Metal Volcano Tapper / Tamer - 1000g/sec

[biopon]

I wanted easy access to liquid metal in pipes for all kinds of stuff, but also wanted to optionally retain the copper production from my volcano, so I changed my sweeper-based volcano tamer to this:

Yes, it uses the fact that pumps are weird, and also takes advantage of the no-phase-change-in-pipes-if-1000g-or-less rule. If you're OK with these:

I think it came out neat and small. It's power positive (the AT doesn't do much but cool the turbine and the metal from 125C to whatever you want it to be) - the turbine handles the majority of cooling. For gold it could even be self-cooled with no AT, but you'd need to provide a buffer cooling option for the minipump then.

The valve is needed, unfortunately (pumps are weird) and has to be set to 1000g.

Tiles circled in red should be ceramic or better, the rest can be igneous (external temperatures allowing). The 4 metal tiles are aluminium.

There is 30kg of naphtha on the tile just under the pump, the one that separates the volcano and the turbine. The yellow stuff is petroleum: just dump a few kilos from a bottle to where the turbine will be, and mop it up where the reservoir sits. You do want some petroleum atop the metal tiles, it's not an accident.

Right now it's set to produce solid metal (dumping it from the liquid vent in solid chunks, it's pretty weird to look at). The pump picks up metal and naphtha; the liquid pipe element sensor and the first shutoff on this line sends the naphtha in the white rock pipe back up top to the vent. The first section of this white pipe, circled in blue above, is actually radiant - I used aluminium but the pump doesn't heat up much, it can be any metal I think. The metal then goes to the other shutoff, and depending on the state of the topmost hydro sensor, it's either sent out in a ceramic pipe for further shenanigans, or it loops into the steam chamber for cooling down to room temperature.

Pipe sections circled in red are ceramic, the rest of the insulated pipes can be igneous. Radiant pipes are aluminium, except the one segment circled in green, which won't be in water or steam until the chamber gets hot - this needs to be steel. The white rock pipe doesn't matter.

Output is a slow and steady 600g/sec because of naphtha. If you have a metal volcano with a calculated average output that's more than this, I guess it won't work for long. (I don't think there are metal volcanoes that greatly exceed 300g/sec, but you never know.)

The top hydro sensor is whatever; it's for you to select which output you want. The lower hydro sensor is "above 0". The element sensor is set to naphtha, the pipe thermo sensor is whatever you want your metal to be - but below 70C so your pump doesn't overheat. The thermo sensors and memory gate aren't really needed but I don't like to see the turbine stutter on and off right at 125C, so I set them to 130 and 125.

[nakomaru]

7 hours ago, biopon said:

Tiles circled in red should be ceramic or better, the rest can be igneous (external temperatures allowing).

You don't get magma flaking off from the ceramic? Seems like it would go right through ceramic if you ever let any mass accumulate. I would use obsidian or something, then any quality insulation tile for perfect insulation on the left.

I like this idea, mostly because rails eat more FPS than pipes, so this gets around that problem.

[Yalp]

I can see a 2 reasons why you wouldn't do this:

Spoiler

1. Cooling.
   
   You could cool the naphtha with a TSP connecting the block below the water (picture, block should not be insulation) with the petroleum from the turbine (over the corner, not touching the block the naphtha sits on).
   
   Or replace the block the naphtha sits on with an airflow tile. Then connect naphtha and petroleum via TSP.
    
2. Pipes breaking.

   12 hours ago, biopon said:

   The valve is needed, unfortunately (pumps are weird) and has to be set to 1000g.

   
   If the pump provides more then 1000 kg in one segment and flow is constant, there will always be some liquid stuck before the valve.The liquid might cool down and cause cold damage to the pipe, though I'd assume the constant flow keeps it hot enough. Worst case, an overflow would be required.

I can't say for certain, that things will still fit as nicely as they do now. Especially if an overflow is required. On to another round of ONI-Tetris

 

[biopon]

8 hours ago, nakomaru said:

You don't get magma flaking off from the ceramic?

It's a good point, but no. That tile was built at 25C I think (the rest are around that much), and is up to 39C after one whole eruption cycle (67 game cycles). Now it's dormancy for 60 cycles during which there will be no more heating. If not for any other factors, and not for the fact that heat transfer slows down as the temperature delta gets smaller, flaking would be an issue after about 10,000 cycles, right? But the tile also exchanges heat with the naphtha at the same rate (that of the insulated ceramic's conductivity) and the naphtha is cooled constantly; as the ceramic temp rises the naphtha will have more effect (greater delta) than the liquid metal (smaller delta). I'm pretty sure it will be fine. But as you said, obsidian would have been a good choice too.

I am more concerned with the ceramic pipes, the segments in vacuum or insulated tiles are up to 600C. :/ I'll have to keep an eye on those. Obsidian probably makes sense there.

4 hours ago, Yalp said:

Cooling.

The naphtha is cooled right now when it exits the first shutoff, there's one segment of radiant pipe above the aluminium block for that. On that picture by bugfixbugfix, the pump would only work for a few dozen cycles (depending on how cold your plastic was). I did think of that.

 

4 hours ago, Yalp said:

If the pump provides more then 1000 kg in one segment and flow is constant, there will always be some liquid stuck before the valve.

Yes and no... the flow from the pump is 800g napththa, 1200g copper, 800g napththa, 1200g copper, etc. After separating the napththa the flow becomes 1200, 0, 1200, 0 copper. The valve shapes this into 1000g, 200g, 1000g, 200g. So there's no liquid waiting for more than a second in that segment, and no risk of solidifying. 

4 hours ago, Yalp said:

On to another round of ONI-Tetris

Because I completely fudged the AT hookup. I just realized it never had a chance to turn on. Super embarrassing.  I'll figure that out and post an update, but it should be simple as the reservoir lets me do a bypass in any way it fits.

 

[Yalp]

1 hour ago, biopon said:

The naphtha is cooled right now when it exits the first shutoff, there's one segment of radiant pipe above the aluminium block for that. On that picture by bugfixbugfix, the pump would only work for a few dozen cycles (depending on how cold your plastic was). I did think of that.

I get how the naphtha cooling loop works. The problem "cooling" would occur when doing the bugfixbugfix designe. That's why I followed it up with 2 solutions using TSP(Tempshift Plate). However, I just realized, that the designe doesn't fit with the Steam Turbine ..

Edit:

I'm stupide, it would pump the naphtha regardless, forget everything I said .

[biopon]

4 minutes ago, Yalp said:

The problem "cooling" would occur when doing the bugfixbugfix designe. That's why I followed it up with 2 solutions using TSP(Tempshift Plate). However, I just realized, that the designe doesn't fit with the Steam Turbine ..

Sorry, I misunderstood. I think the bugfix layout isn't meant to work for long. I certainly couldn't use it, the pump has to be one tile to the right so its body is in contact with a liquid.  

[biopon]

52 minutes ago, Yalp said:

it would pump the naphtha regardless

Yeah there's no way to avoid that with a minipump. I've seen someone hanging a petrol bead off from a tile for a regular pump I think, but I would not trust that to survive game loads  Plus size & amount pumped are also issues with big pumps.

[biopon]

Correct plumbing:

It's a long bypass but it's fine because of the reservoir.

And like @nakomaru brought it up, heat will be a problem even with ceramics eventually, so consider obsidian insulated pipes instead of ceramics where they're run in a vacuum, or inside an insulated tile. Where you're inside steam or petroleum you want ceramics instead.

[avc15]

Thanks for this build, I'm certain it will beat the old steam chamber-conveyor setup for framerate.

As far as it being power positive - if I made it self-contained, I wonder what temp it can cool the output of an iron volcano to.

I like that this takes very little power to start up. So right after the volcano comes out of idle you could get things started with a standard 1 kw wire. Same with maintaining temps between eruptions. Micro grids for another win, one less thing to lose frames with.

[biopon]

5 minutes ago, avc15 said:

iron volcano

Please report back with it, I don't have an iron volcano on my old map, and on the new one I'm nowhere near being able to build this. It *should* be fine. The only thing that could cause problems is that there are only 3 radiant pipe sections in steam, and 2 in the metal block. It should be fine (copper cools in 2-3 ticks) but iron has a lot more SHC. Absolute worst case though, it vents out at 100 degrees and not 20. 

As for power, good luck fitting a battery in there  If you want it to power itself, don't put too much water in the steam chamber otherwise the turbine will never get a chance to run before the AT needs to cool at least the naphtha. 100kg/tile on the bottom row would be plenty.

[Craigjw]

Because of the deficit in power when the AQ is active, I tend to either attach the generator directly to my power grid or place the generator on the large side of a transformer and small side to the main power grid and have my AQ running from a separate transformer attached to the grid.  This way, all power generated gets consumed by the grid, without having a massive battery bank to store a small amount of energy for long periods of time between active periods.