Noob Sharing Automation (Micro) Success

[Qubit]

Okay, I'm sure this is a "yea, duh, everyone knows that, and, also, it could be improved" setup for advanced players, but I'm still learning the ropes of not-completely-trivial ONI automation.  I recently enjoyed a (small) success figuring out a way to automate creating a condition triggered thermal vacuum seal between a steam room and a super hot magma chamber below it.  To make sure I could re-use (and quickly re-understand) this bit of automation in the future, I went ahead and documented it for myself.  And since I had documented it for myself, well, I figured I'd share.   Improvement feedback always welcome.

 

More detailed background:

The above circuit overlay describes a setup that configures two rows of adjacent doors to act as a perfect (vacuum) thermal barrier.  The idea is that the doors will, when an active signal is present, both be open, permitting free temperature exchange between the areas separated by the doors.   When some event (the temperature in the cooler (upper) of the two zones breaches 200 degrees in this case) triggers the circuit to an inactive state, the inner doors (defined as the doors directly touching the upper “cool” area) will immediately shut.  The outer doors will shut 5s later.  (This staggered closure will expel any gas inside the doors into the lower chamber.)  Five seconds after the outer doors close, the inner doors reopen and stay open.  They are now in a vacuum, preventing further temperature exchange between the outer doors and the protected inner area.  The outer doors remain closed until the circuit switches back to an active state (temperature in the inner room returning to a manageable level.) 

The pictured setup/use case is for regulating temperature in a steam room “cool” chamber sitting atop a chamber partially filled with liquid magma, but topped by a gas (hydrogen in this case) heat conductor.  The gasses in the two rooms are separated by highly conductive metal tiles.  Below the metal tiles (so inside the gas containing portion of the magma chamber), the doors are placed.  Result:  we control whether super-hot hydrogen can interact with the conductive metal tiles, thereby keeping temperature in the steam room close to the maximum a set of turbines (barely pictured, sitting atop the steam room) can handle, but with the ability to pause further steam heating should the turbines fall behind (or be shut off by smart battery automation.) 

[Denisetwin]

That is awesome documentation!  Congrats on getting your design working well!

[Nightinggale]

It's a decent description of a design, which works well to regulate the steam temperature. It shows you understood how to use automation to accomplish your goal. Any feedback would be minor details, possibly even nitpicking because you clearly have a working design, which isn't bad.

One thing I would point out is you don't need two rows of door. If you replace the lower row with metal tiles, then the doors will either be closed (heat conductive) or open (vacuum). This means you can control the doors with just a sensor and no need for gates, simplifying that part. It also means disconnecting the heat is faster, making it easier to have a more stable steam temperature. The bad part of this is the heat would have to go hydrogen->metal tile->door->metal tile->steam instead of just hydrogen->metal tile->steam, meaning the DTU/s transfer is lower. This means there is no simple answer to which approach is the best.

Your approach requires a bunch of steel. If the hydrogen ends up as the same temperature as the magma, then certain metals will melt. Because of this, steel is the preferred metal for anything in direct contact with the hydrogen. This means all the doors, automation wires and the row of metal tiles.

If you make the bottom row of doors a steel tile row and you open the doors at 200 C, then doors and top row will be around 200 C at all time. Not only does this mean you can use cheaper metals, it also means you can exploit the very high thermal conductivity of aluminum. The higher the thermal conductivity, the more responsive and accurate your temperature control can be and higher thermal conductivity also means higher max DTU/s, hence more steam turbines powered from the same door "lock".

While on this topic, I will link to my experiment regarding power production from magma. It's harder to build, possibly cost more, but since it transfers heat through pipes rather than hydrogen, it can keep the magma completely insulated and not leaking heat to the rest of the base, only to the steam room.

 

[Qubit]

Thank you, Nightinggale, for the suggestions and the link.    Had it occurred to me, I think I would have gone with your single door row sandwiched between metal tiles design.  The design you're describing requires less logic, has fewer moving (power consuming) parts, and would require less steel.  Those all seem like clear wins.  I would be inclined to accept (what I suspect is a minor) lowering of the DTU/s transfer as a tradeoff.  (So long as the magma supply is finite it doesn't really matter; ultimately it's the same quantity of harvest-able energy.  Maybe that calculation changes if dealing with renewable volcano magma, which would introduce the possibility that one needs to extract heat as quickly as possible to stay ahead of new inflows.   But probably not.)

On the other hand, hey, I learned something doing it the way I did.   And I learned even more from your feedback.