Need help with metal volcano

[Pirito10]

So I'm relatively new to the game and I have found a metal volcano, and I want to get the metal out of it, but I have no idea on how I could manage the extreme temperature. I would want the design to be as simple as possible. Any suggestion would be great

[Mehbark]

Make a loop of polluted water from cold biome to the volcano, and harvest it when the volcano is dormant. Volcanos can easily destroy a base.

[Pirito10]

14 minutes ago, Mehbark said:

Make a loop of polluted water from cold biome to the volcano, and harvest it when the volcano is dormant. Volcanos can easily destroy a base.

Wouldn't that end up melting the cold biome?

[Mehbark]

Just now, Pirito10 said:

Wouldn't that end up melting the cold biome?

Yep.

[abud]

12 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

Wouldn't that end up melting the cold biome?

What you plan to do with cold biome? Digging ice is 50% mass loss, so you will get half amount of water.

[phod]

EDIT: I realize this probably doesn't fit the 'simple as possible' requirement, but here it is anyway.

I'm not sure if you've unlocked the tech, or have the materials available yet, but I've used a steam turbine above my iron volcano to deal with most of the heat. I waited until the volcano was dormant, then built it. I have a steel auto sweeper that picks up the still somewhat hot metal, which sends it zig-zagging on a rail through a tank full of petroleum. This cools it down to about 30C. It worked well for several volcano cycles, but eventually I had to build a cooling loop to bring down the temperature of the petroleum. That cooling loop uses a second steam turbine cooling an aquatuner. I'm sure there are better ways, but it does work. If you do try this, make sure there's nothing but steam or vacuum under the steam turbine, or it won't start up.

[hypoeffort]

If you can get the AETN in a cold biome you're set.   Dig out the volcano and chuck a bunch of oil on it.  That will drop it to under 100 degrees.  You can then run a sweeper and conveyer into your cold biome and let it just sit there till it drops temp right next to the AETN.

[Gus Smedstad]

The first time I approached a copper volcano, I used AETN's. Two AETN's didn't quite keep up with the volcano's heat output over time. The Geyser Calculator says it should have been easy, but that's not how I remember it.

Eventually I switched to a steam turbine and that handled it quite easily.

The smart way is to turn most of the heat into power directly via a steam turbine, with no aquatuner. That cools the metal to around 125 C, and then you can use a secondary cooler using a turbine and an aquatuner to bring it down to something safe to store in your base like 60 C. I've yet to build such a two-stage cooler, though.

[Yoma_Nosme]

Make a pool of water under the volcano to catch the metal. ~5x3 tiles

Use sweepers to harvest metal. 

Use an aquatuner to keep the water inside the pool cool.

Use a steam turbine to delete aquatuner heat. 

That's the basic idea

[beowulf2010]

A bit more complex:

Have 2 deep aluminum metal or diamond window tiles under the metal volcano and a full layer of 900kg or so of water at the base of the volcano. Run an aquatuner cooled set of radiant pipes through the tiles and water. Cool the aquatuner with a steam turbine. (Run the cooling loop through here too just to make it easy) Have an autosweeper pick up the solidified metal and toss it in a conveyor loader and have the metal travel through conveyer rails set into tiles under the volcano. It'll come out around whatever temperature you set the aquatuner to.

I use polluted water in the aquatuner but normal water in the volcano chamber so I set the aquatuner to 15C to not freeze the normal water. I get 15-18C metal out and roughly half the power I spend on the aquatuner. 

I'll post pictures tonight if anyone is interested. 

[Ketmol]

you probably want to wait until you have the steam generator. Once you got that one you can drop water on top of the volcano and get free energy (as long as you do create an airlock around the volcano so that you only have steam in there, or else the generator might malfunction.

You can create a quite durable airlock using oil or petroleum instead of water

[SamLogan]

6 hours ago, Pirito10 said:

So I'm relatively new to the game and I have found a metal volcano, and I want to get the metal out of it, but I have no idea on how I could manage the extreme temperature. I would want the design to be as simple as possible. Any suggestion would be great

Check those :

 

 

[Nebbie]

Simple solution is to melt a cold biome with a loop of coolant between it and the volcano.

All complex solutions basically involve steam turbines. One way is a coolant loop running through an AT and a pool of coolant liquid that the molten metal drops in. I've done this with a gold volcano and petroleum coolant, and it works well, although in hindsight I would've preferred a different solution, cause that petroleum was annoying to get, it takes a fair bit of power with a high draw when active, and ultimately a pool of water would've accomplished the same thing, albeit with destroying the rust biome (which is pretty much destroyed anyways by a water geyser now, and the general problems it has between temperature and loss of chlorine).

The solution I think is generally correct is Brothgar's approach of passive heat conduction to the steam room, then just sweep the metal up once the temperature gradient is low. The reason I suspect this to be ideal is that it's power-positive, at the minor sacrifice of getting metal at like, 130 C instead of arbitrarily cold. Yes, arbitrarily cold sounds nice, but only iron really has much affect on temperature, and your main base cooling loop will deal with it easily, so save yourself an aquatuner and more involved construction and just have a diagonal-access sweeper arm pick up the boiling-hot metal when the turbine's no longer running.

[Pirito10]

First of all, thanks for all the suggestion. I think I'll try with the steam turbine, since I don't have a source of hydrogen fot the AETN. My question is, since the steam turbine runs with hot steam, how do I get the steam? Do I have to fill the volcano with water, so the volcano heats that water until it becomes steam? In that case, if the volcano manages to heat the water until steam, wouldn't that mean that the remaining water is so hot that it won't cool the metal?

[hacksaw12]

50 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

The solution I think is generally correct is Brothgar's approach of passive heat conduction to the steam room, then just sweep the metal up once the temperature gradient is low. 

This is the one I've been using. Not simple to build in survival, but doable. Here's Brothgar's video, sorry for the monster link: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=metal+volcano+exploitation+with+steam+turbine&qs=n&sp=-1&pq=metal+volcano+exploitation+with+steam+turbine&sc=1-45&sk=&cvid=0946FEC6B9714021AA3E84306921FC25&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dmetal%2bvolcano%2bexploitation%2bwith%2bsteam%2bturbine%26qs%3dn%26form%3dQBLH%26sp%3d-1%26pq%3dmetal%2bvolcano%2bexploitation%2bwith%2bsteam%2bturbine%26sc%3d1-45%26sk%3d%26cvid%3d0946FEC6B9714021AA3E84306921FC25&view=detail&mmscn=vwrc&mid=F37B5BFC0CC1687CD348F37B5BFC0CC1687CD348&FORM=WRVORC

[beowulf2010]

Yeah. You'll just dump the water into the steam chamber and let it heat up. The key to cooling the metal is that the steam turbine is taking the >125C steam at 400g/s per turbine port (2kg/s if you don't block any ports) and changing it to 95C water that you will dump directly back into the steam chamber. Over time, the metal will be cooled off to the same temp as the straight and eventually the steam turbine will shut down when the steam drops below 125C. 

I don't use the one chamber method myself, but I'd imagine you'd keep the autosweeper disabled until a temperature sensor in the steam chamber reports the temperature near the minimum 125C that a 1 chamber volcano cooler has so that the metal has time to cool. 

Note: I usually shoot for somewhere around 50kg per tile of steam in any of my steam chambers. On average, my steam chambers are overly large at 6x4 so I dump somewhere around 1,200 to 1,500kg of water in before vacuuming and sealing the chamber. I've had luck with 20kg or so and I've seen people use 100's of kg of pressure. I'm sure someone has figured out the perfect pressure but 50ish seems to work well enough. 

[Pirito10]

So I made this:

Now I think I understand how it works, but first of all, the turbine gets so hot it stops working. How should I cool it down? With Wheezeworts?

Also, since the turbine outputs water at 95ºC, the minimum temperature for the metal I will get will be 95ºC. How could I cool it even more?Using an aquatuner?

44 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

I don't use the one chamber method myself, but I'd imagine you'd keep the autosweeper disabled until a temperature sensor in the steam chamber reports the temperature near the minimum 125C that a 1 chamber volcano cooler has so that the metal has time to cool.

Finally, any advice for the automation, like for the auto-sweeper to wait for the metal to cool down, would be great.

1 hour ago, beowulf2010 said:

I'll post pictures tonight if anyone is interested. 

I would like to see those pictures to get a better idea.

EDIT: is that much water needed, or it would work with much less?

[Nebbie]

8 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

So I made this:

Now I think I understand how it works, but first of all, the turbine gets so hot it stops working. How should I cool it down? With Wheezeworts?

Also, since the turbine outputs water at 95ºC, the minimum temperature for the metal I will get will be 95ºC. How could I cool it even more?Using an aquatuner?

Finally, any advice for the automation, like for the auto-sweeper to wait for the metal to cool down, would be great.

I would like to see those pictures to get a better idea.

EDIT: is that much water needed, or it would work with much less?

Wheezes in hydrogen will work to cool the turbine. That said, its own output can cool it with snaked radiant pipes if it's only running below 140 C anyways (should be, it's a gold volcano). Also, I wouldn't really expect much from this for a while, that's a lot of water to heat up.

A simple thermo sensor down where you expect most of the gold to be, checking that the steam's cool, will work to automate the sweeper. However, you don't want it to be sweeping gold the moment it solidifies if somehow the steam is still relatively cool, so it's best to and that with a clock that only runs it a little bit each cycle. Also, make sure in the actual build you power it, and that there's only water/steam in there, not some gases that'd disrupt turbine operation too.

[Pirito10]

3 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

Also, I wouldn't really expect much from this for a while, that's a lot of water to heat up.

Already changed that, this time I added much fewer water.

4 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

A simple thermo sensor down where you expect most of the gold to be, checking that the steam's cool, will work to automate the sweeper. However, you don't want it to be sweeping gold the moment it solidifies if somehow the steam is still relatively cool, so it's best to and that with a clock that only runs it a little bit each cycle.

So, the best way would be with an AND gate to check the temperature of the steam and also make sure it only works in a little bit of the cycle, right?

7 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

That said, its own output can cool it with snaked radiant pipes if it's only running below 140 C anyways (should be, it's a gold volcano).

So, if I add some wheezeworts + hydrogen atmosphere, and also run radiant pipes through the turbine, it should cool down so the turbine will work, right?

Last question, is there any difference in the type of volcano? (Copper/Iron/Gold)

[beowulf2010]

32 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

Now I think I understand how it works, but first of all, the turbine gets so hot it stops working. How should I cool it down? With Wheezeworts?

Also, since the turbine outputs water at 95ºC, the minimum temperature for the metal I will get will be 95ºC. How could I cool it even more?Using an aquatuner?

Finally, any advice for the automation, like for the auto-sweeper to wait for the metal to cool down, would be great.

I would like to see those pictures to get a better idea.

EDIT: is that much water needed, or it would work with much less?

There is a way to keep the steam turbine from overheating by running the 95C water through the chamber, blocking a port or two, building the turbine out of lead, and controlling when the turbine runs. I unfortunately don't know the details of that as I use a different style. I'm sure someone else can give you those details.

Wheezeworts aren't the best for cooling steam turbines anymore. Your best bets are the self cooling I mentioned above, doing a 2 chamber and having the aquatuner loop cool the turbine in addition to the volcano chamber, or run a different cooling loop through the turbine chamber. This last option could be anything and as simple as a cool slush geyser's output or even  a polluted water loop between it and an ice biome that you are slowly melting. 

A one chamber cooler won't get all the way down to 95C because the turbine stops running at 125C. And yes, to cool the metal below 125, you will need to use some sort of second cooling stage or a two chamber design. Running the 125C metal through a water filled half melted ice biome on conveyor rails would work well if you don't want to set up a dedicated freezer.

For a 1 chamber, I'd just have a Thermo sensor hooked directly to to the autosweeper via automation and set it to something like "below 130" so that it literally can't pick up metal until the room is mostly cooled off. Note that you will need to either use steel (normal refined metal sweepers overheat at 125C) or a corner sweep to avoid overheating due to the steam. 

I'll get some screen shots tonight and post them. Please note that I like over engineering things so mine is overkill, especially for gold volcanoes. 

As for the amount of water, what you have is either just about right (leaving it liquid) or way too much (letting it go to steam). That's about how much I use in the volcano chamber of my two stage that stays liquid and around 15-20 degrees. That's way more than I would use in steam chambers however. 

The more water/steam you have, the slower the temperature changes. I like enough water to change at a decent speed, but not too much to keep the overall temperature too low. Like I said, I generally shoot for around 50kg per tile which would be around 1,500kg (1.5 tiles) worth of water in your pictured 6x5 volcano chamber. 

8 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

Last question, is there any difference in the type of volcano? (Copper/Iron/Gold)

Yes. An iron volcano puts out more than triple the heat energy of gold due to iron's high specific heat capacity (SHC) of 0.449 versus gold's 0.129. 

[Nebbie]

16 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

Already changed that, this time I added much fewer water.

So, the best way would be with an AND gate to check the temperature of the steam and also make sure it only works in a little bit of the cycle, right?

So, if I add some wheezeworts + hydrogen atmosphere, and also run radiant pipes through the turbine, it should cool down so the turbine will work, right?

Last question, is there any difference in the type of volcano? (Copper/Iron/Gold)

Yes, but that's overkill on cooling. Either/or should work, but I would recommend figuring out the self-cooling output because wheezeworts now need phosphorite delivered to them; realistically I don't think you need to do anything complicated to achieve it, just radiant pipes and a lead turbine should do it, because a gold volcano is never going to turn 125 C steam into 141 C steam with an eruption unless you have hardly any steam in there at all. Not sure about copper volcanoes, and iron ones are just ridiculous (would definitely need an aquatuner or something).

[Pirito10]

I'm trying now the radiant pipes method, but why does the turbine need to be made of lead? Is it really necesary? Also, would I need to change something if I decide to do this with another type of volcano, like iron? Because now I'm doing it with a gold volcano because I'm on sandbox, but I don't know what I'll want in survival.

[Nebbie]

10 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

I'm trying now the radiant pipes method, but why does the turbine need to be made of lead? Is it really necesary? Also, would I need to change something if I decide to do this with another type of volcano, like iron? Because now I'm doing it with a gold volcano because I'm on sandbox, but I don't know what I'll want in survival.

To my understanding, the thermal conductivity of the turbine itself is used in how much it heats up from input steam. Lead is the least thermally conductive material you can make it out of.

You absolutely will need to change things for iron. The way metal volcanoes work is each type has the same temperature output and mass output range, and they just output different materials. Different materials are harder or easier to heat up and cool down, because they have different Specific Heat Capacities. Water is an example of a material with a high SHC, so when doing cooling loops, whose job is to physically move a piece of material carrying heat from one place to another, water allows more heat energy moved per mass, thus moved faster as flow is limited by mass.
The metaphor to think of is buses that have infinite capacity, but have to work harder and harder based on passenger count (how hard they're working is temperature, passenger count is heat energy), and different types of buses have better engines, and their goal is to all work just as hard as each other; water has a crazy engine for this metaphor, while iron's is pitiful, copper's is from the junkyard, and gold's was rejected by the junkyard. Hot piece of gold in cold pool of water? Water takes on the few extra passengers of the weak gold bus into its superbuses, so cold piece of gold and still cold pool of water. Hot piece of iron in cold pool of water? Water takes on a lot more extra passengers, ends up a little burdened, so lukewarm piece of iron, lukewarm pool of water.

[Pirito10]

So, I figured out the cooling for the turbine, just using radiant pipes is enough. Now my problem is, the volcano erupts the metal, it cools down to about 170ºC, and it erupts again, giving no time to the previous metal to cool down...

[Nebbie]

17 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

So, I figured out the cooling for the turbine, just using radiant pipes is enough. Now my problem is, the volcano erupts the metal, it cools down to about 170ºC, and it erupts again, giving no time to the previous metal to cool down...

Is there a large temperature gradient between the top and bottom? Your steam chamber does look rather large, and size is the enemy here. In addition to squashing down the size, adding spaced-out tempshift plates should help (they act sort of as a thermally-conducting bridge between all adjacent tile elements in a plus shape, so it's steam-tempshift-steam instead of steam-steam); diamond ones are generally recommended for high-heat applications like this.