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I was reading and checking code of heat exchanger and furnaces. my idea was to use heat coming from nuclear reactor (via heat pipes) and use it in furnace to smelt plates. in theory it would look like a steel furnace using heat instead of fuel without additional power requirement. if furnace is active (has ore in it) then it shall draw heat from heat pipe. if it has no ore then it shall not use that heat (which could be wasted anyway)
I could not understand the logic behind heat transfer around heat exchangers and furnaces so this is a question if the game even supports such a thing.

did anyone try that (or failed)? if you tried and failed, I would like to know as well.

There's this furnace using nuclear fuel. Not exactly what you wanted, but just added to the thread in case.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/NuclearFurnace

My try to make the heat furnace, just Nuclear Furnace

This is on my to-do list for Adamo Cinefaction. It's a bit niche, and heat pipe connections are hard to get right, so it has been low priority.

Unrealistic. Especially for the furnaces (much higher temperatures needed than 1000 C). For chem plants... Well, not really either - usually reactions require certain specific temperatures, and reactors' temp tend to fluctuate. The idea itself is attractive, but IT'S A TRAP!!!

Yandersen wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:37 pm

Unrealistic. Especially for the furnaces (much higher temperatures needed than 1000 C). For chem plants... Well, not really either - usually reactions require certain specific temperatures, and reactors' temp tend to fluctuate. The idea itself is attractive, but IT'S A TRAP!!!

I agree to an extent, however, physically speaking, heat can be concentrated. It's possible to take in 500C and turn that into a region of 1000C, for example. So while I get what you're saying, I think I will still, eventually, add this to Adamo Cinefaction, which already allows us to use heat to do chemical reactions. (It would be nice if I could change temperature/energy demands based on recipe, though. This would be helpful both with chemistry by heat and smelting by heat. )

Yandersen wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:37 pm

Unrealistic. Especially for the furnaces (much higher temperatures needed than 1000 C). For chem plants... Well, not really either - usually reactions require certain specific temperatures, and reactors' temp tend to fluctuate. The idea itself is attractive, but IT'S A TRAP!!!

...you can suspend disbelief in surviving a crash from orbit that completely destroyed a spaceship without serious injury or death, in pollution-triggered insect attacks, in hand-mining iron and copper, and in a person-portable fusion reactor, but you can't manage this?

Seriously, though, you can do all sorts of magic with heat, pressure, and speed. Using steam to generate colder-than-ambient water, or even freeze it, seems pretty magical to me. I know it is not just possible, but well understood, but ... I still can't make it seem logical, y'know?

Though in this case, yeah, the limits on heat pumps mean that you probably just want to use a heat engine to turn that heat into work, and the work to heat the furnace, since your maximum theoretical efficiency is below 1.

AFAIK recipes can have temperature range requirements for fluids ?
No idea about heat-pipe temperature...

BlueTemplar wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:15 pm

AFAIK recipes can have temperature range requirements for fluids ?
No idea about heat-pipe temperature...

I think they can, yes, although I would need to check the prototype to be sure. But there's no way for a building that is powered by heat, directly, to have different temperature requirements on the heat supplied to the energy_source in the prototype as a function of recipe; at least, not one I'm aware of or can find in the prototype definitions.

If there was something similar to the emissions_multiplier in the recipe prototype, like energy_source_temp_multiplier, then we could set the temperature on the crafting machine prototype's energy_source to some round number, then just multiply that for each recipe to the appropriate temperature. But I can't find any way to do that as is.

Hmm, in Factorio modding you can do superposed entities, right ?
(Like AAI Industries' electric-powered offshore-pump + pump...)

And 0.17 has allowed to use steam for powering assemblers...

So maybe combine a heat exchanger, an infinite water source, and a steam-powered assembler/furnace in the same entity ?
(That won't help with the temperature range requirement I guess, not even if you use the very same steam in the recipe...)

BlueTemplar wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:29 pm

I did think about that, but essentially this would require the need to create an entity for each possible input temperature. I just think it would be better to try for a feature request than to do so much work for a hacked solution. What happens in the case you talked about, and in other cases, is that the "placement" entity is replaced by the new entity in its spot using a control code. I have some control code scripts out there, but making them introduces many new points of failure that I try hard to avoid. It is, ultimately, a possible solution, though, yes.

I've released a mod that does this:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/heat-furnace

The minimum operating temperature is only 500C. This is so you can run it using chemical fuel in my Heat Processing mod, which only rises to a bit above 500C. But, the energy requirements of this furnace are twice that of a steel furnace (and therefore the same as the electric furnace). Without doing any calculations at all (meaning I do not know that I am correct), I considered that a reasonable-enough starting place to model concentrating the heat from 500C to the 1000-1200C needed for direct reduction smelting. The energy requirements are probably more than that, depending on how you think the energy is being used internally, but, it's just a game, after all.

As for the heat requirement, heat of a heat pipe is only dependent on energy supplied and editing the heat_buffer attribute, so a custom high-temperature "superinsulateds pipe" or whatever is possible. The Advanced Nuclear mod edits heat pipes and nuke reactors (and turbines).

I was going to post more but Adamo already added his furnace mod.

Adamo wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 16, 2019 2:18 pm

I've released a mod that does this:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/heat-furnace

thanks a lot. I shall try it when I can.