heating High temperatures with the Glass Forge and Metal Refinery - lossless!

[Sevio]

Hi everyone, I'm back with another build. This one was inspired by @QuQuasar's Oilboiloiler a.k.a. Olliebollie. (The Mk2 version is pretty cool!)

Although I will probably stick with just using the oil refinery in my survival games, I really liked the use of the glass forge to achieve the high temperatures that Aquatuners cannot! I also remembered a thread by @Aronia showing how to run a steam turbine using heat from the metal refinery. So I thought I would combine these two and see how well I could trap the heat they generate so you can use it for something useful!

I still consider this proof-of-concept rather than a finished build and I've only got a working title: Glass Refinery Turbine. But it certainly traps heat very well!

Overlays in the spoiler:

Spoiler

If you put a metal refinery or a glass forge in a normal base, the liquids inside (even the molten glass that waits briefly inside the glass forge before it gets put into a pipe) lose some of their heat to the surroundings. This build uses a special vacuum room for both the glass forge and the metal refinery to make sure none of the heat they put into the liquids is lost to the surroundings. However, the refinery and the glass forge still need cooling since they also heat themselves up.

At first I thought this wasn't possible but after some testing I came up with the room you see in the picture. While buildings will exchange heat with all tiles they occupy, it appears resources inside them will exchange heat as if they are debris sitting in the central bottom tile of the building.

There are two tiles of insulated abyssalite below the glass forge and the metal refinery. The liquids inside the buildings will exchange heat with those tiles and the tile above that. As long as the floor there is insulated abyssalite and the tile above is vacuum, the liquids inside will not change temperature. A little bit of petroleum on the other tiles in between is then enough to cool the buildings and conduct the waste heat out through normal tiles.

Now on to dealing with the hot liquids we get. The molten glass is dumped into a petroleum pool, put on a rail by an auto sweeper and cycled through the bath so it gives off most of its heat quickly. At night, the airlock door above the sweeper opens and allows the glass to be put on a different rail out of the room. Likewise, the hot petroleum coming out of the metal refinery will cycle through the pool, give off its heat and go back in the metal refinery.

Above that there is a self-pressurizing steam turbine build with 4 ports blocked which will turn all of the generated heat into useful power and lets none escape to your base! That's just one possibility though... If you kept that molten glass stored in pipes, you could send it through the metal refinery, heat it up even further and easily boil some oil with it! Or you could pump some magma into pipes and heat that up further in the metal refinery. With a large enough heat buffer that makes sure your glass/magma doesn't solidify, you could use the metal refinery as the primary heat source for oil boiling if you wanted.

If you want to poke around the build, have a look at the save file!

 

Glass Refinery Turbine.sav

[Miravlix]

Factorio had this saying that anything containing loops was 0/10.

 

I think we need one for wiggly pipes, like the output one for the glass forge, so 0/10 until that is fixed.

 

The transport arm handling the glass just after it stops being 14xxC seems like it would overheat?

[Sevio]

4 minutes ago, Miravlix said:

Factorio had this saying that anything containing loops was 0/10.

 

I think we need one for wiggly pipes, like the output one for the glass forge, so 0/10 until that is fixed.

 

The transport arm handling the glass just after it stops being 14xxC seems like it would overheat?

I have no idea what you mean about loops being bad and needing fixed.

The autosweeper handling the glass doesn't overheat because it's in vacuum. It is also cooled by the drop of petroleum on its right, which is connected to tiles leading to the base. Everything in the glass forge room and the metal refinery room is below 30 C.

What will overheat (eventually after a long time) are the conveyor loaders, they won't take on any heat from the glass but they will eventually heat themselves to the point of breaking. That takes a very long time (I've ran this thing for about a dozen cycles so far and it hasn't heated up much. They are also easily deconstructed and replaced with a fresh version.

[Lifegrow]

Autosweepers still gather heat within a vacuum - only the central tile heats. You're diagonally venting it to the outside, but it would need cooling.

Funky looking build though bud, not sure how practical it is as I can't have a play with the save at current - but looks a little more interesting than just the glass on it's own.

Still only functional with a throughput of glass though, which makes me doubt how useful it'd actually be - seems to me there are better alternatives in the game already that can produce a much better result without worrying about utilising the minuscule amount of heat that a glass forge produces.

[Miravlix]

2 hours ago, Sevio said:

I have no idea what you mean about loops being bad and needing fixed.

The autosweeper handling the glass doesn't overheat because it's in vacuum. It is also cooled by the drop of petroleum on its right, which is connected to tiles leading to the base. Everything in the glass forge room and the metal refinery room is below 30 C.

What will overheat (eventually after a long time) are the conveyor loaders, they won't take on any heat from the glass but they will eventually heat themselves to the point of breaking. That takes a very long time (I've ran this thing for about a dozen cycles so far and it hasn't heated up much. They are also easily deconstructed and replaced with a fresh version.

The loops was about factorio, where we had a religious war over looped rail designs. This lead to everyone joking about loops not related to trains.

 

In ONI the joke translate to pipes with more bends than needed. Basically a pipe should always have only 1 bend, clean straight lines. As Bill Gates once said, if you can't make it good, make it look good.

 

Thing overheat in a vacuum, because it can't transfer touch heat into the gas/liquid it's in.

[Sevio]

Have you tried the save? I mentioned before the auto sweeper does not overheat and it is still at ambient temperature of the nearby tiles after many cycles despite handling loads of glass.

[Sevio]

I finally got around to building this in survival! For the most part it wasn't too hard to build (having this thread to work from as a blueprint helped though), I first built the turbine section with an oxygen feed pipe maintaining 2 kg pressure in the area, after closing up the hot plate it is probably best to vacuum the oil tank below and start building out the rest in vacuum from the liquid lock towards the oil tank.

Overlays in the spoiler:

Spoiler

Abyssalite tiles shown with the insulation outline:

Layout is slightly different after I realized I could just heavi-watt wire everything down through the hot plate's vacuum area and back up to the glass forge and metal refinery. I also made some changes to keep both the auto sweeper and the loaders permanently cooled using stacked crude and petroleum. Instead of refining lots of petroleum, I just pumped some crude oil into the heat buffer.

The turbine and oil tank are surrounded by abyssalite, the glass forge and refinery room is all igneous rock to absorb the waste heat from the machinery in there. One difficulty with keeping specific tiles clear of liquid is that duplicants actually mop the tiles next to their target as well so there is less petroleum on the glass forge and refinery than in the debug build, but it should still be enough to deal with any waste heat.

For now the turbine is disabled, if/when I use the refinery often enough, it will heat the crude into petroleum and then I can start extracting energy. I might get enough use out of it for that if I want to build my other similar project, the Meteor Magmaficator...

[Oozinator]

Using plastic ladders in that area is risky, you are brave. ^^
The right room with the MR, is not heating up?

[Sevio]

It heats up slightly from the metal refinery's waste heat production but since that part of the room is made of igneous rock it will be cooled by the surroundings. The petroleum in the pipes can only give its heat to the crude oil tank.

Here's an outline of the tiles that are abyssalite:

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Sevio

Looks very cool! Great you went the extra mile and build it in survival game, that's always a nice "proof of concept" 

Please get it in working order as well in survival this would be real proof on concept (no apostrophes). ;D

And never mind the factorio comparison! Quite different game imo. 

Cheers!

[suicide commando]

I'm curious though, where does the excess steam go?

 

[Sevio]

1 minute ago, suicide commando said:

I'm curious though, where does the excess steam go?

 

There's no constant input of water needed, that liquid vent is only to get it up to pressure at the start. It's a self pressurizing steam turbine build, the oxygen in the room gets pushed up by the steam and fights with the steam for the turbine's top 5 blocks, so as long as pressure below the turbine is about 4-5 kg the turbine will run.

The automation for the liquid shutoff is there so you can control when and how much water you want to put in, and in case the steam turbine deletes any gas. (but I've ran turbines like this in debug for quite some time and there wasn't any gas deletion)

[suicide commando]

Ahhh.. Sneaky! Using Oxygen like that.