Steam Engine Input Rate (Fluid Disposal)

[JasonC]

What is the maximum amount of cold fluid per second a steam engine can dispose of?

What if the engine is under no electrical load?

The wiki doesn't say (https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=Steam_engine).

I'm designing a refinery and in the absolute worst case I'll have to dispose of a tiny amount of petroleum gas (1 per second).

[JasonC]

The answer is that a steam generator can dispose of 6.0 fluid / second. Also it does not matter if the generator is connected to anything, and any pumps between the fluid source and the generator have no effect.

Two in series or parallel will discard 12.0 per second (I verified with test below although it is not shown in the images).

I tested with the following experiment (0.12.29):



Pumps were placed to load the tanks then unload them into the generators, using the constant comparator in the middle as a load / unload switch. The tanks were filled to capacity then the test was started. There are 3 pieces of pipe between each tank and its generator, this was needed for spacing. A pump was placed both before and after so that only the tanks were filled (not the pipes) and that all the fluid was drained from the pipes at the end (although it doesn't really matter, the generator does pull the fluid out on its own). The average flow rate was measured over time, the displays below show thousandths of fluid per second:



For all cases the resulting flow rate was 6.0. The display are slightly higher because it is an average over time and initially fluid rushes out of the tanks to fill the pipe sections (rate is measured as fluid lost from tank over time). The gratuitous numeric displays (yeah I could've just read the signal values but, you know) were borrowed from here.

I did not run the test with heated liquids.

So, yeah. I'll add the number to the wiki.

[Griffon0129]

The steam engine can use any type of liquid to generate electricity. This can be used to get rid of unused oil-products. Just fill unusable oil products into a steam engine and it will destroy the liquids (cold liquids will be destroyed at a rate of 6.0 fluid / second).

That is from the wiki link in initial post unless you or someone else edited it since then.

My question is why you would need to dispose of any oil products? if anything turn it into solid fuel(that is always useful if you don't need anything else).

My main curiosity with this is what if you heat up the oil and send it through the steam engine? (if that's possible) Is that more efficient than water (and WAY more expensive)?

[Koub]

All liquids are equivalent when used in a steam generator. Only temperature matters.

[Tepalus]

It has not that much to do with this topic but i thought it would be a waste, if i start a new topic...

I have a very simple question but did not find the answer in the wiki or on google.
How much energy does 1 engine generate at max. water and 100C°? And in which ratio will this be decreased when the temparature and water go down?

Very important question when you will start to make a separated electric network for laser turrets

[Koub]

How much energy does 1 engine generate at max. water and 100C°? And in which ratio will this be decreased when the temparature and water go down?

Each steam engine has a maximum power output of 510 kW (it's written on the tooltip in the crafting window). If I'm correct, it varies then linearly with fluid temperature and fluid level.
Thus a steam engine generates 510 kJ every second.

[JasonC]

The steam engine can use any type of liquid to generate electricity. This can be used to get rid of unused oil-products. Just fill unusable oil products into a steam engine and it will destroy the liquids (cold liquids will be destroyed at a rate of 6.0 fluid / second).

That is from the wiki link in initial post unless you or someone else edited it since then.

I added that.

My question is why you would need to dispose of any oil products? if anything turn it into solid fuel(that is always useful if you don't need anything else).

I just designed a refinery that outputs lubricant, solid fuel, and petroleum gas for general use on demand as needed. It works awesome, and is extremely efficient in both electricity and oil usage. It also provides maximum burst production rates. However, in the rare case (which hasn't actually happened yet) that it needs to produce lubricant or solid fuel but there is no use for petroleum gas, it still outputs 12 petroleum gas / second as a by-product after the petroleum gas tanks are full. I need an automated way to take care of that. I have enough tanks that I've never had to burn it but if I do the options are (this is worst case, which again I haven't had to deal with yet so so far no fluids disposed outside of testing):

• Create more tanks. But I'd have to create one more tank every 208 seconds of refinery run time.
• Convert to solid fuel, but this requires 18 chemical plants to handle 12 gas/second, and would have to scale proportionally if I scale up the refinery. It'd be more chemical plants than for any other purpose, and takes up a ton of space.
• Burn it, with two steam engines.

While I don't like waste it's the most space saving and fire-and-forget option of the above. Additionally since I don't actually produce extra petroleum gas right now (I use it for making batteries and plastic, which I use plenty of), it's not worth it to me to add a whole extra section of the refinery to convert the extra into solid fuel.

In the future when I need to scale up solid fuel production I'll do it via light oil and the rest of the refinery, unless at that point I'm not making a lot of plastic or batteries any more (which I doubt; I go through plastic like water all the way through the end game). If I need to add a petroleum gas -> solid fuel section I can, but not until it's worthwhile. The ratio of crude oil -> solid fuel is best via light oil, so that's where I'm keeping solid fuel generation for now.

On the other hand I could leave a larger buffer of empty space in my petrol gas tanks and convert the extra to solid fuel at a much slower rate, maybe 4 or so petrol -> solid fuel plants. That should work too as long as I'm not producing lubricant/plastic for a really long period of time without using the petrol, which is pretty realistic. I'll think about that.

The burn-off is literally for "emergency" situation. The refinery tries to use everything it can as efficiently as possible but at some point there's a final product that nothing more can be done with; in this case it's petroleum gas. Even if I converted it to solid fuel I'd still have the same problems once solid fuel storage was full (although I'd have to build more storage at a much slower rate and chests are small, so not quite as annoying).

My main curiosity with this is what if you heat up the oil and send it through the steam engine? (if that's possible) Is that more efficient than water (and WAY more expensive)?

That's a really good question. Yes it is possible. I have a good sandbox level that I can test this with. I'll let you know.