Coolthulhu: You’re right about hydrogen but a workaround might be to just not have gaseous hydrogen exist at all. It could just be abstracted away by attaching the electrolysis device directly to the reactor and turning water directly into syncrude and assuming that the hydrogen can’t be recovered from the process. The electricity aspect can be done away with also by adding a generator object to the assembly.
Valpo: It has to start somewhere. AFAIK factories are going in at some point and this is arguably the most necessary type of factory to create.
JCD you’ll have to forgive me but I’m going to try to address your wonderful post in three parts! You have to remember that this is just a game and that the real world companies that make this equipment aren’t black-box supermen. They use the same tools you use (a welding tool) in the case of reactors, columns and other vessels and have the same expertise you can pick up from books and papers. You have to keep in mind that all of this has been achieved by multiple countries in the 40s and 50s back when they didn’t have access to our modern precision tools.
[quote=“jcd, post:4, topic:9027”]It seems a bit out of reach for one survivor to build.
Elaborating:
About hydrogen:
Electrolysis should certainly be possible given time and energy, but the rest don’t seem easy.
I found from the .doc you provided the moles of H comparable to that of C (~2:1 moles to make gasoil and naphtha)
It means that for ~1kg product you’d need 2/13kg hydrogen, the rest being carbon.
This means 23m3 (a room) just for storage of 1kg hydrogen, or having to use pressurized Hydrogen.
(as an ideal gas, i calculated that 2/13kg of Hydrogen stored in a container of 1m3 will have to be pressurized at ~3.6bar)
(Gas density of hydrogen: 0.085 kg/m3 @ 1.013 Bar and 15°C)
From this, i surmise that it will be possible to store small quantities of hydrogen, in large tanks, pressurized at doable pressures.
But for the actual creation of the syncrude, i see 750–800oF and pressure 3,200 psig!!! This is clearly too much for a survivor to handle.[/quote]
Your math looks right to me. I disagree with the last sentence though. I’ll change the electrolyzer design to be more feasible for a survivor. Here is some background:
Here is the process the Germans invented during WW1 which utilized hydrogen pressures of 20-70MPa. As far as I understand they used precision machined compressors to achieve those pressures. Modern day high-pressure electrolysis can be achieved without the use of a compressor by simply filling a electrolyzer with nafion (or any other proton exchange) membranes. You could realistically find these in any lab because they’re used very often for lab-scale separations of hydrogen. There were boxes of them in every nano lab in my school.
Those conditions you listed were regularly achieved by a bunch of regular German dudes at the turn of last century with very primitive equipment and knowledge. While it would be very scary and impossible for most New Englanders to attempt to build pressure vessels of those specs you have to remember that this is CDDA we’re talking about and not real life. Some players (namely I) would enjoy playing a Nicola Tesla type of a mad scientist practicing a very unsafe and unethical type of engineering with no civilized world to place restrictions on their work.
In conclusion I feel it’s better to modify step 1.5 to answer your very valid point with science voodoo:
Stack electrolyzer created with superalloy and proton exchange membranes looted from labs in the presence of a charged welding tool.
[quote=“jcd, post:4, topic:9027”]Now for the distillation:
Two story buildings are problematic, as will be the (required for distillation) temperatures of 350C without burning the syncrude. (you’d need zero oxygen in the fuel)
- you need to upgrade the resulting naphtha & gasoil as they will contain sulfur and will be having pretty low octane/cetane numbers…
I’d love to see the appropriate machinery inside faction bases though. They might be a nice critical resource.[/quote]
I feel like it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch at this point to hand-wave away the dirty specifics of column design and assume total purity of the feed for the purposes of CDDA. The zero oxygen bit is as simple to achieve as making the column air tight and throwing away the initial bit of burnt sludge at start up. I don’t really care to look up how much oxygen can be dissolved in oil, but I’m assuming that the answer is sufficiently minuscule.
Maybe we can say that for lore reasons the CDDA cars are capable of running on much dirtier fuels hence no need to upgrade the naphtha. Here is an unverified forums guy who says he did this to his old car for laughs.
Faction bases are great, but I feel this is something a player should be able to attempt on their own. Think of how mad max you’d feel once you can sell gasoline to your friends and shift power dynamics of the wastes singlehandedly.
[quote=“jcd, post:4, topic:9027”]On the other hand, i’d much more support biofuels than synthoil. Afaik these are much easier to produce than synthetic petrol.
Afaik biodiesel is ridiculously easy to create from pretty much any organic oil (used or unused) + lye + heating at ~50C.
For bioethanol, the procedure is about fermenting sugars, then distilling them and using the product like gasoline.
Taking into account the lower calorific value of biofuels compared to petrelaic products, i’d say a rough equivalence of 1:1,5 petrelaic:biofuel would be valid (if we go that far in simulating this)
EDIT- fixed an error at the calculation of pressure.[/quote]
I’d love me some biofuels! The more fuels the merrier.
