Metal volcano Tutorial

[JohnFrancis]

This tutorial cover some of the less obvious details of metal volcano's. The main focus is on extracting useful cool metal but I try to include other potential uses for the heat. Side note the average output listed on the wiki does not appear to match real game numbers.

 

 

[lunazone]

This was highly informative, thank you for taking the time to make this!

[Draxbear]

This works great! I'm using it on a crazy good gold volcano (seed 963372579) which is apparently 87% better than standard. Well over 100tn gold now, with little effort thanks to this excellent build.

I ran into some problems with it, mainly due to my inexperience with the game. So for the other noobs on here too:

- Vacuum out the volcano area, it keeps the molten metal liquid allowing it to build up and eventually overflow into the cooling tile area. I had enough natgas in the area to allow the liquid to form into gold bars sitting just under the volcano itself. Some manual handling of hot stuff was required to get them into the tamer.

- Flatulent Dupes must Die! I've trained mine up as an astronaut and locked him in a capsule instead. Finally figured out why all my vacuum/liquid lock areas were "spawning" natgas. Worst dupe trait in the entire game I reckon!

- I've rotated the sweepers to be 3 tiles high (vertical instead of horizontal) and "dipped" them in the water. This seems to have arrested their overheating over time quite nicely. Perhaps I was doing something wrong and there's a better way? The tempshift plates in vacuum certainly didn't seem to be helping.

[0xFADE]

The water part at the end... you can convey metal through metal tiles to pull heat out very quickly and then in to the water.  You don't need to do that timing delay thing.

The heat draining part above is pretty great though.

[Gus Smedstad]

I agree with 0xFADE, I found my timed cooling pool didn't work very well with my copper volcano, but a block of metal tiles worked much better. They hand both cooling from radiant pipes and a conveyor for transferring heat out of the metal quickly and reliably.

[FiannaTiger]

@JohnFrancis will you be updating with the new steam turbine once QL3 comes out?  With the water output it looks like you could possible get rid of some of the power drawing stuff in your design (which is great by the way!) and possibly give metal + positive power?  Unless the new steam turbine gets changed

[fredhp]

3 hours ago, FiannaTiger said:

@JohnFrancis will you be updating with the new steam turbine once QL3 comes out?  With the water output it looks like you could possible get rid of some of the power drawing stuff in your design (which is great by the way!) and possibly give metal + positive power?  Unless the new steam turbine gets changed

I tamed a metal volcano with the new steam turbine.  
Very simple: Build obsidian insulated walls to contain the volcano, create vacuum inside.
build the new steam turbine on top, and add small amounts of water. The exactly amount varies from vulcano to vulcano, you need to aim to obtain at leats 125C steam with the maximum pressure possible.

Volcano erupts, water boils.... the base gain power and cool iron  (or gold... or copper, or igneus rock...... )

[Gus Smedstad]

With the old-style turbines, I've used a combination of a liquid valve (to limit maximum flow) and automation tied to pressure and hydro sensors. A hydro sensor to make sure there was only a thin layer of water in the steam generation chamber, and pressure to shut off once there was enough steam in the chamber to keep the turbine running continuously. You didn't want the steam to build up to 15+kg per tile because there'd be trouble returning steam from the top.

I imagine something similar would work just as well for the new turbine. I'm not sure you'd need a temperature sensor, since if you're checking pressure, eventually the water shuts off and the metal heats the existing steam.

I doubt obsidian is important for insulation in such a case. Obsidian's terrible insulation, but it does have a high melting point. If you're using the metal to create steam, the steam's not going to get hot enough for this to matter.

If you're picking up hot metal with an auto sweeper,  you might want to run that on a conveyor through a bunch of metal tiles. The metal's still going to be pretty hot when it solidifies, and this should transfer heat to the metal tiles, which in turn will exchange heat with the steam.

The main drawback of such a setup is that if it works correctly, the metal's still somewhat hot (125-195 C) when it comes out. I'm not sure how well storage insulates that sort of thing now, prior to QOL 3 storing hot metal would lead to high oxygen temperatures around the storage and Dupe scalding.

[JohnFrancis]

11 hours ago, FiannaTiger said:

@JohnFrancis will you be updating with the new steam turbine once QL3 comes out?  With the water output it looks like you could possible get rid of some of the power drawing stuff in your design (which is great by the way!) and possibly give metal + positive power?  Unless the new steam turbine gets changed

I have looked at the preview build and as a player who prefers to avoid the bug builds (blocking vents etc) the new steam turbine is amazing. With only a little modification this should be power positive and spit out the metal even cooler than before. The new turbines go down to 125 degrees. No gas pumps either. On the other hand finding a design that can withstand 200 cycle stress testing is going to kill my free time 

[Gus Smedstad]

I agree. I think the biggest issue with the old turbine was that it wanted you to move 10 kg/s of gas from the top to the bottom if you weren't exploiting it. Which was so far out of bounds for moving gasses that I was OK with blocking 4 of the 5 ports just to bring it down to 2 kg/s, which was very high but livable. The new turbine does away with that problem entirely, and it's a huge improvement.

[fredhp]

[FiannaTiger]

13 hours ago, JohnFrancis said:

I have looked at the preview build and as a player who prefers to avoid the bug builds (blocking vents etc) the new steam turbine is amazing. With only a little modification this should be power positive and spit out the metal even cooler than before. The new turbines go down to 125 degrees. No gas pumps either. On the other hand finding a design that can withstand 200 cycle stress testing is going to kill my free time 

I do think that it will be much easier set up and I too don't like the exploit bugs, so am glad to see something that will work without exploiting.  I wish I have a few hours to test out my thoughts on this, but with family that would be hard   I do think a good method of using it would be to loop the output water to pull a little more heat from the turbine to keep it just under 100.00 with a hydrogen saturated wheezwort set up so you don't have to use a aquatuner to cool it and keep it power positive.  WIth that I love your double door design and temp sensors and see if you could keep the steam at 200C even with the water cycling back into it.  Not sure if metal volcanos will have enough heat to keep things running 100% uptime.

[JohnFrancis]

4 hours ago, FiannaTiger said:

I do think a good method of using it would be to loop the output water to pull a little more heat from the turbine to keep it just under 100.00 with a hydrogen saturated wheezwort set up so you don't have to use a aquatuner to cool it and keep it power positive.

I'v done some testing on the new steam turbine and the heat it gives off varies with the input temp of the steam. At 195C (gives you full power) it generates 69 kDTU, a wheeze only gives off 12 kDTU. Not sure how to balance this all out yet, cooling them metal is easy enough. However doing it in an automated way that requires no dup interaction, does not eat power, avoids using to much steel, is not painful to build, is simple enough for a mid level player to understand and requires no maintenance. That's a little trickier. I stuck my mechanics preview video below if you want to see some of the joys of the new steam turbine.

Spoiler

 

 

[FiannaTiger]

Yeah I checked out the video, great video on it. 

69kDTU that's quite a bit of heat.  Also the fact that it shuts down at 100C would be a great thing for if you were trying to get the most out of a sieve using PWater in a cooling loop to absorb some of that heat and delete it away... so many possibilities but finding that elegant solution that simple is going to be the hard part.

[Gus Smedstad]

69k DTU/s, eh? My reflexive thought was an aquatuner in the steam chamber. The aquatuner can run a loop of cold water behind the upper turbine chamber, keeping it cool. That heat gets transferred via the aquatuner to the steam chamber. If you're not running at the absolute limit of the turbine's capacity (195 C at 2kg/s, 800k DTU/s), the tuner will just heat the steam up a bit more and increase the power output. The tuner will run at about a 12% cycle once the upper turbine chamber reaches your target temperature (probably 15-25 C).

Basically, the sort of cooling loop JohnFrancis shows for his 40 C -> 27 C example, only generalized for any use of the turbine.

[FiannaTiger]

Just did some testing. Not exactly scientific but it gives you some idea of what is possible. I took 5k hydrogen at first and put it in with 4 wheezworts on top and ran some tungsten radiant pipes in front of the engine before dumping the water back under the turbine. I used a setup like JohnFrancis has for dropping the molten iron on wolfmite doors and was only able to get the steam to around 165 degrees max with a iron volcano that was dumping out 7.9kg of molten iron. I don’t know the exact amount of water introduced which would need testing but while running I was at 2100-2200kg of steam. The iron volcano was giving me at max around 440 in power so not perfect but it was running about 85% of the time. I believe the powered doors could be removed and just use the two doors to drop directly onto for a good build.

I also reduced the wheezworts to 2 and kept everything under 96.3C with half the Hydrogen.

Will do some more testing with controlled numbers. 

[JohnFrancis]

All this talking got me curious and I did up a test build, I did not stress test it to my preferred standard but initial results are promising. Power positive and it spits out the metal once a cycle and it no hotter than about 150C by the time it hits final cooling. Please ignore the mess it's just a rough draft. Video in the spoilers if you want to have a more in depth look and the save file is linked in the video description.

Spoiler

 

 

[FiannaTiger]

Just watched the video.  Very nice and can understand not wanting to put loads of hours into this only to see something changed.  I hope they keep this steam turbine the way it is as it looks to be balanced as far as power output but still a bit crazy good on heat deletion.

[Gus Smedstad]

I really don't like clock-based mechanisms for things like making sure metal stays connected to the turbine long enough. It's not really deterministic the way conveyor track cooling systems or temperature probe based systems are, because you don't know precisely when the metal enters the system.

I'll grant you that a sequence-of-doors setup is a lot more compact than running a conveyor through a set of tiles, since the metal can move much more slowly.

[JohnFrancis]

52 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I really don't like clock-based mechanisms for things like making sure metal stays connected to the turbine long enough. It's not really deterministic the way conveyor track cooling systems or temperature probe based systems are, because you don't know precisely when the metal enters the system.

I'll grant you that a sequence-of-doors setup is a lot more compact than running a conveyor through a set of tiles, since the metal can move much more slowly.

This is just a rough design, only a second draft. Who knows how it will end up. I could rip out two of the clocks and just have it run on a single clock and 2 or 3 logic gates though that would increase complexity slightly. The system as designed keeps the metal in the system for 582 inside the door and up to 600 seconds on top of the door. When you trap debris in a door conductivity goes up by several factors, so 600 seconds of the debris trapped inside the door dumps all the heat into the turbine so the metal reliably comes out at around 150 C. With the old turbine you were lucky to get it down to 250 C so that made me a bit lazy. The design requires optimization for sure, I'll wait and see how the devs balance it during preview.

[habuky]

On 5.4.2019 at 3:44 PM, JohnFrancis said:

I did up a test build, I did not stress test it to my preferred standard but initial results are promising.

Indeed, this prototype works excellent. I made some customisations and picked your old cooling style. The stress test was successfull until both geysers went dormant. Thx for sharing your design!

[JohnFrancis]

That looks like some solid work, thanks for stress testing it, what temp does the metal come out at?

[habuky]

The Gold came out at ~19°C
The Iron came out at ~40°C 
I collected several random piles in vacuum and checked the temp after ~70 cycles when both geysers went dormant. 

[FiannaTiger]

Question on the piping.  The bridge over the output of the aquatuner can you explain what your doing there?  Is that to keep the loop flowing when the aquatuner is off?

[karyuendan08]

is that build power positive?