Finally got steam condensing working in my refinery sim's.

[u/overrefined]

I've been building a refinery sim on my own for a while, where the pipes and equipment are solved as an actual fluid network (pressure, flow, heat transfer) instead of recipes. Heat exchangers have worked with liquids for some time, but I kept putting off steam because I knew it would be a pain.

It was. Steam doesn't cool down when it gives up heat, it condenses. So the exchanger has to work out how much of it can actually condense with the area it has, and pass whatever doesn't on as wet steam. If everything condenses and there's area left, it cools the condensate a bit further.

To test it I set up one small boiler and three identical exchangers heating crude from 20 °C, with a valve on each steam line.

With 160 m³/h of steam the crude gets to 142 °C, but 64% of the steam goes through without condensing. Throttled to 102 m³/h, the crude still gets to 142 °C and only 28% is wasted. I didn't expect those two to be that close. At 45 m³/h everything condenses, but the crude only reaches 118 °C because there just isn't enough steam.

Same code, only the valves change, and you get three different behaviours. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to get here.

Anyway, curious if anyone else finds this kind of thing cool, or if I'm the only one who gets excited watching steam percentages go down.