Most efficient way to heat water/steam?

[cblack]

I've been thinking of building a thermal battery with the "new" (as I stopped playing shortly before the second QOL update) steam turbine, but that got me wondering, what's the most efficient way to heat water & steam?  IIRC Liquid Tepidizers were the most efficient until you hit their max temp, after which you had to use Thermo Aquatuners as Space Heaters would not function in water nor heat steam beyond a certain point.  Is this still true?

On another note, from reading other posts on the forum, it sounds like many of the performance issues late game are still there.  Is that accurate?

[Yoma_Nosme]

Don't heat the water by wasting energy. Cool with it, directly - or passively an aquatuner, for example and use the steam. 

I  personally am not building steam turbine for power but it is a very nice by product. Mainly use it for cooling.

 

[SharraShimada]

Tepedizers still work, if you automate them in a pulse. But its not efficient in any way. 

Steam turbines have a max ouput of 850W. But thats only if all ports are covered with 2kg/tile steam > 150°C. They start running at 125°C hot steam, but only at reduced power output. You need a lot of power to make that much steam that hot, and the max output of the steam generator will give you only a fraction of this power back.

Steam generators are now used to cool steam to water, removing heat. You can tame volcanos with it, with a positive power output, because you dont need power to boil water. The energy comes from the volcanos. (iron, gold, copper or magma. Leaky oil fissure has noch enough power to produce large amounts of steam)

 

 

[Nightinggale]

3 hours ago, cblack said:

Liquid Tepidizers were the most efficient until you hit their max temp

They are the exception in converting electricity to heat because if they are powered by steam turbines, for each DTU used in the turbine it generates power to make the LT produce around 4 DTUs. The problem is that it's not a steam generator and you won't get power out of hot water.

3 hours ago, cblack said:

use Thermo Aquatuners

If they are powered by steam turbines, each DTU spent in the steam turbine produce power to make less than one DTU in the TA. In the best case it will produce up to around 0.9 DTU for each DTU spent but in most cases it produces far less heat than that.

 

As others have mentioned steam turbines have power as a byproduct. You can't use electric heating to power it and get a surplus of electricity. It's almost like somebody spent time calculating the gain from each setup to avoid free power.

 

What you can do is sending heat you want to get rid of to the steam turbines. This will make the heat go away and hence preventing your base from overheating. It will produce power, but expect it to be something like you run an aquatuner and spend 1200 W while the steam turbine can produce up to around 600 W. It's a boost, but to actually make it a power source for your base you need an external source of heat like magma/metal volcanoes, deep oil biome/magma or something like that.

[Deustodo]

Yeah, if you got yourself a Minor or Regular Volcano, you got yourself a good source of heat for 1 or 2 turbines and produce a fair amount of electricity, it won't turn into your main power source, but it will take some of the stress out of your natural gas or Coal generators.

[cblack]

12 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

As others have mentioned steam turbines have power as a byproduct. You can't use electric heating to power it and get a surplus of electricity. It's almost like somebody spent time calculating the gain from each setup to avoid free power.

"Free power" is not the goal here.  It's to create a battery, and I don't expect 100% efficiency out of a battery.  I realized though that LTs won't be useful once I've got the battery going, because the water that comes out of the turbine is already above the max temp for it.

If I get 90% back of what I put in to an Aquatuner, I'll be happy.

[Lacost]

1 hour ago, SharraShimada said:

You can tame volcanos with it, with a positive power output, because you dont need power to boil water. The energy comes from the volcanos. (iron, gold, copper or magma. Leaky oil fissure has noch enough power to produce large amounts of steam)

 

40 minutes ago, Deustodo said:

Yeah, if you got yourself a Minor or Regular Volcano, you got yourself a good source of heat for 1 or 2 turbines and produce a fair amount of electricity, it won't turn into your main power source, but it will take some of the stress out of your natural gas or Coal generators.

Wouldn't boiling petroleum give you more power than steam?

[Nightinggale]

Just now, Lacost said:

Wouldn't boiling petroleum give you more power than steam?

It would require crude oil. Steam power requires only steam. Boiling and freezing to turn crude oil into natural gas provides the most power, but good luck figuring out how to do that without space materials.

Most of the game is about making your base work with what you have available rather than finding the perfect endgame solution.

[Lacost]

11 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

It would require crude oil. Steam power requires only steam. Boiling and freezing to turn crude oil into natural gas provides the most power, but good luck figuring out how to do that without space materials.

Most of the game is about making your base work with what you have available rather than finding the perfect endgame solution.

Yeah, but to be able to build a steam turbine you need plastic which requires access to oil. You can use Dreckos for plastic but that isn't a serious alternative.

 

Besides, taming a volcano is nothing you do early on in the game.

[beowulf2010]

44 minutes ago, Lacost said:

Yeah, but to be able to build a steam turbine you need plastic which requires access to oil. You can use Dreckos for plastic but that isn't a serious alternative.

As someone who never uses a polymer press to make plastic until it is time for transport tubes (and even then I don't need to make much) I feel like you are short changing the amount of plastic you get from decent glossy drecko farms. 

[Daxterr]

The most efficient way would be to let the regolith make steam for you 

[metallichydra]

i was thinking about this:

because of the vacuum, the heat won't disappear.

you would need some automaton wires to turn of your steam engine, and your heater, when needed.

the water could be heated into steam, which would stay in steam-form until you turn on the steam engine.

of course you also need pipes to get the water back into the tank.

 

i have no idea if this actually works.

 

[Elbmuf]

Maybe not the "most efficient way", but I found out a pretty fun way to generate electricity from steam by reffining metals. Id did a sandbox working poc when last update went out. 

The principle is pretty simple, iron and steel production creates a LOT of DTUs (as far as i understand oni physics, this looks like some kind of a weird notation for Joules). So you have to build a metal refinery out of a material with a pretty high overheat temp (Steel or ceramic seem to do the job, depending on how you want your heat transfer to be done - as ceramic and steel have different heat transfer profiles). Then you connect the input and the output (you can add come regulation system in the loop). Then you pump petroleum in the system (you can pump crude oil, but you have to be careful not to overheat it to petroleum or you pipes might break and having tons of 400 + °C petroleum flowing in you base might be kind of distrubing for your dupes). 
If the floor of the room is made out of a material that have a pretty good thermal conductivity, you just have to pump some water in the room and then you have some good temp steam (500°C petroleum is a pretty good heater). 
You also can also enclose some batteries in the room to store some electricity, so you get back the batteries energy loss as heat.  

By the way, I encourage you to enclose this room with insulated tiles and limit acces to it to dupes with atmosuits as dupes usually don't like to stand in a room saturated with 250°C steam (try to limit the temp in the room to this temp or your steel build structures could encounter some troubles). 

Depending on your setup you can loop the water or connect the system with you water system to clean some infected polluted water into nice clean 95°C water ready to be transformed into 70°C oxygen ! 

With this kind of setup you just have to get a regular source of iron (as an iron volcano) to have a stable source of : power, refined iron, steel and heat. (an interesting heat byproduct is the possibility to extract overheated petroleum out of the system to refine crude oil). 

By the way, you ahve to cool your steam turbine(s), so you might want to look for a close aetn or some wheezes. 

You might have some maths to do to tune up the system depending on your needs. I refer at this sytem as the "Nuclear Steam Funny Workstation" (of course nuclear physics are still unimplemented in oni, but this is somehow close to way a nuclear turbine works) or just "the beast". 

I don't have screen shots of the poc here but i can give some more informations later if needed. 

[Nightinggale]

You should add 2 rows of doors under the steam turbine. When turning off power production, close the top row, then the lower row and then open the top. This will create a row of vacuum, which prevents the heat of the "battery" from entering the turbine room and it won't need cooling to keep under 100 C when it's not operating. Maybe add a door pump, liquid exploit to allow adding steam regardless of pressure and the battery should be able to gain infinite amount of up to 195 C steam for later use. You could add water directly to the system if the temperature gets too high, making it run consistently with 5 intakes and instead of extreme temperature, store extreme pressure.

I'm not sure about efficiency, but in theory it should be doable.

 

I'm not sure you need vacuum on top. You want the steam to be insulated from the rest of the world, but you don't want the steam turbine itself to heat up or it will just reach 100 C and stop working.

[Lacost]

2 hours ago, metallichydra said:

i have no idea if this actually works.

 

Well, there is only one way to figure it out: Enable Sandbox/Debug mode and build it. Worst thing that could happen is that you have fun tinkering around with your design. When you are finished you can make a post here in the forum and discuss possible improvements.

[fredhp]

It's not a permanent way to heat water or permanent power source, but a thing i'm testing a way to cool a big magma pool with a mix of crude oil and polluted water. It worked fine in debug last night, but i didn't build it in survival yet - i'm waiting for the release to start a new game.

It's relatively simple, but must be buildt in a vaccum environment to prevent a heat disaster from the magma pool.

The concept is simple: Isolate the pool with a row of doors (build it 3 tiles above the pool). Build a turbine and a steel gas pump above the doors.

The doors must isolate the turbine and gas pump from the magma completely. Dont forget the necessary automation wire to open the doors later.

Between the doors and magma, build some liquid vents. 

Build the necessary infrastructure to provide oil and polluted water for the liquid vents, and to keep turbine running (cooling, water output, etc.)

Then start injecting crude oil, in small quantities to prevent the forming of tiles. A lot of ultra hot sour gas will form. Keep pumping until there is no more magma and no sour gas generation, the result will be a small amount of petroleum in a room filled with sourgas. 

At this point, do the same as above, but with polluted water, until temperature drops to +/- 210C. When it reaches this temperature, do not inject any other liquid, and let the system equalize. Eventually all gases will be at almost the same temperature.

Here is the secret: 
Steam is lighter than sourgas, so there will be a cloud of steam floating above a cloud of sour gas.

Just open the doors and let the turbine do it's magic. 
When steam runs out, the sourgas can be converted to natgas - that's the pump is for.
The final result will be a room full of vaccum, some petroleum, igneus rock and dirt.

The sourgas conversion is heat positive, so the system will generate more power from the magma than simply dropping polluted water.

The doors are needed to protect the pump and turbine from the high initial temperatures - sour gas will be at 1400C at the begining, damaging the gas pump.

[Nightinggale]

I ran a test of a magma powerplant. The idea is simple. Build it somewhere close, but not quite at the magma. Use pipes to transfer heat from the magma to the steam turbines. If the magma gets too cold, extend the pipes and keep using the powerplant itself.

Doors opens when the inside is 195 C. Steam turbines turns on at 180 C. This will keep the turbines working at near peak output and at peak efficiency (doesn't waste heat).

Using pre-space materials, the best "liquid" for the pipes is actually steam. Running 2 steam turbines at full power requires just 6 cells of radiant gas pipe.

The only overheat problem is actually the pipes. Most rocks actually melts at magma temperatures, meaning you should rely on ceramics or obsidian purely for the melting point. Steel works too, but...

Startup had problems with cold damage and broken pipes. Using insulated pipes fixed that as it would prevent condensing the steam before it would be heated by the magma.

I prepared to use many pipes, but it turns out that just one pipe is enough for 1600 W.

Some magma solidified, but that doesn't matter. Now there is a radiant pipe going through the igneous rock, which also works quite well. This means it's apparently perfectly fine powering the steam turbines from solids rather than liquids.

Doors and top row metal tiles are steel in the test, but they stay under 300 C and as such can be made out of any metal. Copper seems ideal due to heat transfer ability.

Pipes are in a vacuum to avoid heat transfer.

The door at the gas (steam) tank can be opened to store all steam. This makes it easy to empty all pipes and move them as needed without exposing the vacuum to steam.

The gas tank is a modded one taken from High Flow Storage, though it turned out that the regular gas tank would have worked too.

The steam turbines should be placed higher. The test ran into space problems by placing it too close to the magma. Distance doesn't matter much when the pipes are in a vacuum, hence not losing heat.

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

[joelzhl]

 

 

 

53 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

I ran a test of a magma powerplant. The idea is simple. Build it somewhere close, but not quite at the magma. Use pipes to transfer heat from the magma to the steam turbines. If the magma gets too cold, extend the pipes and keep using the powerplant itself.

 

20 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

As others have mentioned steam turbines have power as a byproduct. You can't use electric heating to power it and get a surplus of electricity. It's almost like somebody spent time calculating the gain from each setup to avoid free power.

 

 

Tepidizer does the same job as magma, just might be "slightly" exploitative. 

 

 

[Nightinggale]

That's not nice. You quoted me out of context, which makes it look like I'm self-contradicting when I really isn't. The first quote is about using magma while the second is about using electric heating and as such those two can't be put together you you did with the quoting.

 

You skipped this important part, hence quoting me out of context.

20 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

to actually make it a power source for your base you need an external source of heat like magma/metal volcanoes, deep oil biome/magma or something like that.

Using the magma at the bottom will grant you a lot of surplus power, particularly considering my setup doesn't use any power to run. However it will only last until you have cooled all the magma enough to not make this useful. It will last quite a while, but not forever.