Cool steam vent + refinment

[FiannaTiger]

So I was giving it some thought the other day and messed around with combining cooling down a cool steam vent with a aquatuner and steam turbine and though well that doesn't sound very effective.  true it would give you 95C water output but cost of the aquatuner would make it very power negative.  So I was watching @JohnFrancis new videos and he is using a petroleum loop to a steam room (actually 4 in his power brick with a aquatuner) so I though why not take a metal refinery with a petroleum loop to dump the heat into the steam to keep making steel. 

So the idea (and sorry no screens maybe tonight) is a steam turbine over a CSV with a metal refinery just to the right of the CSV.  I have a gold radiant loop inside the CSV chamber with Diamond shift plates.  I'm using Ceramic walls and insulated ceramic piping when I come to the walls and out to the refinery.  I have a little steel already so a atmo sensor out of steel inside there with automation going to a liquid shutoff.  The shutoff controls if the steam turbine water goes back into the steam chamber or if the pressure is over 4500 it dumps the water out to my clean water.  There is a bridge giving the valve priority and overflow goes back into the steam chamber.  I will have to play with the pressure numbers to make sure that when the vent is going it doesn't get over pressured.

Thoughts?

[Coolthulhu]

It won't produce a lot of power, but you risk overpressurizing the vent and wasting water.

If your vent produces over 2kg/s, one turbine won't keep up with it. If the temperature is below 125C during vent output phase or the turbine isn't running, the steam will reach 5kg/tile and vent will be suppressed.

If you really want to extract that extra bit of heat, do not recirculate the water back to vent chamber. Keep it low pressure and >125C at all times. If that low pressure doesn't cool your petroleum, have a separate heat sink for it - one that doesn't have a vent in it and thus can be pressurized to arbitrarily high levels.

[Denisetwin]

Sounds interesting, post your screen shots when you get a moment

 

[Nightinggale]

The math looks ok. Assuming the steam turbine is 100% efficient (no waste heat in transfer etc), refining iron delivers steam for 1300 W and steel delivers 2265 W.

Next question is how to move heat into the steam. I made a 5x3 room, filled it with gold radiant pipes (13 cells in total). With 60 kg steam on each cell, the oil drops 50 C and exits 5-10 C hotter than the steam. The steam turbine water output goes directly into the steam room and it boils instantly. Automation turns the turbine on at 180 C steam.

If we assume the oil exits at 200 and it's used for refining steel (worst case), it heats up to 333 C, or around 200 C below boiling. That's a good safety margin.

 

Next is to figure out how to design the layout. Iron requires 2 steam turbines and steel requires 3 if they are to "eat" the heat as fast as it is produced. However with a 200 C margin, we can heat the steam and use a thermal battery. With two turbines taking from the same room, it's possible to place a door, which blocks 1 input on each turbine.

 

There are some things to consider and it might take some trial and error, but in theory it should be very doable to make steam turbines not only eat the heat from the refineries, it will also produce more power than the refineries consumes. It's a very unstable power source though because it produces power in bursts when a refinery finishes, not continuous through the cycle. This means while wattage might be high, the daily production might not be and it certainly requires a fair amount of batteries if you can't use the power in bursts, like turning off natural gas generators while the steam turbines are running.

[FiannaTiger]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

It won't produce a lot of power, but you risk overpressurizing the vent and wasting water.

If your vent produces over 2kg/s, one turbine won't keep up with it. If the temperature is below 125C during vent output phase or the turbine isn't running, the steam will reach 5kg/tile and vent will be suppressed.

If you really want to extract that extra bit of heat, do not recirculate the water back to vent chamber. Keep it low pressure and >125C at all times. If that low pressure doesn't cool your petroleum, have a separate heat sink for it - one that doesn't have a vent in it and thus can be pressurized to arbitrarily high levels.

Yeah I figured it would over pressurized somewhat but right now I'm pretty much overflowing with water as both CSV are draining into one pool and that pool is pretty big and starting to raise over the second lower CSV.

[JohnFrancis]

As @FiannaTigermentioned I use steam turbines to delete the heat from my metal refinery's and feed the power produced into my grid. However I would like to point out a few things that may not help but will at least arm you for the design struggle.

I use a lot of water, about 1 ton in the steam turbine area per refinery. The idea is it's so much mass that even dumping the heat from steel in barely raises the temp. Two reasons for this 1) This ensures the petroleum passing through looses a lot of heat, so no chance I boil my petroleum, I only use 5 radiant pipe segments (tested working with 4). 2) Instead of the steam turbines bursting large amounts of power and then none I produce less energy per second but over a longer period of time. Say the steam only hits 128C but it takes a while for the steam turbine to eat 1 ton of that. This helps smooth the power flow.

My method would not work well with your intended purpose as you cannot support steam pressures that high without jamming the vent. However an alternative solution might be a heat battery. Dump the heat from the refinery into a large mass of water 6-8 tons in an insulated box with a steel door thermal injector. When the heat battery hits a set temp say 330C then you either A)disable the refinery B)switch to alternative cooling source C) Dump water in the steam vent yourself. Now when the steam vent erupts you dump heat from the battery into it's steam until it hits the desired temp. If your just looking to get the water out then 125/6C if your best bet. You will need a decent sized steam area to ensure no over pressurizing for decent output steam vents.

[FiannaTiger]

@JohnFrancis thanks, so a high pressure steam room attached to the side with a heat injector to make a thermal battery for all the heat.  That would even out the power when the vent has gone dormant as well.  Good think my CSV is in a dormant phase currently I can rework some stuff around without issue, and I was lucky that I can keep a water lock on the bottom  and just delete one tile to get in and work from the inside in a vacuum!

@NightinGale Is there a place I can find the formulas for heat transfer in ONI?  I'm just wondering if it would be possible to even build a big enough room that the following could happen

• Could have a complete cycle of vent/dormant without over pressuring the room with the turbine running 100%
• Drain the heat out of the petroleum so that it keeps under the boiling point over the active time of the CSV.

I'm bored at work and want to play with the numbers to see what's possible, and will try doing some of it in debug mode soon

[f0stalicska]

I thought about the same I even built my refinement stuff near a steam vent, but in the end I decided against it, just controlling how much water you recilculate/get out seems more hassle than the gain, when cooling with polluted water or the @JohnFrancis ice box is so trivial. Also thought about heating steam and at the same time cooling the turbine output water as a standalone cool water geyser, but anything short of a steel aquatuner doesn't seem to cut it, and you also have to figure out how to buffer enough water that the aquatuner runs on full packets, but the geyser doesn't over pressure, again other solutions just seem superior.

[Nightinggale]

8 hours ago, f0stalicska said:

you also have to figure out how to buffer enough water that the aquatuner runs on full packets

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1730126196

[FiannaTiger]

9 hours ago, f0stalicska said:

I thought about the same I even built my refinement stuff near a steam vent, but in the end I decided against it, just controlling how much water you recilculate/get out seems more hassle than the gain, when cooling with polluted water or the @JohnFrancis ice box is so trivial. Also thought about heating steam and at the same time cooling the turbine output water as a standalone cool water geyser, but anything short of a steel aquatuner doesn't seem to cut it, and you also have to figure out how to buffer enough water that the aquatuner runs on full packets, but the geyser doesn't over pressure, again other solutions just seem superior.

Yeah I spent about a 90 mins tinkering with the idea, and now I'm pretty much going to do a icebox.  My only question @JohnFrancis is will one ice box set up work well with 2 CSVs?  I have 2 within 30 tiles of each other and was thinking of running a second cooling box off of the one steam turbine and aquatuner.  I know I'll have a longer temp sensor run and pipe runs to the second ice part of the ice box, but I figure it would be better than 2 setups so close together.

[JohnFrancis]

3 hours ago, FiannaTiger said:

will one ice box set up work well with 2 CSVs?

Theoretically yes, it could handle up to 9.3KG/s of steam output on average, so 2 cool steam vents should be a piece of cake. Your automation will be at least a little more complicated.

Assuming recommended settings :One standard ice box can cool 10kg/s of water by 14 degrees. Steam comes out at 110c, tamer at most reduces it to 95C so 15C temp change max.