Steam Boiler Turbine Trouble

[KittenIsAGeek]

In my nice little survival build, I set up a boiler and turbine to cool my main reservoir of water.  Then, before the steam reached operational temperature, my pool started to boil.

I feel like a newb today.  I've been making a lot of simple mistakes.  Here's my current one so that others can avoid the problem:

Those bridges are for bypass priority so that output from the aquatuner always runs.  The problem here is that my second bridge terminates in regular tile, instead of insulated.  This creates a heat path out of my steam chamber and into my cooling pool -- even though I'm using insulated pipes.

The solution, at least in this case, is to simply insulate the tile where the bridge is terminating.  Not the best solution, but it will stop my water from boiling.

 

 

In other news, neither @mathmanican nor I could find my thread on using boiling water to cool your base (without a turbine).  So I  switched to a sandbox save and messed around for a while.  I found that since the last time I built a boiler, they changed  the hysteresis point.  From what I can tell, there's less than a 2C drop in temperature when water boils to steam -- which isn't quite enough to overcome the operating temperature of an aquatuner.  I can get really close, but over a period of about 100 cycles the boiling chamber will no longer condense the steam back to water on a closed-loop system and the cooling pool will still be about the same temperature it was to begin with.  I'm trying a few variants, but without space-age materials, this doesn't seem to work anymore.

[SpreadsheetGamr]

Somewhat related to your second point, perhaps you could answer a question for me.  I had some water that accidentally spilled down to a hot zone and it was just boiling to steam and recondensing constantly.  What I know is that the steam was helping to equalise the temperature between the hot zone and the cooler one above.  What I don't know is whether the act of condensing or boiling was adding or removing any heat.  Can you shed any light on that?

The steam was condensing on various dug out tiles too, and dripping off various surfaces all the way back down through the steam to the hot zone.  I vaguely remember reading about a temperature calculation bug/feature on the forums yonks ago related to dripping.  Is that still a thing?

[KittenIsAGeek]

As of my test yesterday, water boils into steam at a little over 102^oC.  The steam forms at 100^oC.  This means that 2^oC * 4.179 DTU are lost in the boiling process.  Steam condenses back to water at about 97^oC and the water appears at that temperature, so no DTU appear to be gained.

This means that overall, 8.36 DTU/g of thermal energy should be lost every time the liquid boils and recondenses.  So yes, the act of boiling and condensing should remove a very small amount of heat.  In my experiment, I used about 8000KG of water which should have netted me 66.8M DTU of cooling, but it did not.  There was _some_ net cooling, but not 66.8M worth. 

I was able to drop the temperature of a very large hot reservoir by 5C over 100 cycles.  After that point, the steam would no longer re-condense to water because the ambient heat in the steam chamber rose too high.

As for the temperature drip bug, that was patched out a long time ago. If you are interested in some of the mechanics behind it, search for "Borg Cube" on the forum and read some of the archived posts.

TL;DR:  Theoretically there should be some heat lost by boiling water into steam and then condensing it back again.  In practice, it didn't happen.

[Nickerooni]

Try ethanol instead of water.