Mantis: perpetual glitch-less free-energy Steam Turbine in-a-box (portable).

[Boxman_90]

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Changelog

20 Dec '18: V1.2 released

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I had to repost as the previous thread derailed quickly, very sorry about that! Glitch disclaimer below!

It took a while, but I think I've figured out a unique portable perpetual Steam Turbine setup using Aquatuners, fully self-contained within a box, producing power while destroying heat and using zero fuel. I've avoided all the glitches that break the spirit in which the components are supposed to be used (cycling tepidizers / oil-air pocket / hydrogen offsetting steam pressure).

I called it "Mantis"

• No fuel required (no magma, steam vents or anything). Works with Water, Polluted Water and Super Coolant but consumes none.
• No glitches (fast cycling tepidizers / tepidizers in oil with pocket of air / hydrogen to offset steam pressure)
• No overheating-but-not-breaking
• Perpetual self-sustained operation
• Fully self-contained and self-cooled
• Perpetual heat destruction
• Viable build by dupes (check the end of the vid! :D)

Adding the same disclaimer I added to the vid:

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Glitch Disclaimer: I do not believe port blocking is a glitch, as the Dev's specifically designed each port to take 2kg/s and to have throughput decreased by 2kg/s as each individual port is blocked - I assume that's intentional. However, let there be no mistake that the Steam Turbine itself is most definitely bugged! I mean, we're clearly violating conservation of energy :D. The power output should obviously drop as ports are blocked.

I have, however, avoided all other common glitches in this build (tepidizers, overheating, helium coverage, one-hot-tile glitch) such that all components operate to their intended spirit.
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Let me know your thoughts and suggestions! It's still in further development.

Here's the vid:

Relevant screenshots of Mantis V1.1

General components

 

Power overlay

 

Plumbing overlay

 

Automation overlay

 

Ventilation overlay

 

Bonus: Temperature overlay

 

[Oozinator]

Wow cool, i smell 8 exploits ^^

[karyuendan08]

Nice build.

 

obs: disable desinfect at your refinery

[Sigma Cypher]

I'm still learning the ropes and could use some help understanding the power distribution.  For example, I don't understand the function of the two small generators.  The primary side comes from the turbine and the secondary feeds the primary side of large generator.  Can't you just go right from the output of the turbine to the primary side of the large generator?  You said something about isolating the batteries - I want to understand that bit too.

Speaking of batteries, how did you decide that 6 batteries per turbine were needed? It is not clear to me why ~240 kJ of storage is needed for a turbine generating 2 kJ/s.  That's like 2 minutes of down time for the turbine I think?

Finally if you could share the filter and buffer settings for the door pump that would be awesome. 

[Boxman_90]

Good questions! I used the two small generators to limit the power (1000W) to the battery stack to 2000W, the max output of the generator itself, so that no damage occurs in the wires. You’re correct that you could connect the generator straight to the batteries, though then I’d need to use Heavi-Watt wires or overloading occurs. And then I'd have to give up some isolation for a metal Heavi-wire connection plate as Heavi-watt doesn't run through the isolation tiles. I haven’t checked how much heat would actually leak out, but that’s why I went with normal wires + turbines.

Essentially this isolates the batteries – they operate on a 20kW grid so I don’t have to worry about overloading them. I wanted to make sure that everything inside the box can’t possibly break. On the outside I can then put on a load of however many Watts I want (well, max 8000W) without having to worry about damage

As for the batteries; I’m a sucker for symmetry, so I filled up the remaining space with as much battery as I could It’s just a buffer, you don’t need it, but if you have more buffer I can overdraw the box for a while without killing the perpetual cycle (the Aquatuners run through the batteries, not directly from the turbines).

I’ll get on the filter settings when I get home, and will post a detailed screenshot! Should be about 6 hours or so, stay tuned!

[mathmanican]

You have an error in your spreadsheet. The input temp is correct at 500K (so about 226.9C), but the output temp is actcually 425K (151.9C), not 176C. If you pause/unpause the game often enough and check the 5 tiles at the top of the turbine, you'll see a cell with this temp with a quantity of steam around 2079.9g (picture below). In addition, those who dig into the code can easily tell you that 425K is the hard coded output temp. 

Spoiler

Note the "151.9C" output temp of the steam, while everything else in the region is much hotter. 

This change makes Delta T = 75, not 51, which means a single aquatuner processing water is not quite enough to run the turbine constantly (though it will work quite often). Super coolant is of course sufficient if you block 4 ports. 

Great video. It's a great example of turbine that uses a door pump to maintain the pressure, and aquatuner/tile blocking to keep up the temp. I added you to the list of examples in my "Steam Turbine, Everything you need to know" thread (trying to keep links to all posts about the turbine in one place). 

Spoiler

 

Thanks for the video.  I hope you find some new cool things about the steam turbine.

[Boxman_90]

That's some excellent info. I read on this forums somewhere about the 176C number, though that must be outdated then I guess. So with absolute certainty in the current game version, the output temp is 425K? Guess I'll go make some rockets to get Fullerene. It could be adapted to three aquatuners and still be continuously perpetual, there's quite a large power overhead. Less power output though. I'll re-run the numbers and adjust the effective output power. Seems like it'll be more like 1000W continuous instead of 1600W.

Thanks for the add to your list

[mathmanican]

44 minutes ago, Boxman_90 said:

So with absolute certainty in the current game version, the output temp is 425K?

Yep. 

44 minutes ago, Boxman_90 said:

It could be adapted to three aquatuners and still be continuously perpetual, there's quite a large power overhead. Less power output though. I'll re-run the numbers and adjust the effective output power. Seems like it'll be more like 1000W continuous instead of 1600W.

Yep. Three water processing aquatuners could definitely keep 2 turbines running (provided you block 4 ports on each), though the output power would be very minimal.  At that point, I'd definitely think of the "Mantis" as a water cooling plant, rather than a power plant.

On a side note, unblocking the ports might not stop this thing from running, provided you are OK with near vacuum conditions on some of the ports. If at some point Klei makes port blocking illegal, there is a fix.  See the following thread for more info. You could even use this idea to cut down on the power cost to keep the turbine running, as the hot tile and high pressure tile, do not have to be the same tile. 

Spoiler

If you add an aquatuner by the tempshift plates in the build above, and the aquatuner runs for a few seconds every cycle (or less often - just enough to keep the petro hot), then you can keep the temp well above 500K. You'ld have to move the small transformers in your build down a bit (maybe swap out some batteries), but you could easily do it.

Exploity? Hmmmmmm. Well, let's just say it obeys every steam turbine rule, as the devs created them...

 

[Sigma Cypher]

Thanks Boxman I understand about the power generator choice.  

Different question or comment -  I read on these forums that steam deletion happens if you don't leave an open row above the turbine, and you have 3 tiles that might delete steam.  I wonder if your comment about it being ok to leave 50g in each tile instead of pumping to pure vacuum is because of that deletion, and I also wonder if you wouldn't need to drip in 100g/s of water if you just opened up those three tiles above the generator.

I've built a few of these (not this exactly but very similar ones mathmanican and others have posted) for heat deletion -- not for reliable power generation like this one -- and I never worried about overheating the steel aquatuners.  I used temp shift plates behind the aquatuners and a sensor on the input to keep from freezing the coolant (which usually limits the duty cycle) - maybe that's why and maybe I just got lucky.

You have motivated me to revisit the turbine and use it as intended instead of just as a big heat sink.  Your tepidizer idea to keep this going makes me think we can do both reliable power and meaningful cooling at the same time - just not with supercoolant (because it would take too much of it).

[Boxman_90]

Ah, I had not come across the steam delete glitches yet. I'm not sure if mine deletes steam, haven't checked - it might explain why the last bit of my air staying didn't matter or not, or that may have been something else. Or maybe the deletion only happens directly above an active tile.. Really not sure, I'll check it out!

The dripping in of 100g of water is only to get enough steam in, in the end you should be able to turn it off. It need quite a lot of steam before the door pusher pushes enough new steam down - the door takes 20-ish seconds and needs to supply 40kg of steam each push then.

[mathmanican]

I compiled all my research into steam deletion in a sub post on the thread I pointed to above. 

Spoiler

 

Your build will definitely delete steam if you have any other gas in there besides steam, but only periodically (depends on when/if the left over gas enters the far left/far right top 3 tiles. If you just open these three spots above each turbine, you won't see any steam deletion.

[Boxman_90]

Thanks! Currently there's no other gas in my setup. I vacuumed to several grams (though I'm not 100% sure anymore, the 10g i mentioned in the video might have been wrong/higher than I actually did) and got bored, so just started it up - the remaining gas was somehow removed and all tiles are now steam. I'll check out your research now

Also ran the numbers real quick with the new temperatures, and it's a tiny bit short, about 42 kDTU/s with one Aquatuner per Steam Turbine. Currently this means the setup has a theoretical maximum turbine 'uptime' of 93.2%, or effectively producing 664W surplus each (instead of 800W), which comes down to a total of 1328W for Mantis. In reality it'll be a little less as the steam never enters at exactly 226.9 but rather slightly above, destroying some extra heat in the process.

It's only short a tiny bit, but it's viable to add another Aquatuner. My gut feeling too told me that the power requirements would demote it to a glorified water cooler, but here's why I like always running numbers so much - my gut feeling was wrong! The duty-cycling automation salvages it and cuts the average power requirement back down. With the turbine now at 100% uptime and the Aquatuner optimally controlled to shut-down above 226.9C, by my calculations the Aquatuners only need a duty-cycle of 53.6% to break-even, resulting in a net average output of 1425W. Interesting note, adding more aquatuners would not change this output number since their duty-cycle would just be reduced accordingly.

You could even re-scale the setup to incorporate the minimum 100% uptime requirement of 1.07 aquatuners per turbine. But the setup would grow significantly.

So, recap of power output figures for water and super coolant:

• One 100% Duty Cycle Aquatuner per turbine w/ Water: 1328W total average output.
• Two or more Aquatuners per turbine, automation controlled duty cycle: 1425W total average output.
• One or more Aquatuners per turbine on Super Coolant: 2725W total average output.

Could be worth the hassle for the 100W bump in output (and for my green-bar OCD), so I'll see if a future version might fix this  Though only if I can get it done without harming portability.

@Sigma Cypher, I've added all relevant screenshots (with automation timings) in the first post  You should be able to reproduce it with this. Let me know if you do!

[Sigma Cypher]

I did it!  Well, mostly.  I see I am having temperature problems with the right turbine now, probably because I didn't take your advice and used the heavy watt junction, which kind of blows for heat insulation but saved me a little room.  I'll change it back. Now I just have to figure out how to add heat to my polluted water pool before the AT freezes the output pipe.   I also got @mathmanican 's magic free energy machine going (to the right) -- in creative mode ofc.

Thanks again for posting this. 

[Boxman_90]

@Sigma Cypher, Totally missed your post, very nice! Great to see the setup being used

In the meantime, I'm releasing Mantis V1.2 for the adventurous builder; it features a machine-room 'basement' where a petroleum-cooled Metal Refinery is setup - the Refinery on the steel recipe is power positive and turns the Mantis into a Refinery-based power plant. It's an expansion on a finished V1.1 build, where you should be able to drill into the 'mouth' of the Mantis from below (where the pump is located) to destroy the pump and make the necessary modifications to add the petroleum heat-exchanger to the steam-room. Once finished, opening the hatch allows coolant from the Refinery to heat up the steam-chamber, and with that run the turbines.

The refinery-coolant goes through a spaghetti of tubing to make sure only hot (>404C) coolant enters the steam-chamber radiator, otherwise the coolant is looped back into the refinery. It features both a hot- and cold overflow-storage that is carefully designed to never stop the radiator-loop or back up essential parts of the system. The petroleum should never be accidentally overheated, though I have only tested it for a few cycles so far.

Maths

My trained dupe takes 17 seconds to finish the Steel recipe, which means 17 x 1200W = 20.4kJ used. Running this recipe once creates an enormous 93MDTU of heat in the petroleum as 400kg is heated by 132C. The two turbines combined take 1.2MDTU/s, thus one finished recipe gives a theoretical max. 74 seconds of run-time for both turbines (if all heat is ideally transfered to the steam), yielding 74 x 4000W = 296kJ returned. That's a factor 14.5.

Resources are being used, however, so it's not free energy but a very, very, VERY efficient lime+coal burner. Compared to a regular coal generator, this setup is about 20.3x as efficient with coal (says my back-of-the-envelope maths :P, including conversion to refined carbon). Though lime is scarce, so you can't run this indefinitely anyway.

I have yet to work it out for other recipes, but there is a lot of headroom, so I expect a lot of them to be net power positive.

Changelog

• Metal-refinery based power-stage in the basement, energy positive by a factor ~15. 
• Spaghetti-plumbing to optimize refinery-coolant temperature (petroleum) to optimum values before entering the steam-chamber radiator
• Override-switch (pressure) for manually forcing the exterior coolant loop to run
• Automated storage for kiln/refinery
• Minor component placement changes (heavi-watt plate)
• Upgrade possible on already-finished V1.1 builds

To do

• Monitor cooling in refinery room
• Add automation to force Aquatuner cooling to kick-in when the refinery becomes too hot
• Add ventilation to machine room in live builds

Screenshots

Overview:

 

Plumbing:

 

Power:

 

Automation:

 

 

I'll add a save later today if there's interest for it, after I've cleaned up my sandbox map a bit.

 

[Arkaon]

Please a video of mantis v1.2, nice set up