TITLE: Small Plains Refinery
NAME: Kirk A. Austin
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kaustin@tgn.net
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: karefine.jpg
ZIPFILE: karefine.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray 3.01 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Terrain Maker, paper, calculator

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours, 11 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    IBM Aptiva S78 200MHz with 32 MB RAM under Windows 95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This image is a representation of a small plains refinery. Represented within
it is a crude oil distillation tower, a delayed coker, desulfurization
processing, a fluidized catalytic cracking unit and a heavy oil cracking unit,
a platformer unit, a catalytic reforming unit, and a light ends fractionation
plant. You will also find a representative sample of heat enchanging and
piping systems, which ferry the fluids from one plant unit to the next.
In order to provide a reasonable overview, a great deal of piping and
superstructure was omitted from this image, in order to highlight the main
focus of the refinery, the reactors and fractionation columns.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


When I first saw the topic for this round of the competition, 'Great
Engineering Achievements,' my first thought was that the greatest
achievements are overlooked. In reality, one of the greatest engineering
achievements that we have yet encountered is, in fact, the advances of
chemical fractionation and the establishment of refineries across the world.
The reasoning for this is, these systems have made possible life as we
currently know it. Crude oil and natural gases are almost entirely useless
substances as they are brought out of the ground. However, once these
are fed to a refinery, these mixtures are removed of impurities, split
into various fractions, reacted to increase the value of non-useful molecules,
and then blended to form such products as light gases (methane, ethane,
propane), gasoline and diesel fuel, and lubricants of all types. Combining
this with the fact that a number of refinery products become feedstocks
for chemical plants (ethane to be converted to polyethylene, for example)
indicates that without these systems, plastics would have never revolutionized
the world. Indeed, an entire branch of engineering (Chemical Engineering)
arose specifically from the needs to understand and build such complex systems.

I spent several days attempting to plan out each piece of equipment
individually, starting on paper and gradually testing each idea in
separate sections. A great deal of the image is made up of manipulations
of cylinders to one extent or another. I believe that only the roads
ended up being unique objects, the rest are all compilations of several
unions.

I first started out with the propane splitter (the two tall towers with
a P-shaped overhead draw), as this was the most unique thing which came
to my mind. The main body of the tower is a cylinder, capped with half of
a sphere. The majority of the work, however, came into designing the
platforms which occur about every twenty feet along the tower. Each ended
up being a cylinder, with a railing made from CSG differences and rotated
support beams. In addition, ladders constructed from cylinders run between
each level. The overhead draws were achieved using quarter tori which were
spliced onto cylinders running back and forth.

After setting these two towers, I modified the design slightly, removing
the P-shape bend, for use as a template for the remaining towers within
the refinery.

Once this was accomplished, I focused upon the delayed coker. Its furnace
is deceptively simple in design, utilizing cones and hollow cylinders to
build the smokestacks. The entire structure is raised off of the ground by
a number of concrete pillars, to allow piping to run underneath. The coking
drums were set using another cylinder-sphere union, and the scaffolding-type
superstructure was set using several rectangular boxes. In order to reduce
the amount of typing, I created an object for one level and repeated it
up the tower. Note the railing on the top platform.

The two cat crackers were designed in a similar way. I find the rightmost
one to be the better of the two. Each of these units has a rack of heat
exchangers and several fractionation columns, keeping in line with the
actual design of these systems. The right cracker has a vent stack rising
out of it, providing a stream of steam, which was a nice touch.

The platformer and reformer units are both simple, I used two seperate
tower designs for each, one of which has two partial platforms which I made
by clipping the cylinderical platforms with boxes. These are actually
very small towers in comparison, being modeled to be only about 30 feet
tall. (I used a convention of 1 unit = 1 foot for this design). The 
platformer reactor is a combination of a furnace made from several boxes
and a more detailed reacting drum placed on concrete supports and surrounded
by a set of steel box scaffolding. I then repeated the reactor block
four times to give the right size and level of repetition.

The desulfurization unit (center of the image, back row) was created from
two rows of five small coking drums, which are very close in actual appearance
to the desulfurization drums I was trying to represent. Each row also has a
set of heat exchangers, made from cylinder-sphere unions with some added
details to model the actual units. A furnace can't really be seen in the
image, which is producing the steam from behind the middle towers.

The crude tower, (far left, next to a darkened furnace) was created in
much the same way as the other towers. The platform tower just to its
right was created in the same format as the scaffolding on the coker, I
created one level from a number of boxes, and then repeated it up to the
top of the tower. Railing was of course added to the top platform to stop
people from falling off.

The pipe racks running through the image were created on a small scale and
repeated throughout, changing the scaling as needed to give the height
to cross roads, and stretch out so that support pillars weren't cluttering
the place. These are made from the difference of three boxes, with two top
cement lips and five cylindrical pipes laying across the rack.

The storage drums are cylinder-and-cone constructs, with the the outside
earthen dam being the difference of two cones, and granite texturing added.

The hills in the background were made with Terrain Maker, nicely provided
by a friend who knew how to use it. The sky was done via a sky sphere with
a custom star field and some nice high level clouds, for a fairly clear
yet humid-night look.

The steam I could be a little more thrilled with. Due to time constraints,
I was forced to remove several other streams which I'd placed (the furnace
to the left of the crude tower, notably). Overall, it adds to the image,
I would say, and is certainly needed to touch base with reality.

The light interplay was performed using lights on each of the towers, as
well as on the atmospheric tower and the coking drums. I created a small
'lantern' object (more of a lightbulb, really), and used looks_like to
have this give off light in a more realistic manner than using some point
source (or other type) elsewhere in the image. Each of the lanterns which
can be seen from the camera position should be visible, as I set the
ambient on them to 1. As I mentioned, these are the only light sources
in the image, and have created some interesting complicated shadows.


