Harvesting Magma Volcano

[DemainaNyx]

So, I rolled a seed with Volcanos in it, planning that I'd actually try to use these this time.  In the past I've used phosphorus to harvest the heat from them for power, but never harvested the igneous rocks.

Ideally I'd like to automate it, but it seems kinda tricky without space age materials. 

I've been playing with diagonals and might be able to figure out a configuration to reach all the igneous rocks that are generated from outside the room.  With the volcano heating up ethanol to transfer heat to a turbine though, it's still going to be extremely hot inside that room so I will probably need to keep the sweepers in a vacuum so as to isolate the volcano heat.  So I have to cool the sweepers (easy) and figure out how to determine when to pull the igneous rock out of the volcano area and move them to another area to cool down further.

Alternatively, I think keeping the entire thing in a vacuum would work, letting the magma drip down to a plate to transfer the heat out to a turbine (maybe run some pipes to help move heat possibly) and then just wait for it to solidify and dig it up.  Would need to cool the miner and sweeper in the vacuum but that's easier.  The problem is now I'm losing half the mass due to digging.  Not a huge concern honestly since I've so far discovered 5 volcanos and haven't even uncovered the whole map yet, but I'm just trying to maximize as much as I can with my limited non-space materials.  And again, I need to determine when the igneous rock is cool enough to move and then cool it further once out.

 

I think snaking the igneous rocks through a steam turbine room should help get the middle level of heat out of them and then I can use this post's capacitor design to remove last bit of temp out.

 

Any thoughts on this?  I'm sure a few of you have already conquered this task before so I'm curious what your thoughts are for the best approach.

[axxionx12]

I built a thingy a while back. It drips magma into a cooling  chamber that transfers heat to petroleum below. It also melts regolith to add even more heat to the system while cooking the magma down to near "freezing" point 

 

 

[nakomaru]

If you use the simplified version in the link you posted it should work with steel. You will need about 110 kg of steam per tile to increase the thermal capacity of the room as much as possible. Igneous rock tempshifts/drywall. Drop rock in the chilled room after snaking it through the hot room to soak out heat.

If that design can't keep the heat below 275, put a temp limit on the conveyer or increase the size of the steam room for thermal capacity. Worst case add another turbine on the right. It has no trouble keeping iron cool, but I've yet to put it on top of a magma volcano.

The advantage to that approach is rock should instantly become debris and is chilled after removing most heat.

You might need to use water or a high pressure gas in the chilled side instead of brine, for fear of tiny bursts of steam becoming water.

[DemainaNyx]

4 hours ago, nakomaru said:

If you use the simplified version in the link you posted it should work with steel. You will need about 110 kg of steam per tile to increase the thermal capacity of the room as much as possible. Igneous rock tempshifts/drywall. Drop rock in the chilled room after snaking it through the hot room to soak out heat.

If that design can't keep the heat below 275, put a temp limit on the conveyer or increase the size of the steam room for thermal capacity. Worst case add another turbine on the right. It has no trouble keeping iron cool, but I've yet to put it on top of a magma volcano.

The advantage to that approach is rock should instantly become debris and is chilled after removing most heat.

You might need to use water or a high pressure gas in the chilled side instead of brine, for fear of tiny bursts of steam becoming water.

Yeah, I like the idea of the rock instantly becoming debris instantly.  I wasn't sure if your design would work entirely but I can give it a try and see what happens.

I know the capacitor part should work for cooling down but I'm unsure about the quantity of magma vs what a normal metal volcano outputs.  My metal volcano outputs like 20Kg/s while these are around 300Kg/s.  Unsure if the extra mass will cause an issue but we'll find out.

 

Edit::

This Volcano I tested had an output 212 Kg/s for 87 seconds, which is on the low end of some of the ones I have.

It worked fine at first but then the aquatuner, sweeper, and loader started overheating.  Uping the pressure to 140 Kg of steam per tile prevented it from getting over 305C, but that still destroyed the sweeper and loader.  The higher pressure instantly converted all the magma to debris vs the 110 KG where some magma dripped on the tiles below.  Still gotta do more tests.

I feel like harvesting diagonally might be the safest option if it's a compact design.  I'll test it again tomorrow with a larger steam area to see if that helps deal with all the heat.

[Angpaur]

My oil boiler has all the features you mentioned and it also makes sure magma solidifies into debris. You can use the same concept to heat up steam instead of oil.

 

[Priitm]

With Volcanos you have quite some power to harvest. This setup works very well and gives out rock at around 150C.

But i havent figured out yet if its my client/map problem or game bug (its prerelease oasise map). It works like charm if i look at it. If i move camera to other side of map, debris on rails dont change heat with environment and just runs trough system without heat loss...

[abud]

1 hour ago, Priitm said:

If i move camera to other side of map, debris on rails dont change heat with environment and just runs trough system without heat loss

Looks like something juicy to test. Unless @mathmanican already know calculation bug like this happens.

[nakomaru]

It's a very unfortunate bug I experience as well. I just drop metal off in the cool room and then collect it every few thousand cycles instead.

@DemainaNyx Try disabling the sweeper above 200C. It is probably releasing too much heat right away through rails. Debris by itself probably can't overpower a turbine.

[DemainaNyx]

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

It's a very unfortunate bug I experience as well. I just drop metal off in the cool room and then collect it every few thousand cycles instead.

@DemainaNyx Try disabling the sweeper above 200C. It is probably releasing too much heat right away through rails. Debris by itself probably can't overpower a turbine.

I think it's just because there's so much mass to deal with.  Adding a few extra tiles for steam helped prevent the sweeper and loader from overheating but I really feel like it would be better to have more steam turbines to gather all that heat.  I 

 

Your design worked, but even disabling the sweeper until the room was below 200C still left me with 1300C igneous rock.  After snaking through the steam room, it got down to 900C before entering the cold room.  After exiting this area it was 70C, so a ton of energy was removed in the capacitor.

Definitely feel that if I want to get more power out of the rocks, it's going to require a more extreme setup like Prittm has but this definitely works if you just want to harvest the igneous rocks and get them cooler.  If I extended the capacitor more I could probably get it down to a more normal temp.

The fact that I have like 6 volcanos in a small area means I probably want a large capacitor and multiple steam chambers to siphon the power off, but this works for a single volcano setup.

Spoiler

 

[nakomaru]

Thanks for checking it out! I was curious myself. It clearly needs a more clever or more extreme design. A bigger rail system in the steam room should extract more heat from the rock.

[Rhogar]

I use Francis John's counter flow petroleum boiler with some diagonal jank to drop the hot ore into a steam generator.  It runs off of 480 for the pumps and rare cycling for the auto sweeper and robominer.  Volcanoes with oil reservoirs are free power and water positive.

[mathmanican]

7 hours ago, DemainaNyx said:

If I extended the capacitor more

You can also just trap debris inside a door, and then let the materials sit there for a day before dropping.  Just connect the doors to a heat sink, and you can let the rock sit all day in the doors (same multiplier as conveyor rails, but last longer).   

I got this from @JohnFrancis's post below

Spoiler

Check further down the post till you see this picture. 

 

[DemainaNyx]

I will give that a try.  Looks really nice.  I was debating using a conveyor shut off to trap it in a loop for a while, but this works too.

[mathmanican]

6 minutes ago, DemainaNyx said:

I will give that a try.

Let us know how it works out. Happy tinkering. 

[OxCD]

Quick question on this subject : is one steam turbine able to deal all the magma heat from a volcano ? Metal volcanos are nothing for the turbine, but magma volcano I'm wondering, because of the thermal energy quantity it brings.

[nakomaru]

The turbine itself can delete more and more heat from hotter and hotter steam, so it will be fine. When you add your own material limits, power, time, and electrical efficiency limits, then it's a different question.

A volcano has a long dormancy so with a clever enough design I am sure one turbine is enough to cool all the rock to about 150 and chill the rest to 20C with a tuner, even with steel.

I am going to have a go using doors to control heat extraction. That seems much better than rails.

[mathmanican]

5 hours ago, nakomaru said:

I am going to have a go using doors to control heat extraction. That seems much better than rails.

I'm excited to see your results after 10000 cycles of testing.