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Temperature Clamped Steam Turbines - Extract power from cool steam.


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It's been a couple years since the original chlorine clamped steam turbine. After watching @Tonyroid's take on taming cool steam vent, and reading various posts about the pros/cons of heating 110C to 125C, versus cooling the 110C, I decided to create "The Clown Hat" cool steam vent tamer. 

The Clown Hat

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Spoiler

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After priming, this contraption requires much less than 0.1W to run. The cool steam vent will never overpressurize. Water leaves at 2.4 kg/s at about 96C. This also nets you about 140W continuously, till the steam dries up. It can be built smaller, but I wanted some symmetry, and thought this looked aesthetically pleasing. 

There are several mechanics at play. Let's look at each.

Bypass Pumps

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Four 0.1g/s bypass pumps (the liquid vents with crude oil below them) rapidly suck all emitted steam away from the vent. The vent, even if it emits at a ludicrous 20kg/s, will not overpressurize. The measly 0.1 g/s liquid needed can be supplied from the steam turbine exhaust (I was too lazy to finish this last touch). Each pump requires about 10kg of liquid every 167 cycles (yes, cycles), so basically zero power cost. A smart battery runoff is more power than this.

Temperature Clamping

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The 300C petro instantly transfers its temp to tiny quantities of steam (like 15mg or so) thanks to the tempshift plate. However, because the mass of the steam is so small, the amount of heat transferred to the petro is rounded to zero (yes, actually rounded to zero).  If you don't like to abuse this "temperature clamping" mechanic, then keep the pressure around 100mg or so, and you'll see very minimal heat loss.   The tiles touching the petro are made of ceramic, and again ZERO temperature transfers. This means the 300C petro will always be 300C, for 1000000 cycles (see if you can play it that long @nakomaru:) )

Steam Turbines Look at Max Steam Temp Below them

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As long as one tile below the turbine has high temp steam (who cares if it's 1mcg), the turbine will work. It is not required to heat all steam to 125C, just one tile under the turbine must pass this requirement.

Supplying tiny amounts of gas

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We have the keep the steam content above the petro low, but not vacuum. So a gas pump sends small amounts of steam to each vent. One option is to just use two valves, set at 0.1g (100mg), the mininum filter setting. My 600kg of petro lost about 0.3C per day, so I rigged a contraption to send 0.1 g every 10 seconds (similar power requirement as the bypass - essentially nothing). To get this small amount of gas, filters and a shutoff are used. The filter before the shutoff sends 0.2g/s through it. An automation loop (10s off/ 1s on) allows 0.2 g to pass through it once every 10 seconds. This 0.2 g gets split by the two other filters, with 0.1g arriving at each. 

Conclusion

The Clown Hat is a "set and forget" option for cool steam vents.  You can harvest liquid and power, and/or you can harvest steam (just turn the turbines off via automation if you want steam). In addition, you can use these mechanics to do lots of other things. Here are two. 

  • Harvest any gas power free (essentially) from any vent without it overpressurizing (bypass pump). 
  • Pass steam at any temp through a turbine (temperature clamping one tile under the turbine). If you have 101C steam you want to get rid of, this will do it. 

FYI, temperature clamping works in many other ways (tempshift plates are not required). You can use statues, gravestones, bridges, etc. If any building is connected to a large mass of something, and then the other end is connected to a very tiny amount of gas, interesting things happen. 

Ohhhhh......, I should end with "This is exploit-free" ....

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1 minute ago, Argelle said:

the steam turbines do not need any cooling

Self cooled. That's the radiant pipes you see running through petro. 

In the spoiler.

Come to think of it, if you zoom out a bit it looks like @minespatch. You've got eyes (vent), glasses (vents), a nose (cool steam vent), ears (petro area) and a colorful hat (steam turbines and liquid turbines). I'm sure with a bit of redesign, we could make it look even more like @minespatch. :) 

 

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3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Steam Turbines Look at Max Steam Temp Below them

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As long as one tile below the turbine has high temp steam (who cares if it's 1mcg), the turbine will work. It is not required to heat all steam to 125C, just one tile under the turbine must pass this requirement.

This is what makes this design a non-starter for me. It's outright cheating, IMHO, taking advantage of the fact the code takes a shortcut instead of properly calculating the total energy of the input steam.

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1 hour ago, Gus Smedstad said:

This is what makes this design a non-starter for me. It's outright cheating, IMHO, taking advantage of the fact the code takes a shortcut instead of properly calculating the total energy of the input steam.

Have to agree on being able to trick a steam turbine being an exploit, though I believe it'd make more sense if a steam turbine just only counted ports that had valid steam.

I would also call the temperature-rounding an exploit, although it's not strictly required. Overall, this build uses shortcuts ONI makes and very small amounts of things to trick the whole thing into working. I'd really rather Klei just buff cool steam vents a little to be more usable.

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2 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

This is what makes this design a non-starter for me. It's outright cheating, IMHO, taking advantage of the fact the code takes a shortcut instead of properly calculating the total energy of the input steam.

Any reason you have to comment? If you don't like it then that's fine but you're forgetting why we build these things that exploits the mechanics of the game. We do it to improve the game and make Klei aware them by brute forcing them.

Honestly, all you moaners owe us "exploit builders" a huge amount of gratitude because the game would be much worse of without our builds demonstrating the need for improvements in the game mechanics.

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26 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Any reason you have to comment? If you don't like it then that's fine but you're forgetting why we build these things that exploits the mechanics of the game. We do it to improve the game and make Klei aware them by brute forcing them.

Honestly, all you moaners owe us "exploit builders" a huge amount of gratitude because the game would be much worse of without our builds demonstrating the need for improvements in the game mechanics.

am i an "exploit builder"? or do we only count useful designs?

not talking about the tubes and such, im talking about my sandlock

 

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1 hour ago, metallichydra said:

my sandlock

I loved that build. If it persisted through save/load I think the devs would give it more attention.... Nowadays I tend to play with things that persist through save/load, though some day we should put together a huge list of things that break/change upon save load. 

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Oh my goat I'm in love with this one, it remembers me good old times when you used to trick the old turbine in every possible ways.

A bit to exploit for my own rules (very tempting however... will I be a dissident despite me... ?!) but still it's so much pleasure to see stuff like that :D

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I stumbled across this turbine quirk inadvertently myself when water returning to the steam chamber of an aquatuner heat sink created a low-mass water lock that partitioned the chamber, keeping it running far longer than it otherwise should have due to a single cell of 125 °C steam. This is quite a clever use of the mechanic.

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20 hours ago, mathmanican said:

It's been a couple years since the original chlorine clamped steam turbine. After watching @Tonyroid's take on taming cool steam vent, and reading various posts about the pros/cons of heating 110C to 125C, versus cooling the 110C, I decided to create "The Clown Hat" cool steam vent tamer. 

...

 

This is all very clever. Part of me wants to scour forums for "dubious-but-really-cool" builds like this and get permission to feature them on YouTube videos. But... I have so much work to do it will have to wait.

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This probably saves more power by not having to pump the water after it condenses than it generates by the steam turbine :) . (Not actually, as an average geyser is around 100W from the 100kDTU/s from 110C to 95C while pumping limited by automation would only be about 40W).

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