Perpetual Gas Generator 6000

[ChickenStealer]

This is my very first design and it manages to generate a continuous 6000 grams/sec of natural gas using 1584 watts. I tried to look up other designs on this forum just today and found nothing comparable. 

 

It utilizes some thermodynamics to heat the oil and cool the gas in one single loop.

 

 

Here you can see the pump that outputs 6000 grams/sec of crude oil into the system, and the rest is handled by gravity and gas pressure. The crude oil in this case started out as -9 Celsius, heats itself up to 527 Celsius and the last part is done by the aquatuner. The sour gas travels back and cools itself down by the incoming crude oil.

 

In case the crude oil started at some higher temperature, this design would be able to produce more gas but I have to add in the part where the liquid methane helps cool the sour gas, which I was  too lazy to make.

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Here is a little followup, the methane helps in the cooling process and outputs at -7.5 Celsius which is where you would like to have it.

[ChickenStealer]

s

 

Here is a little followup, the methane helps in the cooling process and outputs at -7.5 Celsius which is where you would like to have it.

 

This thing can be scaled down by using a Thermo Regulator instead of the aquatuner and making it smaller. It would produce around 1500 grams/ sec for merely 700 watts.

[ChickenMadness]

nice. Love designs that work with minimal use of machines.

[Lifegrow]

5 hours ago, ChickenStealer said:

This is my very first design and it manages to generate a continuous 6000 grams/sec of natural gas using 1584 watts. I tried to look up other designs on this forum just today and found nothing comparable. 

As I said to you on your Youtube comments - these figures are a little vague. 

1584 watts constant? 1584 watts per cycle? 1584 watts for 20 seconds? Need a little more info ideally bud. Also, a quick search of the forums would find you a dozen similar builds from months ago.

[Saturnus]

5 hours ago, ChickenStealer said:

... using 1584 watts.

Just how exactly can a single aquatuner and single pump use 1584W? Surely the absolutely maximum power this should consume is 1440W. Or are you counting in the 144W a liquid pump at 60% is working off screen but are neglecting to count all the things that is also needs for this to even work. Like the 2880W 12 gas pumps would use that you'd need to make any use of the 6kg/s NG for a start.

[Carnis]

I think it demonstrates rather nicely how much easier mass natgas is with thermium aquatuner heat & cool source with supercoolant.

It is very far from optimised as far as heat exchanger or coolant piping is considered, but it doesnt need to Be..

.. since The aquatuner can be used at both sides of the process, its simple. Far simpler build than what we did before with magma.

I think its simpler than what lifegrow built, so If it really Works - then bravo.

[Daxterr]

2 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

As I said to you on your Youtube comments - these figures are a little vague. 

1584 watts constant? 1584 watts per cycle? 1584 watts for 20 seconds? Need a little more info ideally bud. Also, a quick search of the forums would find you a dozen similar builds from months ago.

How about you just be happy for him, bud?

[Soulwind]

It's really nice.  So are most of the other builds I've seen.  Most of them have one glaring flaw though (imo):

they all seem to rely on thermium and super coolant.  By the time I've got enough of both of those, I would expect

that most/all of my power generation issues have already been resolved.  I've seen old school LOX systems and

oil boilers that don't need space age materials (from back before we had those materials), but I don't think I've seen

a methane or an H2 liquidizer that doesn't use super coolant.  Not even sure if it can be done without SC.  [I've never

gotten one of my bases that far along.  I always find a reason to start a new base].

 

[JukedByLife]

20 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

It's really nice.  So are most of the other builds I've seen.  Most of them have one glaring flaw though (imo):

they all seem to rely on thermium and super coolant.  By the time I've got enough of both of those, I would expect

that most/all of my power generation issues have already been resolved.  I've seen old school LOX systems and

oil boilers that don't need space age materials (from back before we had those materials), but I don't think I've seen

a methane or an H2 liquidizer that doesn't use super coolant.  Not even sure if it can be done without SC.  [I've never

gotten one of my bases that far along.  I always find a reason to start a new base].

 

Methane is easily done w/o super coolant. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is not. I have tried but was unable to devise a way to cool it to condensation without breaking pipes.

[Craigjw]

Really efficient design.  There are plenty of other designs, perhaps you are searching for the wrong phrase.  Try searching for Natural Gas boiler.

Lifegrow recently posted a build for Oil to NG, however it isn't quite as simple, but it does utilise the heat with a steam engine, making it self powering and also possibly uses a lot less super coolant, which by all accounts isn't that easy to get in large volumes.

You might want to place the liquid valve for the oil flow on the outside of the condenser, as in survival mode, not sandbox, you would have a hell of a job to change the flow rate without spoiling the internal gas mixture, which I'm sure relies on it being pure.

A screenshot of the piping overlay would be useful.

 

[ChickenStealer]

3 hours ago, Carnis said:

I think it demonstrates rather nicely how much easier mass natgas is with thermium aquatuner heat & cool source with supercoolant.

It is very far from optimised as far as heat exchanger or coolant piping is considered, but it doesnt need to Be..

.. since The aquatuner can be used at both sides of the process, its simple. Far simpler build than what we did before with magma.

I think its simpler than what lifegrow built, so If it really Works - then bravo.

Thanks for your feedback. To be honest, the heat exchanger was the part that I was the most proud of. It gets the input oil to 527 degrees without the need of any heating, and it takes the sour gas from +-560 degrees to  -121 (out of my head) before getting cooled. In case this could be improved upon, I would very much like to learn how. Can you maybe give me an example where they show how it's done?

52 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

Really efficient design.  There are plenty of other designs, perhaps you are searching for the wrong phrase.  Try searching for Natural Gas boiler.

Lifegrow recently posted a build for Oil to NG, however it isn't quite as simple, but it does utilise the heat with a steam engine, making it self powering and also possibly uses a lot less super coolant, which by all accounts isn't that easy to get in large volumes.

You might want to place the liquid valve for the oil flow on the outside of the condenser, as in survival mode, not sandbox, you would have a hell of a job to change the flow rate without spoiling the internal gas mixture, which I'm sure relies on it being pure.

A screenshot of the piping overlay would be useful.

 

Thanks for the tip about the valve. This build was made as a proof of concept before I did any optimizations on it. As for the steam turbines, in the current build of this game, they can generate energy all on their own. But from a thermodynamics perspective, there is no need to convert the heat into electrical energy first because of the entropy and the loss.  In this build about 93% of the energy is fully utilized to heat the incoming crude oil which makes this so efficient.  

The result is quite accurate, because in the build you sent me there are 2 aquatuners required to process 500g/s each. Mine does 6000g/s.

2 hours ago, Soulwind said:

It's really nice.  So are most of the other builds I've seen.  Most of them have one glaring flaw though (imo):

they all seem to rely on thermium and super coolant.  By the time I've got enough of both of those, I would expect

that most/all of my power generation issues have already been resolved.  I've seen old school LOX systems and

oil boilers that don't need space age materials (from back before we had those materials), but I don't think I've seen

a methane or an H2 liquidizer that doesn't use super coolant.  Not even sure if it can be done without SC.  [I've never

gotten one of my bases that far along.  I always find a reason to start a new base].

 

Thanks for your interest. This concept can also be applied with hydrogen gas and the air coolers. It will in that case simply produce less, because of the heat produced by those machines. With 2 of those air coolers I would be able to produce about 3000 grams/sec although considerable amounts of tweaking is required. Thermium is required for the boiler no matter what and can be easily multiplied with the smelter to also include in the pipes.

I do however have a water boiler that could completely skip the thermium and only lose a little bit of efficiency.

 

[Craigjw]

I would dread to make Lifegrow's NG boiler on survival mode.

[ChickenStealer]

5 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

As I said to you on your Youtube comments - these figures are a little vague. 

1584 watts constant? 1584 watts per cycle? 1584 watts for 20 seconds? Need a little more info ideally bud. Also, a quick search of the forums would find you a dozen similar builds from months ago.

To help you to the right direction, a watt is a unit of energy per time that an object constantly produces or uses. Your computer might be running at an average of 200 watts. That is not 200 watts per cycle but just 200 watts. The wattage of 1584 is the sum of what is used by all components. 1200 for the aquatuner, 240 for the pump and another 144 for the supply pump that is on 60% of the time.

[wachunga]

It's a good first effort that demonstrates how to heat crude into petroleum to get high preheat temps in order to increase throughput. The problem is the math doesn't add up. Turning crude into SG makes excess heat due to SHC differences. You can account for that by dumping the heat into the NG, but the temp will be much higher than the stated -7.5C. Alternately a steam turbine can be used to delete heat.

It's all well and good to tinker and test things in debug, but it should be clear that this isn't a survival build for a number of reasons. How do you start it? How do you stop it? Where is the automation to prevent overheating or overcooling? What if you don't have crude to dump your heat into? What if you don't have super coolant to dump your cold into?

Keep tinkering and build upon what you have here.

[ChickenStealer]

2 minutes ago, wachunga said:

It's a good first effort that demonstrates how to heat crude into petroleum to get high preheat temps in order to increase throughput. The problem is the math doesn't add up. Turning crude into SG makes excess heat due to SHC differences. You can account for that by dumping the heat into the NG, but the temp will be much higher than the stated -7.5C. Alternately a steam turbine can be used to delete heat.

It's all well and good to tinker and test things in debug, but it should be clear that this isn't a survival build for a number of reasons. How do you start it? How do you stop it? Where is the automation to prevent overheating or overcooling? What if you don't have crude to dump your heat into? What if you don't have super coolant to dump your cold into?

Thank you. That is a very good question actually and I am happy to answer it.Bare with me, it will make sense in the end.
 

The excess heat of a liquid aquatuner is actually very minimal. The vast majority of the heat it creates is from the liquid it is supposed to cool. Since it is a closed loop, the oil will not overheat and the coolant will not get too cold because it is the same amount of heat that is being moved around. In case the machine runs too cold, you can simply reduce the efficiency of the heat transfer from the methane to the sour gas to let the methane out at a few degrees higher.

The idea of how this can be applied in survival is that you slowly turn it on by adjusting the amount of crude oil dripping in until you eventually get to 6000 grams / sec. Once you got it running, you simply convert all the crude oil you can find on the map for later use and optionally hook it up to one of those oil reservoirs.

[Lifegrow]

3 hours ago, Daxterr said:

How about you just be happy for him, bud?

We've had a previous dialogue in my YT comments already sweetheart, hence me referring to it. Take your white cloak elsewhere, friend  

2 minutes ago, ChickenStealer said:

To help you to the right direction, a watt is a unit of energy per time that an object constantly produces or uses. Your computer might be running at an average of 200 watts. That is not 200 watts per cycle but just 200 watts. The wattage of 1584 is the sum of what is used by all components. 1200 for the aquatuner, 240 for the pump and another 144 for the supply pump that is on 60% of the time.

Right. 

So, now that you've established what your figures relate to - you can roughly calculate the cost to run per cycle.

1584w * 600 seconds / 1000 = KJ usage per cycle - i.e how much power your entire build consumes over 600 seconds.

Now add to that the cost of running 8 pumps continuously to move your 4000 grams of natural gas per second (when you factor in the lost mass to sulfur) at a rate of 144kj per pump, 144 * 8 = 1152KJ

So all that considered your running cost is ~2102 kj per cycle. (including delivering the gas to natural gas gens/storage)

Do you understand ?

If you have a constant 4kg/s of natural gas, you can feed ~44 natural gas gens constantly - generating approximately 21,120KJ

Deduct your running costs and everything else is profit  

[ChickenStealer]

11 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

We've had a previous dialogue in my YT comments already sweetheart, hence me referring to it. Take your white cloak elsewhere, friend  

Right. 

So, now that you've established what your figures relate to - you can roughly calculate the cost to run per cycle.

1584w * 600 seconds / 1000 = KJ usage per cycle - i.e how much power your entire build consumes over 600 seconds.

Now add to that the cost of running 8 pumps continuously to move your 4000 grams of natural gas per second (when you factor in the lost mass to sulfur) at a rate of 144kj per pump, 144 * 8 = 1152KJ

So all that considered your running cost is ~2102 kj per cycle. (including delivering the gas to natural gas gens/storage)

Do you understand ?

If you have a constant 4kg/s of natural gas, you can feed ~44 natural gas gens constantly - generating approximately 21,120KJ

Deduct your running costs and everything else is profit  

Oh thanks, I haven't played this game very much so I have the habit ignoring cycles and calculating everything with watts and seconds. For example, I always remember that a duplicant uses 100 grams/sec of oxygen, instead of the 60kg per day. But your way makes more sense because days are easier to count and plan ahead for. 

Anyways, I think we all leaned a thing or two. Good luck with your upcoming builds.

[Lifegrow]

1 minute ago, ChickenStealer said:

Oh thanks, I haven't played this game very much so I have the habit ignoring cycles and calculating everything with watts and seconds. For example, I always remember that a duplicant uses 100 grams/sec of oxygen, instead of the 60kg per day. But your way makes more sense because days are easier to count and plan ahead for.

No worries at all, I wasn't trying to be offensive, was just expanding on what we'd already discussed.

With more complex builds, the running costs start getting confusing, especially if you have setups where a component might skip a cycle (i.e. an aquatuner that only toggles once every 3 cycles, or a steam turbine that is intermittent) - so calculating the running costs on a daily basis using the in game reports (plus letting your build run for a good few cycles once stable) can help you get a fair average.

It's very easy to get caught up in misleading figures, only to find out something gets borked after 10 cycles of running, etc.

All my recent sour gas builds are currently borked on the QoL update for example due to temp shift issues  

[wachunga]

In order to heat 1g of -9C crude to 527C requires about 910 J. That will cool 1g of 550C SG down to about 70C. This is due to the difference in SHCs of crude (1.69), petroleum (1.76), and SG (1.898). From 70C you need to cool the SG down about another 235C to -165C in order for it to condense. The aquatuner can do about 20C (you heated the petroleum from 527C to 550C SG, the cooling will be a bit less due to SHC differences). Which leaves about 410 J to be absorbed by the NG. That amounts to raising the temperature of the NG by about 280C (only 0.67g of NG is produced per 1g of SG and NG has a SHC of 2.191). So your NG would output at like 115C.

That's all assuming you have your heat exchangers set perfectly which is easier said than done. There is a lot of thermal mass hiding this, let it run more and you'll see what I mean.

[ChickenStealer]

26 minutes ago, wachunga said:

In order to heat 1g of -9C crude to 527C requires about 910 J. That will cool 1g of 550C SG down to about 70C. This is due to the difference in SHCs of crude (1.69), petroleum (1.76), and SG (1.898). From 70C you need to cool the SG down about another 235C to -165C in order for it to condense. The aquatuner can do about 20C (you heated the petroleum from 527C to 550C SG, the cooling will be a bit less due to SHC differences). Which leaves about 410 J to be absorbed by the NG. That amounts to raising the temperature of the NG by about 280C (only 0.67g of NG is produced per 1g of SG and NG has a SHC of 2.191). So your NG would output at like 115C.

That's all assuming you have your heat exchangers set perfectly which is easier said than done. There is a lot of thermal mass hiding this, let it run more and you'll see what I mean.

This makes me rethink the entire build again. It worked as long as I ran it, and I assumed that it stabilized at my current values because nothing really changed afterwards. In case any troubles occur, like the sour gas being to hot because of built up pressure, the natural gas would soak that up before leaving the system. Optionally, I can transport the cold sulfur buildup to soak some energy as well.

Remember that with the current thermo shift plates the temperature of the gasses equalize, so whatever heat the sour gas has left after heating the crude oil will be soaked up by the natural gas leaving. It is even possible to let the natural gas heat exchange go all the way to the boiler. Would that solve the problem? 

[wachunga]

57 minutes ago, ChickenStealer said:

It is even possible to let the natural gas heat exchange go all the way to the boiler. Would that solve the problem? 

Sure. NG generators don't directly care how hot the gas they burn is. When sour gas was introduced a couple months back there was a lot of discussion about these things. Running the NG all the way to boiler to absorb more heat is one of the things you can do. But that adds some complexity, are other solutions "better"? Sour gas boilers are interesting because of how many different problems you have to solve and how many different solutions there are. Everyone is going to come up with something at least a bit different from others. I would recommend searching the forums for ideas and continue to tinker and test your own unique build.

For example, Neotuck has a similar build to yours with the petroleum falling down to a heat source. He did his before super coolant so had to use thermo regulators.

 

[Carnis]

I see wachunga already calculated that this does not indeed work without pasted supercoolant.

Heres one that is overly optimised & complex, but Stable.