Metal refinery overheating

[valenti_scott]

Hello-
I have a metal refinery which has been overheating. I'm hoping to get some tips on how to keep it from overheating.

I am cooling the refinery with a pool which contains mostly water, and some polluted water. I also have a bin of ice and snow in the pool of water, to help cool it down.

The water in the pipe which is about to enter the refinery currently measures about 50C. The environment around the metal refinery currently has a temp of around 50 or 60C.

The current temp of the refinery itself is 62C. I understand that it overheats at 75C.

Currently the machine is disabled and awaiting repairs. I also noticed that it leaks coolant when it is damaged by overheating.

The expelled coolant normally goes back into the coolant pool, to be pumped back into the refinery. The size of the pool is about 20 tiles; as I said above, mostly water with some polluted water.

The last time the machine overheated, I deconstructed it, re-built it, and assigned it to produce iron, and then it overheated again very quickly. This time I will have it produce just one unit of iron, and I will keep an eye on the machine.

I'll add a signal switch so I can shut of the machine when needed without delay. In the mean time I thought I could get some comments from you all. Thanks.
-Scott

[cswiger]

It is very likely that you recycled coolant that was too hot to safely use and had it convert into steam in the output pipe. Once that happens, the pipe breaks and the mess will heat up the whole area and the refinery itself.

If your coolant is mostly water, you will see a 33 C increase in temp for iron and 56 C increase for steel, meaning your input water ought to be ~40 C or below to be safe.

The output from the refinery can be consumed by a SPOM or by hydroponics, or you can send it to a pond with a pitcher pump and consume it for research. (But use insulated tiles for the last.) You can also send it to a storage tank, although that only gets you a dozen runs of the refinery.

To run it longer term, you either need to have a source of cool liquid like a p-water vent or slush geyser, or you need to use a coolant like crude oil which can be heated above 125C safely. Then you can cool it in a steam chamber via steam turbines (or via an aquatuner/AETN/etc, I suppose).

Don't repair it; deconstruct it and rebuild cleanly. That helps reset the temperature downwards. If you notice the problem beforehand, you can also try to empty storage.

[Hedning]

If you use petroleum as coolant you will get a much higher tolerance for heat, and since it can be heated well above 125°C before turning to sour gas you can cool it with a steam turbine to recycle some power: https://i.imgur.com/dYUFpKt.png

[valenti_scott]

Thanks for the ideas; this is helping me to figure out what is going on.

[JasonS]

Try building the Metal Refinery out of Ceramic, that will bump the overheat temperature up to 275 degrees.

[Xilo The Odd]

when starting out i use polluted water for my first bit of coolant, it doesnt boil into steam until past 119C. if you can pull it from a cold area or by melting P ice to feed the pump for it, you can use that twice for steel refining before sending it to be cooled. just dont try and sieve it odds are it'll be hot enough for normal water that it'll flash to steam. i typically try to get it back down to 70C ish and then send it to my SPOM. that way i keep some of the heat energy after converting it back to water without much gain when its electrolized.

[Gamefever]

Build a massive radiator, trim the top/bottom or longest length of a cold biome right off.
Shave it off, replace the missing tiles with air flow tiles, run pipes and vents through that....Over the top of that cover the "hot side" with insulation.

This gives you hundreds of turns of free passive cooling.

I stack mine 4 air flow tiles high.
Zig zag the pipes through the tiles and now you will drop your heat right into the cold biome.

You can cool down just about whatever you want.

Polluted water would be chancy coolant but I would not run regular water in those pipes cause it could freeze right inside. I'm running ethanol in those pipes freezes at sub 500C. My coolant shaves off about 15C when it runs through, but I could get it lower with liquid shut off valves if I needed too.

Pro's

Cheap materials,
Low Tech solution,
Lasts for hundreds of turns
Creative use of liquid bridges and liquid reserve tanks means this system costs no watts.
Biome only has too be colder than needed temperature, meaning if the desired temp is 75C you dont actually need an ice biome to provide cooling.

Cons,
Requires a lot of materials
Takes a long time to build these things are massive.

[Gamefever]

Anyway, water coolant temp just has too lose 20, 40,or 50C from 110C for polluted water coolant.

All it has to do is run through most available biomes except magma or oil biome.
So you could build a radiator just about anywhere to drop the heat from the water.
It just has to be long enough of a run, maybe use automation liquid temp checks and liquid shut off valves to re route water back to the heat exchange line before it reaches the metal refinery.

You do not have to use metal liquid pipes either, since normal pipes made out of sediment exchange heat with contents really well and given that you run these pipes for a long enough length of distance through a heat exchanger made out of metal.

If the coolant is 110C an your running steel, you need a long enough line running through a radiator to drop about 50C, its easier if it runs through much colder biomes.
But almost all biomes are about 30-40C, which is plenty of zones to exchange heat with.

[Joman]

Originally posted by Hedning:

If you use petroleum as coolant you will get a much higher tolerance for heat, and since it can be heated well above 125°C before turning to sour gas you can cool it with a steam turbine to recycle some power: https://i.imgur.com/dYUFpKt.png

Doing this could also generate some extra power! Depends on the metal you want to smelt. Weird thing!

[valenti_scott]

Thanks for the replies. I am planning on using crude oil or petrol as a coolant, but I am only now starting to exploit the oil biome.

In the meantime, I am still using a mix of mostly water and some polluted water as coolant. I am cooling the liquid both by a couple of bins of ice, and also snaking the pipes through a room with wheezeworts in it.

I am smelting steel one unit at a time, in order to keep an eye on the coolant temp. So far this method is working.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by valenti_scott:

Thanks for the replies. I am planning on using crude oil or petrol as a coolant, but I am only now starting to exploit the oil biome.

In the meantime, I am still using a mix of mostly water and some polluted water as coolant. I am cooling the liquid both by a couple of bins of ice, and also snaking the pipes through a room with wheezeworts in it.

I am smelting steel one unit at a time, in order to keep an eye on the coolant temp. So far this method is working.

if you get enough refined metal, making a pipe temp sensor + shut off valve you can set a limitation on how hot the water going to your refinery can be. add a filter and you can make sure only one fluid type goes to the refinery like P water and its higher temp tolerances. then your normal water can be put elsewhere or used as a way to cool down the P water.

i'll run a setup of a big tub of normal water that is slowly filled by making ice temp shift plates and any spare water i dont need in a big bowl, then i run my coolant pipes for the refiner through that, set the refiner so that the water allowed cannot be hotter than a certain temp else it goes into the loop to be cooled down again. knowing that above 119C P water will boil off into steam, i jsut take the amount steel production adds to the fluid used and subtract it from that + -1C more for safety. so teh fluid going in will never be too hot for the process.

but yeah once you got oil and petrol to cool with it becomes a lot easier and then cooling the fluid is as simple as running it through water to make some steam turbines run.

[valenti_scott]

Thanks for the idea about using p-water, the sensors, etc.

[Gamefever]

So I just wrestled with it today, and didnt want to snake a line through a radiator.

So what I did was basically filled a large area with water/polluted water it was about half an half cause I did not feel like fixing that.

Now the metal refinery takes about 50-60 blips aka 50-60X 10KG packets of liquid, I used crude. Filled each refinery up counting out to 10 while raising a finger for each one an their you go the metal refinery is filled, switch off the liquid pump.
Now the metal refinery itself has liquid intake and outbound piping....Loop them with radiant pipes made out of iron or gold, running those pipes through a bath of water, salt/brine/polluted/water does not mater just water.
That water will soak up the heat and become steam but the gain here is that you can run a lot of steel through those metal refineries.
In the long run you put steam turbines above that massive water that is above the metal refineries and that means you never have to lose the cooling water and net some extra watts.

[valenti_scott]

We've uncovered a pool of crude, about 200 tiles-or-so of unpressurized oil. I'm using this to cool a metal refinery, as well as feeding an oil refinery and oil generator.

The output coolant from the metal refinery, after making steel, for now, is just dripping back in the pool of crude. I realize that over time the pool of crude will start to heat up and I'll have to do some kind of cooling.

[ATM_Reaper]

What I tend to do is tunnel down to the bottom of the map and free up all the oil down there then you have a huge pool of oil, I pump it directly into the metal refinery which is located down there with the oil and make enough iron and then steel to make an industrial building with a cooling loop (normally filled with petroleum). After that I just let it run.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by ATM_Reaper:

What I tend to do is tunnel down to the bottom of the map and free up all the oil down there then you have a huge pool of oil, I pump it directly into the metal refinery which is located down there with the oil and make enough iron and then steel to make an industrial building with a cooling loop (normally filled with petroleum). After that I just let it run.

yeah pretty much this, once you've made enough steel you either physically cannot anymore or the total sum of loose oil in the oil biome gets too hot, you have the makings of a large cooling facility for materials.