aquatuners can't power metal refineries

[Primalflower]

i don't understand how to design a setup that uses the heat of a metal refinery making steel/iron to power the metal refinery without outside influences. No matter what i try, it's always not enough and I end up running the backup coal generators at least a little bit. how do you people do it?

[crypticorb]

Aquatuners not needed.

You need to use a liquid like petroleum that has a high boiling temperature, crude oil works in a pinch, too. Water/polluted water will boil before it can absorb enough energy from steel production. Route the liquid output from the metal refinery into a steam room through radiant pipes, and the steam will absorb the heat energy, and have a steam turbine pull the heat out of the steam.

This is not a net positive power system at all, but it does allow you to reclaim some of the power spent on the refinery and get rid of the heat generated.

[Primalflower]

17 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

Aquatuners not needed.

You need to use a liquid like petroleum that has a high boiling temperature, crude oil works in a pinch, too. Water/polluted water will boil before it can absorb enough energy from steel production. Route the liquid output from the metal refinery into a steam room through radiant pipes, and the steam will absorb the heat energy, and have a steam turbine pull the heat out of the steam.

This is not a net positive power system at all, but it does allow you to reclaim some of the power spent on the refinery and get rid of the heat generated.

i only use the aquatuners to cool down the turbines if they get too hot, i run down the crude oil in pipes through the steam turbine room inside metal/diamond tiles next to diamond tempshift plates

[Craigjw]

I've always used a single turbine for my refineries, I'm not convinced that this is the optimum though as the turbine doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the refinery when making steel.

Without doing maths, I would recommend using 2 turbines if you can get away with it, but one will adequately suffice.

As soon as possible, I usually switch off the turbine refinery and use a different refinery which use metal refinery heat to convert oil to petrol, so the turbine refinery become mostly unused until I want a quick resupply of steel without having to wait for the oil refinery.  Oil refinery normally takes nearly a day to produce 1 steel.

I find it best to use only 2 tempshift plates in the steam chambers per turbine, which are normally gold for non-critical turbines.  Less is sometimes better, less mass to heat up, etc.

[crypticorb]

22 minutes ago, lbphero said:

i only use the aquatuners to cool down the turbines if they get too hot, i run down the crude oil in pipes through the steam turbine room inside metal/diamond tiles next to diamond tempshift plates

Can you screenshot your setup, or share a save file? I'll take a look and provide some suggestions, but I can't debug what I can't see.

[psusi]

Dumping the heat from the refinery into a steam turbine is only power positive when refining steel, not other metals.  Also don't waste power on an AT to cool the turbine itself; use the 95 C water coming out of the turbine to cool the turbine before dumping it back into the steam chamber.

[crypticorb]

3 hours ago, psusi said:

Also don't waste power on an AT to cool the turbine itself; use the 95 C water coming out of the turbine to cool the turbine before dumping it back into the steam chamber.

This doesn't work perfectly, because a steam turbine running at maximum will output more heat than the 95C water it produces can absorb, and will stifle.

[catsRjerks]

28 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

This doesn't work perfectly, because a steam turbine running at maximum will output more heat than the 95C water it produces can absorb, and will stifle.

IIRC until ~141c, the 95c water has no problem cooling the turbine, since the turbine only absorbs 10% of the heat it converts/removes. Above that is where you start having issues. So if you have enough steam in the chamber, a refinery will never heat it above 141.

[Lancar]

I like to use a cooling loop that handles my entire industrial brick at once. It's no issue to let that same loop handle the ST:s as well. With two ST:s it's possible to handle even two refineries (+ the single AT) making steel all the time for a few cycles without the system overheating, as long as you rig the sensors correctly and have some reservoirs installed for buffering.

[psusi]

Oh, interesting... I thought the heat the turbine produced was fixed ( like other buildings ) and didn't depend on the heat of the steam going in.

[SamLogan]

17 hours ago, lbphero said:

i don't understand how to design a setup that uses the heat of a metal refinery making steel/iron to power the metal refinery without outside influences.

Do this :

Some math :

Turbine @ 1200 Watts needs 800 000 DTU/sec

AT produce 500 000 DTU/sec with polluted water or 1 000 000 DTU/sec with Super Coolant

Metal Refinery produces from 264 000 DTU/sec (gold) to 2 339 000 DTU/sec (Steel).

So you have enough DTU to produce 2400 Watts, you just need to put enough Steam Turbine.

Links you have to boomark :

- https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Metal_Refinery

- https://oni-db.com/details/steamturbine2

- https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/97493-wheezewort-to-aquatuner-ratio/?tab=comments#comment-1103705

[Craigjw]

I didn't think it was possible to tune steam turbines with the power control station, has this changed recently?

[psusi]

2 hours ago, Craigjw said:

I didn't think it was possible to tune steam turbines with the power control station, has this changed recently?

Yea, they said they fixed it a patch or two back.