Here's the new Steam Turbine

[SamLogan]

Hello,

Here's some informations and pics about the new Steam Turbine from QoL Upgrade Mk3. Note, it's an early version and could change many times to the release version of the patch.

Last updated : 30/03/19 (320841)
 

New restrictions

The pression above the turbine no longer taken into account.

Before, it was 226,9°C.

New ! Now you need to cool the turbine but apparently only one weezeworth is enough.

Note the Steam Turbine need to be place on ground to be functionnal. And it have a new skin.

New output

Now the steam out of form water and not steam. The water temperature output depend of the steam temperature but it's around 90-100°C.

New electricity production rate

The turbine produce now 850 watts instead of 2000 Watts. It a maximal value that depend of the steam temperature.

You can check how much you're producing here :

Some setup :

 

[caffeinated21]

Do you know the pressure requirement? Steam throughput?

[lee1026]

2kg/s, 500g pressure.

[Saturnus]

Output power depends on steam temperature apparently. The steam turbine does not currently accurately display it's actual power output, nor does the power wires connected to it.

[OxCD]

Can't wait for @mathmanican to break this new toy rules ^^

[mathmanican]

Just now, OxCD said:

Can't wait for @mathmanican to break this new toy rules

I'll try. Don't worry.  It's on my hot list. 

I've already made a build to prepare for the "input blocked" bug to be fixed.  

Spoiler

 

I'll have to play with this and see if parts can be used. If it still uses max temp underneath, then we can feed in 103C steam, provided 1 tile has 125C steam (though I could guarantee one tile always has 400C steam if needed). 

[pacovf]

Why do you say you can't block the inputs anymore? Does the game disallow placing blocks under the row of blocks that the turbine is standing on?

[mathmanican]

Anyone tried using a steel pulsed tepidizer to keep the heat up? A single pulsed tepidizer could easily make this power positive... 

[mathmanican]

Well, I had time to try a pulsed tepidizer.  Once you get the temp up to 195 in the heating chamber, this thing will self power with excess. 

It provides continuous heat deletion at 2kg/s.  It does have some positive power out, but not anything like the previous turbine. I'm guessing you could siphon off 300W or so of power, but that's just my initial guestimate. I'm sure @Saturnus will run 50 cycle tests on his workstation, once we find some optimalish setups, and this thing leaves the preview. 

Of course, save/load still breaks an overtemp  tepidizer, so this build only works till you do a save/reload.  

 

[beowulf2010]

Random question. Does the new turbine have an automation input? 

Slightly related, has anyone looked into whether the steam temp - > power output formula is linear or not? 

Just thinking about whether one wants it to run whenever possible or keep it shut down until the steam is near the max 195C.

[mathmanican]

Well, here are three more observations.

1. You can get it to run with under 2kg/ steam, and sometimes it will even run at full power in this situation (though not always at full power). 
   Spoiler

   

   Notice the pipes above are not full with 2kg of liquid, yet the turbine is at full power. 

    

2. You can trick it to run by having one spot hot.  For example you can only heat one tile of a few mg steam, and the rest of the steam can be below 125C.  It will still run. 
   Spoiler

   

   If you take out the tempshift plate, the whole thing stops. The power output is interesting, jumping all over the place. 

    

3. Any port under the turbine that does not have steam will result in 400g/s less steam. However, you can process higher temp steam and still get full power output.  A single tile of petro at above 125C will keep the turbine running at all times, regardless of steam temp, so you can definitely use this to catpure all steam from a steam geyser and turn the steam into 94.5C. 
   Spoiler

   

    

Current testing gives quite sporadic results.  We'll tame this beast soon. It appears that the power output is directly related to the thermal energy input (up until you hit max power, then you just lose energy).  This is a great change in the right direction.

5 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

Slightly related, has anyone looked into whether the steam temp - > power output formula is linear or not? 

Just thinking about whether one wants it to run whenever possible or keep it shut down until the steam is near the max 195C.

It seems to be.  The max temp is 195C if all 3 ports are open.  That temp goes up if you have fewer ports open.It's around 260 with 3 ports open and around 340 with 2 ports open.  With only 1 port open, it looks like the game prevents you from going above half power, so a 1 port open turbine is considered bad by the code.  However, 2 ports open can still get you full power with 340C steam.  

Here's some formulas that show what's going on.

• Input temp 195C - output temp 95C - 5 ports open
  (195C-95C)*2000g*4.179 = 835.8kDTU/s
• Input temp 261.6666C - output temp 95C - 3 ports open
  (261.666C-95C)*1200g*4.179 = 835.8kDTU/s
• Input temp 345C - output temp 95C - 2 ports open
  (345C-95C)*800g*4.179 = 835.8kDTU/s

The numbers above suggest that the amount of power created we can compute perfectly. This gives us a way to directly compute power from thermal energy in a body, provided we don't exceed the max. 

So, a new exploit is to (1) matter convert gas to chlorine, (2) bump up the temp to high levels using whatever means you want using low SCH properties of chlorine, (3) matter convert the chlorine to steam, and finally (4) send the steam to the turbine.

Essentially, any element conversion process (matter conversion or even state changes of some things) that changes the SCH of something can now be exploited by the turbine for power. 

[Lachres]

Now that the top half of the steam turbine can be put in a separate room, can it get the "Engie's Tune Up" buff?

[mathmanican]

6 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

s electricity 850W at full power now?

Close to, if not exactly.  It's hard to measure exactly, though powering fridges puts it right in that range.

I don't think the 850W and 835.8kDTU/s from my computations are coincidences. 

[beowulf2010]

22 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Pathetic.

I dunno. It now needs 1/5th less steam at most than a fully blocked/exploited old turbine used to, it uses cooler steam and it outputs water so we don't have to waste any power on pumping water if we're using it as a sealed unit.

I don't think anyone has had time to run numbers on it but it sure looks like it will give a decent amount of free energy just off of the heat put into a steel refinery's coolant.

(If my rough math is correct, ignoring the time it takes to transfer the heat to steam, it takes a turbine 160 seconds to remove all heat added to coolant by a single batch of steel through a petroleum cooled refinery. Not bad. )

[DarckCrystale]

(the picture in the "new logic" spoiler is broken for me)

[mathmanican]

53 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

I don't think anyone has had time to run numbers on it but it sure looks like it will give a decent amount of free energy just off of the heat put into a steel refinery's coolant.

Numbers are run above (at least for the steam turbine half).  If you want to add steel as well, then here's what you'll get.  

• A single run of steel will raise 400kg of water 56C. 
• A single second of steam turbine use will drop 2kg/s of water about 100C.
• So we have (400kg *56C)/(2kg/s * 100C) = 112s. 

You can run a turbine for about 112s off of one run of steel.  These are all napkin estimates.  

[SamLogan]

New turbine with new glitchs, I feel we go back to the past when the steam turbine has been added to the game.

[Saturnus]

I think that if power output is directly linked to the amount of thermal energy consumed then we're definitely on the right track.

It is only because the tepidizer is over 100% efficient when we trick it that we can get any meaningful positive power output. Using aquatuners you at best break even under normal circumstances.

To me it's a great leap forward. And exactly what I suggested when it was first introduced, ie. liquid output and power output directly related to thermal energy converted.

Now the steam turbine fulfils it's purpose of being able to delete vast amounts of heat with no positive power output (in most cases) or produce power when run on an external heat source like magma or rocket exhaust.

The only thing they really still need to change is that it runs at all with any of the bottom input vents blocked.

[SamLogan]

42 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Now the steam turbine fulfils it's purpose of being able to delete vast amounts of heat

Yes, but you need to cool it so I'm not sure it's consistent.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, SamLogan said:

Yes, but you need to cool it so I'm not sure it's consistent.

In almost all cases cooling it with it's own fixed temperature water output is plenty. In extreme cases you might need a single wheezewort at 50-60% duty cycle.

[lee1026]

The shc and matter converting exploits isn’t a big deal, because once you have matter converting builds going, natural gas is just going to be more appealing. 

[brucemo]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

In almost all cases cooling it with it's own fixed temperature water output is plenty. In extreme cases you might need a single wheezewort at 50-60% duty cycle.

How would you achieve this? Temperature delta between the output water and the point at which the turbine shuts down as too hot is not large.

[Saturnus]

Here's the equilibrium temperature with a single wheezewort running the turbine at maximum efficiency of 195C steam input.

51 minutes ago, brucemo said:

How would you achieve this? Temperature delta between the output water and the point at which the turbine shuts down as too hot is not large.

Note I didn't say you needed to have the maximum efficiency. At 80% efficiency, meaning 668.4W output at steam input temperature 176C the equilibrium temperature is 99.7C only cooled with the water output of the steam turbine itself.

Note that not running at maximum efficiency does not mean you lose any potential power.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Hmmm...

Let me get a few things straight:

-The heat it removes from the steam, will that be transferred to the turbine itself? Or will it be deleted?

-Follow up question on the one above: if running the machine does generate heat,will that be a fixed temperature output, or dependent on the steam input heat?

-Can we possibly run this in a positive loop with an aqua tuner?

[Saturnus]

5 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Hmmm...

Let me get a few things straight:

-The heat it removes from the steam, will that be transferred to the turbine itself? Or will it be deleted?

-Can we possibly run this in a positive loop with an aqua tuner?

1) The heat energy is converted into electrical energy at 1kDTU = 1W up to 835.8W maximum. Above that it just deletes excess heat energy without producing more electrical energy.

 2) No. In my opinion it is not possible for it to be power positive with an aquatuner