, the metal tiles will heat up to 500c, while the supercoolant is still climbing at 400c, meaning that the metal tiles get too hot for a while. 

[Nitroturtle]

59 minutes ago, Arcus2611 said:

The temperature sensor only measures the temperature for its tile. The risk comes from the heat being distributed unevenly.

Yeah honestly it's not really an issue.  I have it placed between the ATs and the temperature stays pretty uniform through the pool.

[Sigma Cypher]

Nice job @Lifegrow.  Why are the aquatuners on mesh tiles?  I believe you did this in previous methane cooking build too.

[Craigjw]

I had wondered about the mesh tiles also, I assumed it is there to stop heat transfer to the surrounding insulating tiles through it's lower tiles the same way a liquid storage breaks the lower left pipe due to tile contact.

On a completely different note, how do you link the user tag, eg @Lifegrow?

10 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

Nice job @Lifegrow.  Why are the aquatuners on mesh tiles?  I believe you did this in previous methane cooking build too.

I have also just noticed my promotion to old bastard Senior Member.  Do I get a free bus pass?

[biopon]

17 hours ago, Arcus2611 said:

The temperature sensor only measures the temperature for its tile. The risk comes from the heat being distributed unevenly.

Yeah... that's not a risk. If you want to justify this build, how about the fact that when it was created, temp sensors were limited to +300 Celsius. Right now you can just stick a temp sensor in the liquid near your output pump and you're done.

17 hours ago, Craigjw said:

The issue I came across using supercoolant to register temperature is that if too much is used, it will be slow to heat up.  I've tried using supercoolant to register the temperature in a heatsink attached to a volcano, the metal tiles will heat up to 500c, while the supercoolant is still climbing at 400c, meaning that the metal tiles get too hot for a while. 

Just use some hydrogen gas and a temp sensor with your volcano? And in the boiler's case, a temp sensor in the petroleum?

[Craigjw]

1 hour ago, biopon said:

Just use some hydrogen gas and a temp sensor with your volcano? And in the boiler's case, a temp sensor in the petroleum?

There is a heatsink on the oil which has rail delivery of igneous from the volcano, so I'm using a metal tile heat sink to absorb the heat from the volcano at a slow rate, so that I don't cook the oil and ruin the vacuum.

I recently managed to cancel the job order on a pitcher, so that a small dose of super coolant is used, this works better than petrol, however, due to the low volume and subsequent phase change, the temperature of the supercoolant jumps strangely, but it seems to work ok.  In the case of using super coolant as a medium for some form of temperature measure, less is better than more.

[biopon]

1 minute ago, Craigjw said:

less is better than more

My point exactly. None if it is best, as it's not needed anymore. You can measure the temperature right within the petroleum. 

 

Right temp sensor to cut off heat (by opening mech doors) at 450 degrees. Left 2 temp sensors (AND-ed together) to make sure temp is above 405 (to ensure phase change happened), but frankly after building this I know one would have been enough. Also AND-ed is the left hydro sensor set to 100kg, and the right hydro sensor controls the shutoff that lets more oil in. Hard to make out is the vent on the right side, covered by oil.

My heat source is rockets, but I imagine yours could be built very similarly. As fun as lifegrow's contraption is (and I am a fan of his stuff in general), it's needlessly complicated nowadays.

[Sigma Cypher]

Congrats on your promotion @Craigjw!  Just start typing the name after the @ and a pick-list will appear.  You have to actually click on a name in the picklist for the link to work.  If you missed it you might be typing the name too fast.

@biopon - what do you have above the mechanical doors?  More metal tiles under the rocket silo?  Do you have a great big heat sink there?  Is the silo vented to space?  My silo walls are hovering around 200C, except right after a launch, which would make my petroleum cooker work rather infrequently.  I wonder what we are doing differently.

[biopon]

5 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

More metal tiles under the rocket silo?

A whole lotta mess, sir!

It *used* to be alternating vertical columns of iron tiles and tempshift plates, but I decided to move rocket automation down there to make use of the space. (And having rocket automation around the head of the rocket itself makes changing the height of the thing a major PITA.)

So let's pretend it's still alternating columns, which for a large part it still is. The bunker tiles just below the rocket get the most heat exposure by far, these easily jump up above 600c when launching a H2 rocket. I have a horizontal row of diamond plates just below to conduct the heat down.

The vertical columns are iron tiles and igneous tempshift plates. Iron, beceause it doesn't matter much as the metal tiles are only there to conduct heat between the tempshift plates (as there's no plate<->plate heat transfer). And igneous, because it has a decent ability to store heat and I needed a lot of it:

The control doors are thermium above the boiler (pretty sure it's overkill), and the plates around the doors are diamond. The boiler's walls are tungsten which was maybe overkill? I sometimes have periods after rocket inactivity where the entire right hand side of the boiler is well over 405c but the pump on the left hasn't kicked in yet because it's still below 405c there. 

With regular launches it's easy to keep the boiler going around the clock. Even though I suspect I'm losing a lot of heat to the multiple 25+ ton chunks of regolith sitting on the hangar floor (per tile), but I dread that cleanup project, and I don't have a good way to deal with the space trash either.

The outgoing petrol is too hot even for steel pumps to handle so whatever doesn't get turned to sour gas I cool it in that oil chamber (and preheat the oil at the same time), both are 200-ish degrees for me in the end.

It's fun to tinker with, but I have trouble balancing the sour gas part as that whole process is largely heat-neutral in the end, Since my input is so hot, I have way too much cooling from the tuner and struggling to find ways to keep the coolant above the freezing point of methane. 

I haven't even begun to seriously think about capturing the steam from the rocket so for now I just let it all vent. 

 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

On 4-1-2019 at 11:28 PM, SamLogan said:

I see a lot of ideas to transform crude oil in petroleum with a boiler. But what about the cooling system to manage it? Because, how you pump it without the new metals?

 

Assuming you are just using steel, there are infact options. First of all, the low fruit cooling is using the input oil to cool down the output petroleum. This will simultaneously cool the petroleum and heat up the oil for conversion. If your system is optimal in the heat exchange, you will already get fairly close or even right below steel building overheat temperature tresholds.

If additional cooling is needed, you can use thermo aqua tuner set ups, or an AETN.

Like Yunru said, compartmentalize into different chambers. One chamber for heating and conversion, one chamber for cooling and one chamber to dump the cooled petroleum into. Make sure the whole plant is vacuum and at the very least ceramic sealed (there will be people telling to vacuum seal it, but ceramic insulation will do the job too).

[SamLogan]

3 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Assuming you are just using steel, there are infact options. First of all, the low fruit cooling is using the input oil to cool down the output petroleum. This will simultaneously cool the petroleum and heat up the oil for conversion. If your system is optimal in the heat exchange, you will already get fairly close or even right below steel building overheat temperature tresholds.

Really interesting, I'll test that.