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Introducing the split steam turbine and it's uses


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28 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

So you avoid making excessive power wiring. I use this technique basically everywhere possible. I often have conductive wires which have in excess of 5KW potential load but because things connected to it are time sliced and/or mutually exclusive like here the actual maximum possible load on the wire is 2KW. It dramatically cuts the needed number of transformers.

So it's just a habit and isn't needed?  Because the wires there have plenty of headroom.

30 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Possibly. We're talking less than one watt on average though.

Hrm... 100g/s coming from the vent.  That's going to require 48 watts for that pump, on average.  10 watts for the valve ( I'm still not sure whether it spends most of its time open or closed and which one doesn't use power ).  I don't know how much power you will actually get from the steam turbine, but ignoring that, you will need to burn ~7.25 g/s of that hydrogen, storing the rest in the infinite pool.  If you are using that hydrogen instead of just storing it forever, then that leaves 92.75 g/s of excess hydrogen to pump out, which will cost 44.52 watts.

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30 minutes ago, psusi said:

Hrm... 100g/s coming from the vent.  That's going to require 48 watts for that pump, on average.  10 watts for the valve ( I'm still not sure whether it spends most of its time open or closed and which one doesn't use power ).  I don't know how much power you will actually get from the steam turbine, but ignoring that...

Valves do not consume power... at all. Test it yourself.

Let's not ignore it as it's most of the power :D

The steam turbine generates about 98-99% of the power needed to run the pump that pumps the hydrogen into the infinite storage during eruptions. The hydrogen generator is really only there to counteract battery run off during dormancies, and to provide power for the supply pump from the infinite storage to external consumers.

That's why it's connected to that pump and not the other since the vent will not be active all the time, and you can't really know when the consumers down the line will demand hydrogen then the hydrogen generator needs to have a supply to cover that power cost. So you can't have the primary pump supply the hydrogen generator and expect it to actually run as intended.

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4 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Let's not ignore it as it's most of the power

Really?  I thought it used no power when in one state, but 10 W in the other?  You are saying that it just has to be tied to a non dead battery in order to open/close, but doesn't actually draw the power?

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2 minutes ago, psusi said:

Really?  I thought it used no power when in one state, but 10 W in the other?  You are saying that it just has to be tied to a non dead battery in order to open/close, but doesn't actually draw the power?

Yup. And it counts towards wire overloads as well. But it doesn't consume power. Nor does it have an entry in the daily reports.

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Just now, Saturnus said:

Yup. And it counts towards wire overloads as well. But it doesn't consume power. Nor does it have an entry in the daily reports.

So I've been trying to figure out if it would be a terrible thing to have the power to it sometimes fail... i.e. because it is connected to a single smart battery flip-flop to power it from the main trunk, ditch the in-built hydrogen generator, and just tie the turbine to the main trunk.

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1 minute ago, psusi said:

So I've been trying to figure out if it would be a terrible thing to have the power to it sometimes fail... i.e. because it is connected to a single smart battery flip-flop to power it from the main trunk, ditch the in-built hydrogen generator, and just tie the turbine to the main trunk.

You could do that just as with the polluted oxygen build also described in the first post. Nor do you actually need to have the infinite storage connected to the vent itself but these builds are conceptualized as autonomous units you can drop in and forget about.

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3 hours ago, psusi said:

I wonder if I can use metal tiles instead of the diamond windows?

Yep. I'd have to check my spreadsheets at home to guarantee it, but IIRC, only aluminum is better than diamond window tiles with tungsten and gold being only slightly worse. This being said, anything but lead is good enough for most uses. 

A lot of us just use diamond windows out of habit since aluminum is so "new".

Plus, I like how they look versus the metal. ;)

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7 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Yup. And it counts towards wire overloads as well. But it doesn't consume power. Nor does it have an entry in the daily reports.

Thanks for confirming this. Although unrelated to this thread, I've started using shutoffs a bunch in my latest run and was starting to suspect they weren't actually drawing power. Good to know.

I wonder if this is a bug or just a weird design decision/UI failure. I'd be happy if they dropped the power connection requirement, personally.

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5 hours ago, Supraluminal said:

I wonder if this is a bug or just a weird design decision/UI failure. I'd be happy if they dropped the power connection requirement, personally.

I figure that Klei decided that actually keeping track of 10W power consumption for 0.1s each time it's changing state was a waste of CPU resources. Just having the requirement to be actively powered to operate is really complexity enough.

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4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I figure that Klei decided that actually keeping track of 10W power consumption for 0.1s each time it's changing state was a waste of CPU resources. Just having the requirement to be actively powered to operate is really complexity enough.

I thought it was supposed to be 10 watts every second the valve is *open*.

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When looking at the properties of a particular wire, in the Energy Consumers, even though the valves are active and listed, they do not show as consuming power, they are always showing 0/10W.  I can only conclude that they aren't drawing power.

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The liquid shutoff and gas pumps in the hydrogen vent tamer don't need to be made of steel do they?  Also why the long 100s delay of the left side boiling before sending any water to the right side?  Also why vacuum the top room and leave water on the floor?  What's wrong with leaving air in there and leaving some oil on the floor?

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I would suggest that you don't have a vacuum in the infinite storage pump area, gas in that room will prevent the oil from spreading out properly, any other liquid in that area will also stop it working.

If you read the instructions correctly, you'll find that the required pump materials are described in every build.

You don't need a vacuum around the turbine at the top, it's just an insulator between the turbine and anything else.  The water at the base of the turbine is what cools it.

The 100s is explained in Saturn's original description, if you read and digested it fully.

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Well the hydrogen vent finally came out of dormancy and the tamer is working beautifully.  It's storing plenty of cool hydrogen in the infinite storage and producing power.  Next I need to connect a pair of pipes to my hydrogen power plant to either supply hydrogen from infinite storage when the local gas reservoir fed by the electrolyzers is empty, or if that gets full, deposit the overflow hydrogen into the infinite storage.  I didn't think the turbine would actually run very much so I didn't bother sealing it up and letting it self cool, but it seems to be running a bit more than I expected ( and producing more power than I expected! ).  Still not sure if I would rather have the space to travel through or not have the heat source there.  We'll see if the heat becomes a problem I suppose.

Also I was thinking about what you were saying about splitting an intermittent flow.  Do you mean sometimes you have flow and sometimes not, or the size of the packets isn't consistent?  If the size varies, then yea, I can see that being a problem because the valve just wants to subtract a fixed amount so if you want an even split, you have to start with a known size packet.  You could use a packet combiner to make sure of that.

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13 hours ago, TheEvilMango said:

Could u use the hydrogen tamer for a Nat gas geyser of is it over kill and a waste of energy?

NG only comes out at 150.  I suppose it should work but isn't going to run very much.

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There is very little point in doing this, it's a huge waste of materials for such a small amount of power.

I had an NG vent next to a hydrogen vent and tried pre-heating the water for the hydrogen tamer using the hot NG and even this was a complete waste of time and resource.

I now just directly pump the hot NG straight to my NG generators.

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58 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

I now just directly pump the hot NG straight to my NG generators.

Hrm... you can do that with a steel pump I suppose but the gen will spit out steam and hot dirt instead of pwater.  I suppose you could then use a turbine to cool that steam but you'll need exosuits and a liquid lock ( or double liquid lock with vacuum between to prevent heat transfer ) to access the gen room.  Not exactly convenient but makes more power than the turbine directly on the vent I suppose.

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My NG gens get ~150c NG from several NG vents and have been doing so for over 1k cycles without a single incident.  The whole complex is kept at 70c for slicksters.

Place a mesh tile underneath the round part of the NG generator, as this is where the gas is stored.  The mesh tile prevents the 150c NG from interacting with it's surroundings, apart from a bit of CO2, but this is negligible.

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38 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

My NG gens get ~150c NG from several NG vents and have been doing so for over 1k cycles without a single incident.  The whole complex is kept at 70c for slicksters.

Place a mesh tile underneath the round part of the NG generator, as this is where the gas is stored.  The mesh tile prevents the 150c NG from interacting with it's surroundings, apart from a bit of CO2, but this is negligible.

Umm... if it is burning 150 C NG, then the CO2 and pwater output will also be 150 C.

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1 hour ago, Craigjw said:

All the other tiles are metal and cooled to 70c, since these exchange heat with the generator, but not the 150c NG, the output of PW and CO2 is also 70c.

I haven't tried building one yet since they changed around all of the temperature stuff, but according to the wiki, the NG gen now outputs temperature based on the input NG, not the temperature of the generator itself.  Only the petrol gen still does that.  Is that wrong?

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I'm aware of that change, however for what ever reason, the output stuff isn't hot enough to vaporize at any time.

Have a look at the power stations in this game save, it runs just fine, you'll have to alter the battery automation to set the NG gens as the main, not backup power.  The slickster ranch is rather crap and needs automating, but then again, I ony have 2 ranchers and I couldn't be bothered for my dupes to spend all their time minding slicksters to maintain a stable population, so it's population crashed from about ~70 to about 10 during a re-prioritization effort to save my other creatures dying out.  It uses a conveyor filter mod, so don't expect the base to run properly. 

It also has a fully automated fish farm, that would work properly if I hadn't accidentally killed off all the fish due to a mod crash.  The puft farm is appallingly bad, i'm lucky there is still pufts in it.  The hatch ranches work well and the shine bug ranch too (left of stone ranch), but again, with the shine bugs, I made an error and killed them off too, it did used to contain a bunch of abys nymphs though, but you'll just have to take my word for that.

Golden Bunker.sav

 

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