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.

Solo dev here working on Overrefined, a refinery game where flow and heat transfer are simulated instead of running on recipes. This is the planner I just added for heat exchangers.

How it works

You enter the fluid you want to heat, its flow, and the temperature it starts at and needs to reach. Then you pick the hot fluid you'll heat it with and how hot that is. In the screenshot, that's 6 m³/h of diesel going from 20 to 60 °C using water at 80 °C.

The planner tests every exchanger tier twice: brand new, and after fouling (the gunk that builds up in the tubes and cuts heat transfer over time). On each bar, the triangle is your target, the filled dot is where the exchanger gets when new, and the ring is where it gets once fouled. It recommends the smallest tier that still reaches the target when dirty, and tells you how much hot fluid each working tier needs.

This example has a few non-obvious results. Tier 2 works when new and fails as it fouls. Tier 3 falls short even when new. Tier 5 needs a lot less hot water than Tier 4, because a bigger exchanger pulls more heat out of every litre.

What I'd love feedback on

• As a mechanic: does a planner like this help, or does it take away the fun of figuring it out yourself? Would you rather unlock it later, or have it from the start?
• The look: it's going for a retro industrial control panel style. Does it read clearly at a glance? Are the dot, ring and triangle obvious without the legend?
• What's missing: is there anything you'd want it to show or let you do that it doesn't?

Any thoughts welcome, including "this is too much".