Coal to plastic (liquefaction setup)

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vanatteveldt
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Coal to plastic (liquefaction setup)

Post by vanatteveldt »

I have a world with too little oil and enough coal, so I decided to build a coal -> plastic converter:

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It converts just under a red belt of coal into 450 plastic/m. The only circuitry is a pump before the heavy cracking which activates if heavy > 10k. The rest functions non-stop and the ratios are fairly good apart from the overcapacity of heavy:

Image

You need to prime it with one or more barrels of heavy oil, but after that it should work and always keep some heavy oil in buffer. Input is from the left, but it is easy to switch that around.

If you build this near your nuke plant you can remove the steam engine in the top right, but it doesn't really help that much compared to the coal intake of the refineries, and it is nice to keep the unit isolated.

(Adding prod3 modules would make this setup a lot more coal efficient (about 2 coal : 1 plastic instead of the current 4:1), but of course that also changes the design and ratios a lot and I don't have prod3 modules yet in my current base :) )
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Minbaru
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Re: Coal to plastic (liquefaction setup)

Post by Minbaru »

Thanks for the blueprint. I have the same issue in my map. Question though how did you calculate the percentages? What math did you use?

vanatteveldt
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Re: Coal to plastic (liquefaction setup) [now with ratios]

Post by vanatteveldt »

Minbaru wrote:Thanks for the blueprint. I have the same issue in my map. Question though how did you calculate the percentages? What math did you use?
I have to admit I just fiddled the numbers in Helmod until they were about right :).

I'm sure it is really just a system of equations, but working that out on paper for me would be way too much like work and not enough like fun.

Edit: however, being me, of course having said that I coulnd't stop myself.

Equations:
r = # of refineries, h=# of heavy->light cracking plants, l = # of light -> pg cracking plants

Setting input equals output for heavy and light oil (so no rest product, i.e. all oil is converted to PG) yields two equations:

Heavy: (10/5)*r = (40*1.25/3) * h # heavy output from r refineries equals heavy consumption of h heavy cracking plants
Light: (15/5)*r + (30*1.25/3)*h = (30 * 1.25/3) * l # light output from r refineries and h heavy cracking plants equals consumption of l light cracking plants

Now you can fix any of the amounts and get the correct numbers for the other amounts. E.g. to reproduce above, lets set r to 10.8 and feed it to Wolfram:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=( ... ,+r%3D10.8

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Which matches the figures from helmod. Setting h to 3 gives what seems to be exact ratios: refineries:heavy:light = 25:3:9, or about 8.3:1:3.

[as a bonus, you can also easily check the normal refinery:cracking ratios by changing the light production from 15 to 45, giving the accepted ratio of 8.3:1:7; https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=( ... *+l,+h%3D1]

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