Need help with metal volcano

[Pirito10]

41 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

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.

As you can see, that metal is 135ºC (it was from the first eruption of the volcano), and the steam is at 108ºC in every tile. The problem is that the volcano is about to erupt again, so it won't give time to the previous metal to cool down. About the amount of water, I added 50Kg per tile, as beowulf2010 said before.

EDIT: I think the solution would be to cool the water that comes out the turbine before sending it back to the volcano. But the aquatuner would produce a lot of heat. What would be the best way to cool the aquatuner, avoiding, if possible, the cold biomes or the AETN?

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Pirito10 said:

EDIT: I think the solution would be to cool the water that comes out the turbine before sending it back to the volcano. But the aquatuner would produce a lot of heat. What would be the best way to cool the aquatuner, avoiding, if possible, the cold biomes or the AETN?

This is exactly why I prefer my 2 stage setup.

Basic setup:

Spoiler

Automation, plumbing, power and conveyors:

Spoiler

Note: I actually now run a conductive wire out of the steam turbine and put it into the "high" end of a transformer to push the power onto my main power grid via the "low" end so that I don't need to run the heavy watt through the wall like my posts.

Just made a new one and got a few numbers to show you how good it is at cooling.

The eruption spit out 495.7kg of molten iron at the usual 2,527C. Since I had just built this, the temp was a little higher than usual at 19.6C in the water and diamond window tiles.  Usually, they're around 15-17C.  By the time the autosweeper picked up the first 9.2kg chunk, it was already down to 801C or so just from the water. By the time the iron was in the first visible tile of conveyor railing directly below the loader, it was down to 174C. 8 diamond window tiles later, it was down to 18C. When the eruption was finished, the entire stack of 495.7kg was at 27.1C and the tiles/water in the volcano chamber was up to 28.4C. By the time the next eruption happened, the chamber was down to 21.3C.  So for this particular Iron volcano's output (Second highest output I found in a quick search on ToolsNotIncluded), I'm loosing 1.7C per eruption. Over the 92 cycles, this equates to adding around 104 degrees to my volcano chamber so by the time the volcano goes dormant it'll be somewhere around 125 degrees and boiling. I'm OK with this as at the end of the cycle, I'm still producing cooler metal than most one stage designs. And the dormancy time is long enough to brig it all the way back down to a normal 15C. It also shows that this will eat the heat from Copper (2/3 Iron's heat capacity) and Gold (less than 1/3 the heat capacity) volcanoes for dinner.

The downside? It's pretty power hungry, slow to build and is overkill as a consistent stream of 125-150C hot metal from a one stage design isn't all that hard to deal with.

Are there better designs? Sure. JohnFrancis has a pretty cool one that uses no liquid at all (outside of the steam chamber). Brothgar's is nice. I think Lifegrow has a clever one too. I'm sure Neotuck and Saturnus have posted builds in the past. And I'm sure I'm forgetting another 20 or so people's builds.

Edit: Pretty much everything to the left of the volcano is completely useless outside of temperature stabilizing mass. 8 tiles of conveyor through diamond/aluminum at most is all that is needed to bring iron down to temp. 

[Nebbie]

58 minutes ago, Pirito10 said:

As you can see, that metal is 135ºC (it was from the first eruption of the volcano), and the steam is at 108ºC in every tile. The problem is that the volcano is about to erupt again, so it won't give time to the previous metal to cool down. About the amount of water, I added 50Kg per tile, as beowulf2010 said before.

EDIT: I think the solution would be to cool the water that comes out the turbine before sending it back to the volcano. But the aquatuner would produce a lot of heat. What would be the best way to cool the aquatuner, avoiding, if possible, the cold biomes or the AETN?

Oh, you just mean the metal. Realistically, without a cooling loop, 120-140 C is what the metal will settle at depending on how well you can conduct away heat from it. As I've explained about gold, it being hot isn't an issue, you can take 135 C gold right into your base and build stuff and it'll just cool down to match surroundings pretty much instantly without heating the base up much at all, cause it has something like 40x less heat than water per mass. As to why this happens, it's because that gold is only touching the steam of the tile it's on. You could fix this easily with a thin layer of petroleum, provided temperatures won't reach its evaporation point (they shouldn't, again, gold carries very little heat). Diamond tempshift plates spaced every other tile (in this case, I'd just recommend 2, diagonally above the center) should also help.