Gus Smedstad Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 These have been done before, I just haven't seen any videos that (1) harvest the heat from the metal for energy and then further cool it to room temperature and (2) use the current version of the steam turbine. This particular setup also services a glass furnace. I'm using petroleum as a pool to do the immediate cooling of the molten metal, and to keep the auto-sweeper and conveyor loader below 275 C (since both are steel). Cooling the metal heats the petroleum, and that heat is transferred to the steam chamber for the turbine. I've never seen it stay much above 205 C. I went with an initial depth of 200kg per tile, and that seems to have been plenty. Plumbing: There are two heat exchanger loops. One transfers heat from the petroleum pool to the steam chamber, the other is serviced by an aquatuner in the steam chamber, which keeps the metal block at about 0 C. Once picked up by the conveyor, hot metal winds its way through the steam chamber, cooling to whatever the current steam temperature is (125 - 200 C). It then continues on to the metal block, where it cools to about 15 C before exiting. Glass doesn't do anywhere near as well because it's not as thermally conductive. Glass exiting the steam chamber is often still around 600 C, but it still gets to 40 C or below before it exits the second metal block. A system for properly harvesting heat from glass would either have to use a larger steam chamber with a longer conveyor track, or another approach for transferring the heat entirely. The glass furnace and the steam turbine proper are externally cooled by a system off-screen. It's another turbine system that keeps machines that tend to run hot cool. They could, instead, be cooled by the same loop that cools the metal block. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beowulf2010 Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 That's very similar to the setup I use with the solid tiles being used to transfer the heat from the metal via conveyor line to the liquid radiant pipes. Here's a slightly old version that I use. It's overkill on the length of the conveyor line and not as optimized as I'd like to get it to at some point but it does work really well and is self contained except for the power needed for the aquatuner and conveyor stuff. (This was pre-lead and I'm too lazy to figure out port blocking to get the steam turbine to self cool) Spoiler The aquatuner shuts off if it detects a polluted water packet under 15C so that I don't freeze the normal water in the volcano chamber during dormancy periods. Note: I actually use vacuum now instead of the hydrogen you see. I honestly don't remember why I put hydrogen in there for that base. Note 2: I also use conductive wire out of the steam turbine room now and just use a transformer to push the energy into my main trunk :line(s). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Promethien Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 So you don't show your conveyor overlay but I am guessing you run the still hot metal through the steam room to get what you can out of it. Then into those metal tiles you are cooling with the aquatuner to get it to useable temp? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0xFADE Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 I'm a fan of a slight variation of brothgars metal drop on a door style one. I've got it running right now but unfortunately it hasn't been out of dormancy long enough to heat up. I used a water reservoir style one before but was spending large quantities of energy cooling the liquid. Yours would do the job as well. Easier to put together for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Raptor Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 This is a great and simple design. I really like the idea of cooling with the metal block, probably going to steal it. Thanks for sharing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebbie Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 Hmm, interesting idea with rails to transfer a lot of the heat directly as soon as the petroleum cools it a bit, The way I've done it before is to cool the petroleum ridiculously and only sweep when it's cold, but this should save a lot on aquatuner power. I guess the fundamental problem with doing it this way, though, is not having a rail thermo sensor as an option to only offload the gold/glass once it's for sure cooled down. My big thought here is maybe this hybrid approach is actually wrong and you should just directly have the metal volcano be part of the steam room, so that the steam cools down the liquid metal to make it sweepable to put on rails for final heat offloading and then cooling, with no petroleum involved. It might be a bit tricky, but would condense things down as long as the steam below the overpressure limit is still sufficient to take the heat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus Smedstad Posted September 1, 2019 Author Share Posted September 1, 2019 9 hours ago, Promethien said: So you don't show your conveyor overlay but I am guessing you run the still hot metal through the steam room to get what you can out of it. Then into those metal tiles you are cooling with the aquatuner to get it to useable temp? Correct. I really should have included the conveyor overlay in the first place. I've editing my post to include it. 9 hours ago, 0xFADE said: I'm a fan of a slight variation of brothgars metal drop on a door style one. I haven't seen Brothgar's video, but "drop the metal on a door" is specifically what I was thinking when I said the glass probably needed a better system to harvest energy in the initial step. I'm not a huge fan of systems like that for a variety of reasons, mostly because they depend on timing and require tinkering to get right, but they have the advantage of letting you retain the hot solid (metal or glass) for longer for heat transfer. 4 hours ago, Nebbie said: My big thought here is maybe this hybrid approach is actually wrong and you should just directly have the metal volcano be part of the steam room, so that the steam cools down the liquid metal to make it sweepable to put on rails for final heat offloading and then cooling, with no petroleum involved. It might be a bit tricky, but would condense things down as long as the steam below the overpressure limit is still sufficient to take the heat. I'm not sure what you mean by the overpressure limit. So far as I know, there's no upper limit to how high steam pressure can go. Back when I first experimented with making steam and had no idea what I was doing, I'd dump full tiles of water into a steam chamber, and ended up with steam pressures of 300-400 kg/tile. I used about 1600 kg of petroleum in my pool, and to get the same thermal mass you'd need about 800 kg of water. Which isn't much, but it would give you a steam pressure of about 28 kg/tile, depending on how large the chamber was. I'm thinking it would be smaller overall, but it still needs room for a number of items like the autosweeper, conveyor loader, and aquatuner. You'd probably want to automate adding additional water if the steam temperature got too high. A single-chamber system doesn't have any advantages thermally. The heat exchanger in this system keeps the petroleum pool in the volcano room the same temperature as the steam in the steam chamber. The main thing you'd gain is you could build it without petroleum, but you'd have the drawback that the chamber would always be full of high-pressure steam, which would make servicing it with Dupes very difficult. Spacesuits can handle the steam, of course, but you'd need an airlock that could handle high pressure steam. Waterlocks can't do that. An oil or petroleum lock could, but the point of going with high-pressure steam is to build it before you have access to those. A pump airlock like the one I typically use can't send the steam back into the volcano / steam chamber, because the pressure's going to be above 20 kg/tile. Now, in theory a single-chamber system shouldn't require Dupe service. I generally completely seal my turbine steam chambers and don't attempt to service them once built. However, I only get away with that because I've built enough of them that I rarely make mistakes. I had to send Dupes into the volcano chamber of this one several times because I'd made various errors and I had to correct them. For example, I originally built the power wires out of lead, and they melted. Presumably because they exchanged heat with the hot copper on the conveyor rail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebbie Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 1 hour ago, Gus Smedstad said: ... I'm not sure what you mean by the overpressure limit. So far as I know, there's no upper limit to how high steam pressure can go. Back when I first experimented with making steam and had no idea what I was doing, I'd dump full tiles of water into a steam chamber, and ended up with steam pressures of 300-400 kg/tile. ... Geysers in general will not output if the pressure around them is too high. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus Smedstad Posted September 1, 2019 Author Share Posted September 1, 2019 Oh, right THAT overpressure limit. D'oh! I wasn't thinking about that in connection with the volcano. Usually I worry about that with steam geysers and natural gas geysers. I have no idea what the pressure limit is for metal volcanoes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mathmanican Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 11 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said: I have no idea what the pressure limit is for metal volcanoes. Last I checked you are fine till the third row above neutronium, middle column of volcano, hits 500kg. Or if all tiles are 500 kg steam. There is a plus shaped region where stuff erupts from. If each is over 500 kg then you're done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus Smedstad Posted September 1, 2019 Author Share Posted September 1, 2019 That makes sense, since they're emitting a fluid. 500kg is plenty if we're talking about steam pressure. 6 minutes ago, mathmanican said: There is a plus shaped region where stuff erupts from. If each is over 500 kg then you're done. I was under the impression that it all came from the 2nd tile up, 2nd column from the left. Reinforcing that was another error I made - when I put a segment of insulated tile over that square, it rose in temperature to around 300 C while the adjacent segments stayed at 100 C or so. I ended up re-routing the pipe because I was concerned. The other reason I thought it was a single tile is that the solidified metal always ends up in a single tile, 2nd column from the left. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beowulf2010 Posted September 1, 2019 Share Posted September 1, 2019 6 hours ago, Nebbie said: I guess the fundamental problem with doing it this way, though, is not having a rail thermo sensor as an option to only offload the gold/glass once it's for sure cooled down. You don't need one. On both Gus and I's posted builds, we both built the metal/diamond tile area way bigger than needed. On mine my style, iron is down to 14C in at most 8 tiles worth of rail behind diamond tile. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus Smedstad Posted September 1, 2019 Author Share Posted September 1, 2019 I used to build even bigger metal tile heat exchangers, but that was when I was brute-force cooling the copper from 2226 C. In actual operation, with this system the copper is always at the steam temperature by the time it leaves the steam chamber, which is 125 C - 200 C depending on where it is in the volcano cycle, and it's always at 15 C or below long before it leaves the metal block. No testing of the rail temperature required. It's be nice to have a rail temperature sensor for the glass, though. As I said originally, it's generally still 600 C when it leaves the steam chamber. It's cool to touch, 30 - 40 C, by the time it leaves the metal block, but I'd prefer to re-cycle the glass through the steam chamber until it's below 200 C. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0xFADE Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 This is pretty much the design. All the heat is leaking out that hydrogen on the right that I need to suck back out. I had the temp sensor in way too much steam before and it took too long to change temps for the sensor. Otherwise it doesn't need any timers. This is just a gold volcano but his example worked just fine off an iron. There would be an aquatuner in the steam room but I have one in a room below the screen shot that I used for cooling. The arm moves the below 130c gold through the metal floor and it comes out the other end at 20-30c Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0xFADE Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 Once the sensor drops below 130 it starts to open long enough to drop, still plenty of time to the next cycle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TLW Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 Thoughts on water versus petrol for the coolant? Water->steam is reversible, which is nice... but petrol doesn't evaporate until a much higher temperature, which is also nice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beowulf2010 Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 1 hour ago, TLW said: Thoughts on water versus petrol for the coolant? Water->steam is reversible, which is nice... but petrol doesn't evaporate until a much higher temperature, which is also nice. I use water because of the higher specific heat and the ability to directly delete the heat via steam turbine. My next choice would actually be crude oil instead of petroleum so I can get the "free" pre-heating in preperation for cooking it to petroleum or natural gas. There nothing wrong with using petroleum, I just usually only make it to be used directly. I rarely have petroleum just sitting in a tank unused. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
0xFADE Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 I have had petroleum flash in to gas while being used as a coolant when it was around 60-70c. Could be something to do with lag/timing and it having less heat capacity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus Smedstad Posted September 2, 2019 Author Share Posted September 2, 2019 2 hours ago, TLW said: Thoughts on water versus petrol for the coolant? You can't use water if you're using it in a heat-exchange loop for a volcano. It's in a pipe, and if it boils in the pipe, it's going to damage the pipe and escape. If you're not using a heat-exchange loop, you're doing a single-chamber solution. The drawbacks of which I've already discussed at length. You end up with > 20kg / tile steam, which makes service very difficult. A two-chamber solution is more forgiving of errors. 1 hour ago, beowulf2010 said: There nothing wrong with using petroleum, I just usually only make it to be used directly. I rarely have petroleum just sitting in a tank unused. I view petroleum as a all-purpose high and low temperature coolant for a variety of purposes, a role it retains pretty much indefinitely. Supercoolant is better, but supercoolant production is dependent on space trips and thus production is very low. Petroleum is inferior to water for aquatuners, but for heat exchanger loops cooling volcanoes or robominers, water's not suitable. I do tend to keep tanks of the stuff lying around. I'm in the mid game (as I view it) in my current colony, and I have 3 petroleum tanks - one buffering power generation, one buffering all other uses (including plastic), and one that's an on/off automation control for the oil refinery. The latter's not really storage since it's designed to disable the refinery when it's full, and then re-enable the refinery when the tank runs completely empty. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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