Liquid pipe pressure sensor

[Mzero974]

Hi.
I've done some experiments with aquatuner theses past weeks and there's a big flaw with them. The aquatuner will use the same amount of power regardless of what is going through it's pipes. If there's is 10g passing through it will consume 1200W and if there's 10Kg it will consume the same amount.

But here's the deal; if your coolant source runs out or output at a very low rate, you can't have the guarantee that your pipes will contain 10Kg of coolant.
The only way to ensure your pipes are full is by building a pressure valve. I found 3 way of doing just that and they all come with flaws :

 

1. The hydro sensor room : Consume 240W more, first packet pumped will always weight 5Kg

2. The pressure valve mod by nightinggale : Can be buggy but best solution ATM

3. Sequentially overflowing the inputs : Break if the overflow system have a constant flow of less than 10Kg/s at the input 
 

So here's my suggestion (to Klei devs or any modder):
Can we have a Liquid pipe pressure sensor ?
It's the same as the Liquid pipe thermo sensor, but detect pressure inside the pipe. Basically an Hydro sensor for pipes.

 

We could build a simple pressure valve with the Pressure sensor and a Shutoff valve.

Feel free to comments, critics...
Thanks.

[nets]

In-line packet aggregation is also an option. Not my design, also better than anything I've made. Follow instructions precisely. 

[Nightinggale]

3 hours ago, Mzero974 said:

2. The pressure valve mod by nightinggale : Can be buggy but best solution ATM

If you know of any bugs I'm not aware of, then do tell. Do note that it by design will output if it contains 22 kg of liquids even if none of them has 10 kg, meaning it can output less than 10 kg at a time. This is by design because the alternative is to fill the internal storage and since everything is below 10 kg, no output and it would jam. Sure the internal storage could be bigger, but it isn't meant to be storage.

[Mzero974]

2 hours ago, nets said:

In-line packet aggregation is also an option. Not my design, also better than anything I've made. Follow instructions precisely. 

That's neat! With a reservoir it can replace option 1 (Hydro sensor room)

 

51 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

Do note that it by design will output if it contains 22 kg of liquids even if none of them has 10 kg, meaning it can output less than 10 kg at a time.

That explain the issues I got with the mod. It should work perfectly with single/double liquid usage. I'll be carefull not to mix more than 2.
Thank you for your work.

[bmilohill]

4 hours ago, Mzero974 said:

 The aquatuner will use the same amount of power regardless of what is going through it's pipes.

Since it sounds like you are trying to optimize your tuner, you might also want to be aware that it will use the same amount of power regardless of what fluid is going through the pipes as well. It always drops the fluid by 14 degrees. Which means though petroleum might seem like a good coolant due to it's wide liquid state temperature range, it has half the specific heat capacity of water/polluted water, meaning you get half the heat transfer for the same amount of power. 

[Nightinggale]

11 minutes ago, bmilohill said:

Since it sounds like you are trying to optimize your tuner, you might also want to be aware that it will use the same amount of power regardless of what fluid is going through the pipes as well. It always drops the fluid by 14 degrees. Which means though petroleum might seem like a good coolant due to it's wide liquid state temperature range, it has half the specific heat capacity of water/polluted water, meaning you get half the heat transfer for the same amount of power. 

You could have a room full of water and use radiant pipes to cool petroleum. That way your petroleum coolant can easily become say 300 C and then be cooled down to 50 C if that is what your setup requires. The water can then be pumped through the aquatuner to maintain the temperature of the water room. Granted this will require an additional pump, but (1200 W + 240W) running 50% of the time is lower than 1200 W running 100% of the time. You can do a lot with pre-space materials, but sometimes it takes some creativity.

 

Cooling through radiant pipes submerged in water means you would not have a power benefit in making sure the pipe is full. This makes the compressing pipe content issue less of an issue.

[Craigjw]

A pressure/volume sensor would be really nice.  I can't remember how many things have erroneously borken due to an inadequate flow in liquid or gas devices/things.  At present, there is no easy way to measure flow for when you need to detect if something goes above or below a certain amount.

My only suggestion would be that the OP is describing pipe packet volume, rather than pressure, but I suppose this is the same thing in ONI, as volume is used to simplify pressure calculations, as these would really suck the life out of the CPU and therefore performance.

Two Thumbs up for this suggestion

[Kiako]

Just for the reccord a far less compact solution than  @Saturnus, but usable without refined metal.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Generally if my aquatuner is thermally controlled, I'll have a reservoir on the input side of the aquatuner that holds enough coolant that the aquatuner will always have a full packet on its intake.  I don't have any examples to show in my current base, but.. the reservoir doesn't need very much -- 10kg more than will fill all pipes is enough.

[Nightinggale]

I updated Sensory Overload to contain pipe pressure sensors for both liquid and gas pipes. It does precisely what you would expect it to do: it takes the mass of the content in the pipe and has a temperature like threshold controller GUI.

It has custom code to work reliably in two scenarios:

Above 0: active if pipe contains anything, standby when empty

Above 1/10 kg: active only if pipe is completely full

Those two modes didn't work reliably with the code copied from vanilla, hence custom code for those two cases.

[Saturnus]

On 16/05/2019 at 9:20 AM, Mzero974 said:

So here's my suggestion (to Klei devs or any modder):
Can we have a Liquid pipe pressure sensor ?
It's the same as the Liquid pipe thermo sensor, but detect pressure inside the pipe. Basically an Hydro sensor for pipes.

It's easy to build one though. I've posted a solution to the problem before but it's sadly lost in time but since it's mind-numbingly simple I'll just post it again.

It's just a valve, a bridge, and an element sensor.

The valve sets the pressure trigger level. When pressure is too high it flows past the valve, across the bridge and triggers the element sensor before joining up with the valve output again.

 

[Nightinggale]

@Saturnus I like that design. Now if only that was posted before I started writing the pipe pressure sensor....

Well I still prefer the pressure sensor. It's more compact and there are cases where they are not interchangeable. For a start an element sensor only works if there is just one type of element in the pipe while the pressure sensor doesn't care about the element.

[mathmanican]

@Saturnus, is this the post you were thinking of? 

 

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, mathmanican said:

@Saturnus, is this the post you were thinking of? 

Indeed. Cheers.

Although the version posted here works better as it's based on use for a very long time.

[Craigjw]

I would also like a voltage sensor.  I've yet to find a simple solution to tell me when something has power or not.

[Saturnus]

5 hours ago, Craigjw said:

I would also like a voltage sensor.  I've yet to find a simple solution to tell me when something has power or not.

I've posted a solution to that problem before as well but here it is if you didn't see it.

Make a loop with one or two blobs of liquid or gas.
Have a shut off sensor connected to the network you want to monitor.
Force the shut off valve on with a NOT gate. (Technically, you can skip this step).
Sense the liquid or gas with an element sensor.
Add a buffer gate with as tight timing as you like, 3s should be fine.
Output stays on as long as the network the shut off valve is connected to has power.

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Saturnus marvellous!