[OutDated] [Build] Simplified Exploited Steam Turbine

[mathmanican]

As of QoLIII, this build no longer works.  Great Job Klei - I'm seriously very happy that it no longer works. 

As promised last week and @Sigma Cypher reminded me, here's a redesigned exploited steam turbine that is easier for newer players to recreate in survival. Many of the things below are not required, rather designed with a simple fix to a hard problem in mind. Advanced players will probably comment that you don't really need specific parts (the kinds of insulation I use, the type of waterlock, way to get chlorine, etc.). You can play with this and change things as your skills increase I do truly hope that this build becomes obsolete at some point with a redesign from the devs.

Let's start with the build at the moment the turbine starts working. (The rest of the pictures will be in spoilers).

I'll assume you have access to exosuits, crude oil, petroleum, and plastic. Here are the steps needed to produce the build above.

1. Start by locating a place large enough to build it (30 tiles wide, and 16 tiles high). Block it in with either tiles or natural materials that will not offgas when dug out (no slime or bleach stone). Surround the thing with ceramic tiles. No heat will escape, so put it next to your beds, farms, wherever.  Note: If you plan to tile in a lot of space, it's generally faster to build from the bottom up.
2. Create a U-bend liquid lock with crude and petro. (Build a bottle emptier, and bring 200kg of crude first, then 200kg of petro second).
   Spoiler

   For this particular build, the height is exactly three 4-tile high tunnels. The width is 2 turbines (5 tiles each), 3 waterlocks (5 tiles each), 3 ladders (1 tile each), and then the insulation on the right end (2 tiles).  This gives a total of 5+5+5+5+5+3+2 = 30 tiles (nice even number). If you want more turbines, you can directly copy the left turbine to ladder right of turbine (an extra 16 tiles), and just add more copies, as many as you want.

   

    

3. After the right side of the waterlock is finished, hollow out the interior of the region, starting at the top and working down. Build the interior frame, add ladders, add the other 3 water locks, pipes, liquid vent, and tempshift plates (gold amalgam or diamond are the only I've tested). The two waterlocks next to each other at the entrance are important. The right waterlock will get really hot.  The left waterlock will not change in temp provided you keep a vacuum between things. 
4. Build the insulation tiles near the temp shift plates with ceramic (any tile that will touch the petro, needs to be made of ceramic.  
5. Build a ceramic metal refinery on the bottom level (should still be in vaccuum). Use 4 insulated ceramic pipes from the outflow to the inflow section (so they won't drop in heat). Fill it with petro. While doing everything else, you want to get the petro heated up to above 400C (technically it can be less, but aim for this).  If you already have lots of refined metal, then refine steel or iron to make this fast.  You'll need 1600kg of refined metal for the turbines, so make lots of gold if you don't have much yet.
   Spoiler

   The airflow tiles are not required. I like using them here because I know that debris placed on them will not transfer any heat. 

   

   Here is a plumbing display, along with how I make sure I have exactly 800kg of petro delivered with any excess being returned. Notice the 4 insulated pipes. on the refinery. Those need to be ceramic. The pipe section leading upwards is made of insulated anything else, and purposefully not yet connected to the refinery.

   

   I just deconstruct a bridge, and build it differently to clean the pipes out. You can now deconstruct the pipes that delivered the oil. 

   

    

6. Build an atmosuit station and a bottle emptier under each turbine.  Fill each atmosuit station with oxygen (200kg), and deliver 800kg of water (4 loads of water) to each side. [Edit: Note: Some have suggested just 600kg to the left side. The water and oxygen levels can be adjusted after this is built. so it's not 100 crucial you nail this step perfectly.]  You can deconstruct the bottle emptier, but DO NOT DECONSTRUCT the atmosuit station yet.  Make sure you do not get a wrong element sent to those stations, otherwise you'll have to pump the region back to vacuum.  Use a filter if you are not 100% sure the only thing that will get pumped in is oxygen.
7. Build the turbine as soon as you can. I didn't have much metal, so I built the turbine later in the process. You can build it right at the start if you have the materials ready. 
   Spoiler

   Here's my oxygen delivery. 

   

   Here I've got the water added, and I'm building my turbines. Meep is hard at work making more refined gold, as I only currently have enough gold for one turbine. Note: Max has already trained the first level in engineering - otherwise he could not build the turbine. 

   

    

8. Clean up any loose materials near the tempshift plates. Then wall the region in. You're just about done. I like to clean up materials all along the construction process in the entire region.
   Spoiler

   

    

9. One the turbine is built and the region below is walled in, deconstruct the atmosuit station. Oxygen will fill the region. Feel free to deconstruct oxygen pipes in the turbine rooms, or send any extra oxygen away with bridges to push things where you want them to go. 
   Spoiler

   I messed up and had my oxygen pipes build over the vaccuum region in the left. So to fix this, I deconstructed several tiles inside the turbine room, then used bridges to push the oxygen along and eventually just deconstructed all the pipes inside the turbine rooms.

   

    

10. Build a liquid tepidizer where the water is. Add automation to the tepidizer (a not gate, followed by a buffer gate), and connect it to power.  You don't have to adjust any properties, and it will quickly boil the water (if you save/load at this point, you will have to deconstruct the tepidizer and rebuild it - a bug). Your oxygen and steam are now all set to go. The oxygen will rise to the top and start fighting with the steam for control of the second to top layer (pressure tricking the turbine to work). 
    Spoiler

    The automation is tepidizer -> not gate -> buffer gate -> tepidizer. It will cycle off/on every 5 seconds. Your water will boil quickly. 

    . 

    Eventually the gas levels off, and a conflict ensues.  Notice how the steam and oxygen both occupy parts of the second to top row. This is what you want.  If at any point the oxygen all gets pushed up to the top row and doesn't fight back, then you need more oxygen. If you brought in too much water, this might happen. To fix it, just build a gas dispenser in the bottom area and bring in more oxygen. (this picture was taken near the end of the process - it will take a while for the gasses to even out). 

    

     

11. Now we add chlorine.  Build a storage container in the metal refinery section. Bring in a single bit of bleach stone to this container, let it stay for a brief second, and then remove it to somewhere else in the base.  You should have a very small amount of chlorine in the region. Deconstruct a ceramic block so the chlorine can spread up to the tempshift plate region, and then replace it.
    Spoiler

    

    Bleach stone should be easy to get, and easy to move around. If it accidentally falls in the vacuum entrance area, don't worry.

    Use emergency priorities to make this errand happen.  You don't want the bleach stone sitting for very long in the region.

     

12. We now deliver the hot petroleum (I like to aim for high 400C temp). Just adjust your outtake pipe, and then rther. efine 2 final orders. 
    Spoiler

    Slightly modify the way the output pipes work before you send the order. 

    

    Make sure the temp is hot.  Then pick a final 2 jobs that won't cause you to go above the vaporization point.  Keeping around 500 is save.  Above 530 and you're in the danger zone. My temp was at 448, so I picked iron ore to add 67, keeping me well below 530. 

    

     

     

13. Add wires that touch your turbine. You're done. This thing should run forever. The temp inside will stabilize at 159.1C. Provided you used both liquid locks, with the vacuum between them, the heat will not spread out the left side. The other areas are sealed with ceramic, so no heat leaves either.  Enjoy your 4kw power station.
    Spoiler

    

     

14. To get the power out, I like to use a regular wire and then a smart battery switching station somewhere else in the base.
    Spoiler

    Regular wires will not overload if they are not connected to any consumers.  Here is how I get my power out.

    

    The line leads to a battery switching station (might be on the other side of the map), where the 1kw line puts the power onto a 20kw line to be consumed. This particular station is my industrial sector, which feeds power to my plastic manufacturing plants, my metal refineries, etc. 

      

     

     

15. Remember that the steam turbine is a massive heat deletion machine. I decided to add 6 metal refineries in the now chlorine filled section under the turbines. The turbine will cool the petro for me. You could instead put aquatuners inside the turbine chambers and use them to transfer heat to the steam.  
    Spoiler

    This part is just for fun. I haven't field tested if it cools the pipes fast enough with granite pipes, but I do know that if I swapped the pipes to radiant pipes, then the turbines could delete heat faster than 6 full time metal refineries processing steel could create it. 

    

     

[Tytan]

make a video working

[Sigma Cypher]

Come on Tytan, not even a please or thank you?  The level of effort the OP put into this is clearly in evidence.  It's ok Mathmanican, I'll take care of the rude paparazzi.

The left turbine seems to work better with 600kg (3 trips) of water instead of 800kg.  The oxygen has 4 more squares to go to on the left turbine and can't quite stand up to the steam pressure, at least in mine.

Oh ... thanks by the way; I learned a lot from this post.  

 

[goatt]

I’m bad at really stuff. After reading it 5 times, I still have this question, what is the water tepidizer for? Thx.

[goatt]

One more, does this delete gas?

[mathmanican]

45 minutes ago, goatt said:

what is the water tepidizer for?

Turns the water to steam. Just let it keep running till it breaks, then disassemble it.

8 minutes ago, goatt said:

One more, does this delete gas?

Nope. See the following comment I another post for the reason (lots of pictures).

 

2 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

The left turbine seems to work better with 600kg (3 trips) of water instead of 800kg.  The oxygen has 4 more squares to go to on the left turbine and can't quite stand up to the steam pressure, at least in mine.

Thanks for the find.  I probably overcame this issue because of where my pipes were deconstructed, adding extra oxygen to the left turbine. Building a gas dispenser, and bringing in a few loads of oxygen will overcome the issue as well.  

By the way, it looks like in your build you will be ejecting lots of heat out the right side (through the heaviwatt plate).  

[Sigma Cypher]

I tried to combine the compact elegance of your original behemoth with some of the "easier to build" features of this post and settled on the Steam Mesomorph:

It uses 800kg O2 (so four atmo suit stations), and 2800 kg of water.  I was lazy and only put water and a single tepidizer in the center well.  The water condensed in the other two wells but once the center turbines started, it all evaporated again.

So much easier to split oil and gas two ways instead of 3! The hyrdo-sensor activated shutoff + needle valve (set to 0.1 g/s) combo works better than trying to get my stupid dupes to "hurry up and jam that block back in!"  

[mathmanican]

15 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

I tried to combine the compact elegance of your original behemoth with some of the "easier to build" features of this post and settled on the Steam Mesomorph:

Looks fun.  Here's a couple things to consider as warnings down the road.

1. You'll be ejecting heat out the left side without a double water lock with vacuum between then. The entire region near your turbine will rise in temp to 151.9 C.  Simple to fix with another tiny water lock. 
2. I have built the turbines before without putting water locks between the top layers. The steam generator mechanics favor outputting steam on the left side of the turbine. Over time, you may find that your left turbine works great, but the right turbine sputters. That's the reason I use water locks between turbines in my original builds. I don't know if I've ever written about this issue on the forums.

I hope to hear more cool finds from you. Happy tinkering. 

16 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

works better than trying to get my stupid dupes to "hurry up and jam that block back in!" 

Haha.  I do prefer delivering chlorine with a pump, and controlling precisely the tiny about to be in mcg level.  For a newbie, I figured dropping in bleach stone, and then pulling it out would be sufficient. Maybe I should have just shown how to make a small room somewhere else to get the chlorine. 

[fishoutofwater]

@mathmanicancould you explain a little how this build work?

I'm assuming the heat is from petroleum, and the chlorine to keep it from losing heat?

is this turbine still delete heat in the steam?

[OxCD]

This is something I didn't get neither. I bet the turbine's still deleting heat, as the creator suggested to use the heat deletion for petroleum or aquatunner cooling.

But if you're deleting heat from the steam, how is it remaining in persitent gaseous state ? I didn't get the goal of the chlorine/petroleum room, even I'm thinking it's linked to my previous question.

[OxCD]

Ok I've tried it, and even I don't get all mechanism involved, it's highly efficient, turbines are working full charged everytime. Like a charm. Still need to test over a long period.

It seems that the temperature suction is afecting by default the chlorine/petroleum room. Close to the turbine vent assigned to this room, the temp of the Chlorine is very slowing decreasing.

My question, will it be reliable over a long period ? Will the temp of the Chlorine room slowly but surely keep decreasing ?

Adding aquatuner, could be the answer ? If yes, adding it to the bottom steam room, or the Chlorine room ?

 

[Heremeus]

Chlorine has a low conductivity of 0.008 so I guess it does not lose much (if any) heat to the turbine. The steam has a fixed output temperature of 475K so it won't cool down further. Any additional heat you dump into it will get deleted.

The turbine requires 500K temperature at one of it's input ports. If the steam and the turbine stabilize at 475K and the chlorine is at 500K, I'm not sure if any heat is transferred at all with rounding.

[mathmanican]

9 hours ago, fishoutofwater said:

mathmanicancould you explain a little how this build work?

 

 

3 hours ago, OxCD said:

My question, will it be reliable over a long period ? Will the temp of the Chlorine room slowly but surely keep decreasing ?

I guess I should have linked to some old posts for explanations to the why and how it all works.  Here they are. It will run forever. 

Spoiler

The above post explains the chlorine clamp (exploit possibly non fixable rounding errors in the code to effectively have zero heat transfer). The post below shows how to build the same thing without chlorine. 

If any of these got you interested, there are tons of more posts on the steam turbine you can view at 

 

If your petroleum is dropping in temp, then you have too much chlorine in the room under the turbine (the bleachstone approach might not be the best at delivering tiny amounts). This isn't easily fixable after the thing is built without using sandbox or debug. You could insert an aquatuner in the region to add heat if you have access to the needed materials, but that would have to be done before you seal off the chlorine room. If you keep a low enough density of chlorine to start with, then it will never transfer heat between the petro and turbine.  

 

[mathmanican]

6 hours ago, OxCD said:

Ok I've tried it, and even I don't get all mechanism involved, it's highly efficient, turbines are working full charged everytime. Like a charm. Still need to test over a long period.

By the way, the fact that you decided to build it and succeeded makes me happy.  This means that it was simple enough to help someone else construct. 

Since your petroleum is dropping, that does suggest that I should change how to get the chlorine added. I think I'll just revise the post (some day) to show how to get the right amount of chlorine in with a gas pump. 

[Sigma Cypher]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

. I think I'll just revise the post (some day) to show how to get the right amount of chlorine in with a gas pump. 

Like this?

Turn the off the shutoff valve just as the first 100mg gas packet gets to the valve and you will pass about 200mg of gas (divided into 9 tiles, or 22 mg per tile).  You are excused  

The return line is optional, unless you have those gas lines somewhere you don't want chlorine when you disassemble them.

[OxCD]

@mathmanican last time I tried it in sandbox mode. It was working really well.

Today i've added this setup to my normal game.

It took me few hours, including some mistakes I've made, then to be corrected.

Also, following @Sigma Cypher return, i've only put 600kg water at the left. And 800kg at the right, as designed.

I unconstruct gas pipes before the vacuum, so i was sure to only have 200kg O2 & the water into each turbine room.

Then I had an issue. For the center hot petro room. I've added 0,1g of chlorine into this room and the refinery room below. That conclude with 2400 mcg per tile. Thanks again @Sigma Cypher for the valve tip. I've closed it, added the petro at 523'C, then inside the room the petro temp quickly fall to 320'C, and it was still going lower.

For your investigation, the tiny amount of Chlorine was at 12'C, and tempshift plates were granite at 12'C also.

After a reload, I tried to heat up plates by using steel aquatuner just above, until overheating. No success. Only 2'C more. So i've replaced granite plates for diamond plates. Those were at 27'C.

I think the temp difference didn't help a lot, but i'm guessing heat capacity did. If I'm correct diamond has far lower heat capacity than granite. That allowed my petro to do not go lower than 400'C  

So my petro fall down from 523C to 405C approximately, and then tepidizer were started and now the beast is running as expected : full charge.

I've seen many steam turbine setup on this forum, but this is by far the only one that really get my interest (to be built). I like the way it's not using any mechanical stuff, including door compression... only dealing with gas pression and temperature, manipulating physics results from the turbine against itself.

Free 4kw, and already thinking into more of this one. Thanks again a lot for your work and imagination @mathmanican !

If I'm correct about the plates materials, maybe you should add this info into your first / main post ? 

 

[mathmanican]

3 minutes ago, OxCD said:

tempshift plates were granite at 12'C

This would definitely be the issue.  I have used diamond and gold amalgam for these plates, never something like granite. I'll put notes in the top.  Thanks.

[Denisetwin]

It WORKS!  I am so happy!  This is the most ambitious build I've ever tried in a very long time playing ONI.  Thanks @mathmanican  The step by step above was key!  annnnnd I spoke too soon.  Left one does not want to keep running.  I followed the steps with the same measurements for each.  What's up?

 

[OxCD]

@Denisetwin how much water did you put at the left ? If you put 600kg, it should be ok with your 200kg o2. But if you put more, you should think about adding a bit more o2. 

[mathmanican]

11 hours ago, Denisetwin said:

Left one does not want to keep running.  I followed the steps with the same measurements for each.  What's up?

 

4 hours ago, OxCD said:

adding a bit more o2.

If the O2 levels get stuck on the top layer, then you need more O2.  If the gas conflict is still going, and the turbine stops, then you don't have enough steam.  Either fix is simple to take care of.  Build a gas dispenser or a bottle emptier.  As long as your chlorine room is not dropping in temp, any side issues can easily be fixed. 

[Denisetwin]

After looking over the oxygen overlay and reading the above including @Sigma Cypher's and @OxCD's notes, it is an issue with too much steam in the left side even though I made it exactly 800 as the OP said and had the exact amount of oxygen as well.  I'm adding in some extra oxygen now with bottle emptier.  @mathmanican perhaps you could edit the original post to note less water should be used on the left side to avoid this.  

Other than this hiccup, I am so pleased that after all these cycles getting it built, this build works!  Thank you @mathmanican, I would not have had the courage to try to build this if it wasn't for your step by step instructions.