EMAIL: kaustin@tgn.net NAME: Kirk A. Austin TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Small Plains Refinery COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: 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.