Petty Perpetual: The petty final glitch-less condensation Turbine build | No covers, no doors | (Sandbox only, PoC).

[Boxman_90]

Oh no! He's back! With another attempt at glitch-less, perpetual, free-energy, legitimate steam turbine. After the failure that was called Alien, I figured there was only one way to redeem myself - an actual glitch-free steam turbine. No covers, no doors, no pressure glitches. Pure, free energy using only components the way they're meant to be used.

It is very much tongue-in-cheek , though technically should check all the boxes of the critics. It can be done

The core of this build? Power transformers - my last resort. Apart from the Metal Refinery (which uses fuel/coal) the only component that can give more heat than the energy it requires and yield a free-energy steam turbine. Legit power transformers - about 3700 of them. Hence the name - the petty build. It is not viable, never will be, to build in a base, due to the sheer size of the heat source. But it works, and it spawned two neat other features, a relatively compact condensation loop and a hard-capped 2kg/s but (near) 100% uptime steam-turbine 5-stack.

The heat-source works because the power transformers expel 1000DTU/s of heat while not consuming any electricity when doing so - they just have to be on. To do so, I've linked up 3700 of them on both their primary and secondary circuits. On the secondary circuit, a lamp runs. This way the power transformers are being used in a legit, yet ridiculous, fashion. Imho, they should waste some power to expel the heat. Even 1w would be enough to make shenanigens like this impossible - but as it is right now, the transformers work exactly as the devs intended and thus their use can currently be considered legit.

Probably the dev's simply figured nobody would be idiotic enough to fill his entire map with power-transformers for a whopping 2000W of free energy.. 

Anyway, regardless of the 'legitimacy', on to the more interesting bits;

Compact T-swap column condensation-loop

 

In order to avoid other glitches, I went out of my way to try and remove the door-pump and built a compact condensation loop - the big problem with condensation loops being cooling and re-heating the steam. What resulted is a mostly passive steam condensation loop that uses way way less than 2000W to cool and re-heat the steam. It's a relatively compact temperature-swap heat exchanger, the difference with a regular heat exchanger being total swappage of T's while usually T settles on an average between the two fluids. Thanks should go out to @wachunga for demonstrating the use of a counter-flow heat-exchanger with a steam turbine in his build thread. I haven't actually checked out his save, but I assume from his terminology that he used the same principle - a quick glance shows his is probably applied on the coolant, while this approach applies it to the steam directly. The vid describes it in more detail, but essentially it's a column of cascading heat-exchangers with cross-flowing steam (opposite directions), allowing a near-complete swap in temperatures at zero energy cost. The condensation loop then only has to remove 10-ish degrees, which is well within the realm of feasibility with a single aquatuner.

Afaik one of the smaller steam-turbine condensation-based concepts yet. Could probably be smaller with optimizations in the layout, and should be applicable to all steam-turbine builds if doors are not desired.

Optimized flow-restriction

 

Since the T-swap column needs a huge amount of steam with a low throughput, I needed to reduce flow. Taking note of @Nickerooni's idea of stacking turbines to reduce total required flow, I tried implementing that but hit a snag when multiple turbines began running at once and distorting the balance - both taking too much heat, and flowing >2kg/s as intended. The vid explains, but I've expanded on Nickerooni's setup by adding automation that ensures only 1 turbine is running at all times, while alternating sequentially.

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For the rest the vid shows the same explanation I posted here, just a little more in-depth, and with a time-lapse proof-of-concept at the end. I've included the save-file so you can dabble around with it if you want. Don't forget to bring your best hardware, and be prepared to wait 10 seconds or longer for the power-overlay to open, though. You have been warned.

Important! The automation doesn't initialize properly after a load (probably a bug), so I've added a reset switch on the bottom of the turbine. Flick it on and off once, and you're good to go. If you don't flick the switch first thing, you'll get 5 traveling signals and a broken equilibrium.

Petty Perpetual Forumsave.sav

Screenshot:

 

Vid:

inb4 "I smell about 3700 exploits" 

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, Boxman_90 said:

It is very much tongue-in-cheek , though technically should check all the boxes of the critics. It can be done

Reminds me of "stupid dirt cooker 2000" by @GemeinerJack. Of course, I guess that build did block 4 ports, so we finally have an exploit free build.  Haha. Make sure you give @GemeinerJack a "Haha". 

 

[SackMaggie]

Over 3000 small transformers for 1 lamp.

[hpongledd]

Congratulation! You made it! 

[ruhrohraggy]

So what happens if you need to power 2 lamps?

[Lancar]

1 hour ago, ruhrohraggy said:

So what happens if you need to power 2 lamps?

Overheating mayhem! (drawn out over a few thousand cycles or so)

[JukedByLife]

#1 meme build. I enjoyed looking at this.

[Boxman_90]

Heheh, thanks guys  I've added the save-file in the startpost, with added reset-switch at the bottom of the turbines so you can initialize the automation loop properly upon load (it's bugged out somehow otherwise). Flick it on and off once, and you're good to go. Bring your best hardware, cause it's gonna squeal like a little piggy.

3 hours ago, ruhrohraggy said:

So what happens if you need to power 2 lamps?

It should be capable of handling ~249 extra lamps :'D

Petty Perpetual Forumsave.sav

[ruhrohraggy]

5 minutes ago, Boxman_90 said:

It should be capable of handling ~249 extra lamps :'D

Oh ok, sweet. But If i want 250 lamps...I'll have to build another...

Also...won't the heat from the lamps add back into the system? Did you take this into account i wonder...

[Boxman_90]

Hahaha, well if you were to recycle the lamp's heat (currently not so) you might just squeeze that extra lamp worth of power out  Any more lamps, and you'd better dig out a whole extra map...

O a slightly more serious note, currently it produces more heat than the turbines need at the flow they're set to, however this surplus heat is destroyed by the turbines when the input steam-temperature is >227C, so that's a self-regulating feedback. You could adjust the turbine-automation to allow >2kg/s of steam through, but then you also need a power-system overhaul as you'll be able to draw more than 2000W through the conductive wire.

[KittenIsAGeek]

11 hours ago, Boxman_90 said:

Oh no! He's back! With another attempt at glitch-less, perpetual, free-energy, legitimate steam turbine. After the failure that was called Alien, I figured there was only one way to redeem myself - an actual glitch-free steam turbine. No covers, no doors, no pressure glitches. Pure, free energy using only components the way they're meant to be used.

This was awesome. Thank you.   Some neat things to take away from this might be the combination of turbine stacking and logic to allow only one at a time and the counter-current heat exchange system.  I'll have to play around with things and run some numbers, but I've been trying for a while to get a legitimate polluted water to clean water boiler system running that also allows me to generate power.  You're right that the jump from 100c to 225c takes a huge amount of energy -- its what usually breaks my system.

[Boxman_90]

Glad you like it! If you manage to setup the T-swap column properly, it should cost you no energy to cool your steam down to ~110C and heating the new steam to ~210 (beyond that I'd say making it larger yields diminishing returns), so you'd only have to cool 13 more degrees for it to condense. If that was your show-stopper previously, this might help you out  Good luck!

[KittenIsAGeek]

Yeah.  Previously I had done counter-current using pipes to bring oil up to temp for nat-gas boiling systems, but I always had a problem with steam because of heat-creep. I think the idea of spacing heat exchangers with insulation might solve that problem.

[Fizzy Cyst]

On 12/17/2018 at 8:28 PM, Boxman_90 said:

inb4 "I smell about 3700 exploits"

Thank god it wasn't over 9000 exploits.

[0xFADE]

You got a passive heat transfer out of it. That design can be extended to many other applications.  And you are better off with it than relying on other things. 

[Oozinator]

@Boxman_90 "point is that these things generate heat, without using energy.." *sniff* i smell...
^^ nice build

[peachkillu]

that heat exchanger is pretty inspiring i can see looping a metal refinery threw it at one point and fitting in a metal volcano at another all depending on the temp range you are working with