Hydrogen vent & self-cooling turbine

[biopon]

I just thought it was worth sharing.

Excuse the jerkiness, the dupes were busy building lots of pipes.

The temp icon that flashes up is steam too cold, not turbine too hot

Works great for relatively low amounts of heat, around 3-350kDTU/s is safe. The turbine heats up by 10% of what it removes from the steam, and the output 95C water @2000g/s can absorb 33.4kDTU before going over 99C. This particular vent, while erupting, puts out 327kDTU/s in the 125C->500C band. 

[Steve Raptor]

Very nice.

 

Did you try using diamond window tiles to transfer heat instead of the radiant pipes?

[biopon]

27 minutes ago, Steve Raptor said:

Did you try using diamond window tiles to transfer heat instead of the radiant pipes?

Nope. Not needed. I'm using igneous tiles.  Even with petroleum and cheap lead pipes, the gas cools down immediately. it's 10kg/sec liquid vs ~400g/sec gas, and even though it's a pretty good gas, and a pretty lame liquid, it's not a contest. It's OK on the steam side too, I used aluminium there and that thing is ridiculous.

 

[0xFADE]

I was considering something like this but I will be sending the hydrogen to rockets so I’m cooling it down as much as probable before it gets to the final liquidation area.

[fishoutofwater]

how and why this could work?

any specific condition that steam turbine can cooled itself?

how much is the output of the vent?

 

[Samson.ONI]

Looks like you definitely did your research, still kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that it could be completely self-cooling though with how it outputs 10% of the heat it destroys. The 95C output can really keep up with the heat from the hydrogen vent? How many active periods on the vent has it been running?

[biopon]

10 hours ago, Samson.ONI said:

The 95C output can really keep up with the heat from the hydrogen vent?

Yeah... As I said in the OP, it takes 33.4kDTU to warm up 2000g of water by 4 degrees, so you can run the turbine safely forever on a 334kDTU heat source. The vent outputs less than that when it's active, and the coolant and the steam under the turbine can provide some buffering so you could even go hotter, maybe, as long as your long-term heat input doesn't exceed this. So really the only question is, can the 5 segments of alu pipe and a puddle of oil cool the turbine with 95C water? And so far it seems to be doing fine. I've had it through 20 eruption periods, so it wasn't exactly a long-term test though.

[Zathodian]

Hello, I was looking at this design and have a question. 

What do the automation controls connect to and what are there settings?

Thank you.

[biopon]

30 minutes ago, Zathodian said:

What do the automation controls connect to and what are there settings?

They're not strictly needed, I just hate seeing the turbine sputter on and off at 125C.

Left one to above 130C (to turn on at 130), right one at below 125C (to turn off then).

By the way, I had another build where I used this lazy method to cool an aquatuner running constantly with ethanol as the primary coolant (I needed -100C without SC), and this is a bit below 300K DTU constant heat. The turbine overheated... I changed the crappy lead cooling pipe to aluminium, and it worked fine for 200 cycles after that. (Actually it still is.) The turbine hovered right at 99C, which makes sense because thermal transfer increases with the temperature difference. So you do want aluminium, or make a bigger loop in hydrogen out of gold - just don't use lead.

[Saturnus]

Not a bad attempt but it can be even better. You can easily cool down the hydrogen enough with a self-cooled steam engine that you don't even need a steel pump. Gold amalgam is fine.

[biopon]

20 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Gold amalgam is fine.

Are you thinking of using the turbine output to cool the pump after it's done with the turbine? If so, I'd love to see what you have in mind. If not, I'd love to see it even more.

[Saturnus]

I banged this together a couple of days ago.

 

There's some minor updates after stress testing it for 3 consecutive full eruption period. But the gist of it is that you use the fact that a steam turbine averages the temperature of the incoming steam when you split the inputs in two separate steam chambers. And it will run even if only one port sees steam above 125C. So it will pull steam from one side at high temperature near the geyser and the other side will be low temperature.

Output hydrogen with this set up is rock steady at about 105C. So cold enough for gold amalgam pump and very manageable in terms of material choices for piping.

[biopon]

5 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

I banged this together a couple of days ago.

2-stage cooling, and in a really clever mechanical way. I love it.   Self-powering is a nice touch. 

When you said you can get it colder, I thought you split up the turbine water into 1000g pipes and used that to further cool the hydrogen right at the pump. That'd probably work too, but some people might not like the 1000g trickery.

[Saturnus]

6 minutes ago, biopon said:

When you said you can get it colder, I thought you split up the turbine water into 1000g pipes and used that to further cool the hydrogen right at the pump. That'd probably work too, but some people might not like the 1000g trickery.

Indeed. Could get it a few degrees lower by using the pipe trick but that's a step I didn't feel would be widely accepted. And since it really doesn't make a difference if the output is 98C'ish or 105C I didn't see a point in going that far.