Volcano setup doesn't work as expected

[Pas-2]

I was able to fully power 2 steam turbines with one volcano. However it seems impossible to power 5 with 3 volcanoes.

Only thing that powers up the turbines fully is to circulate the resulting igneous rock through but that quickly cools ALL the rock below 150.

Heat gets destroyed somehow but HOW?!

[yoakenashi]

The heat is converted to energy; that is the point of the steam turbine. You are simply trying to run too many steam turbines with the heat the geysers are generating.

[Zarquan]

Check out this thread:  

Basically, when liquid displaces gas, there is a large amount of heat deletion based on the density of the gas.  Your setup experiences this bug.  

[Pas-2]

Just now, yoakenashi said:

The heat is converted to energy; that is the point of the steam turbine. You are simply trying to run too many steam turbines with the heat the geysers are generating.

Well, like I said, I can run two turbines with one of those volcanoes, but I'm not able to run 5 with 3 volcanoes. To my calculations I should be able to run 6-7

[Pas-2]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

Check out this thread:  

Basically, when liquid displaces gas, there is a large amount of heat deletion based on the density of the gas.  Your setup experiences this bug.  

I was aware of this and making the steam chamber 3 tiles high seemed to help a bit. I guess the main problem is that I cannot siphon enough heat from the igneous rock.

[Lifegrow]

You may also have to reconsider your loader/sweeper placement to prevent overheating.

I normally opt for a 3 wide lip - inverted loader, and sweeper sitting in a small layer of naptha with a bit of radiant piping behind to keep things cooled.

[ForTheQueen]

I don't like a system to boil water in everywhere in the system. But I like to heat it in a centralising area. It make my huge steam engine power station become easy to build. Here are two of my example. The quickest way to transfer heat is by using the steam it generate. And the system in ideal case should not absorb any heat from steam before it absorb by the steam engine. So my strategic is,  heat up steam to 200C, and let it go through the whole system

[Craigjw]

You need bridges on your rails to cope with how heat is transferred from the rails offscreen.  There's a post about it somewhere.

I expect that your sweeper arm will explode at some point, as it has no cooling from what I can see.

I have a setup which has 3 turbines and gets a reasonable amount of power from a single volcano, while also converting 10kg/s of oil to petrol.  So 5 turbines should definitely be up to the task for cooling 3 volcanos, if not being insufficient.

I would suggest that you have some kind of temperature control on the packets of igneous, have a temperature tester that prevents outputting igneous if it's above a certain temperature. 

My setup has a linear rail, that zig zags up and down from right to left which has lots of bridges on the rails, the right most turbines get the most heat.  At the left, there is a secondary heat exchange that takes the output from the 3 turbines and uses the 95c water to cool the igneous below 125.  Once the igneous exits the power generation part, it enters the third stage cooling.

The third stage has an AT, which cooles another heat exchange which takes the igenous from ~100c down to 20c.  The final stage, there is a temperature check to ensure it leaves at ~20c.

While I don't have active temperature control on the igneous before it gets below 100c, I do have a rail switch that is pulsed on for 1s every 20s.  Because I have good heat transfer both onscreen & offscreen, I can afford to pulse the rail otuput.

The lower part of the picture is just a metal box & pool of petrol, which cools the rail by an AT.  The turbine at the bottom is entirely powered by the aquatuner.

There are other designs which work and might be much more compact, but this one is multi-functional and really quite efficient and above all, is very reliable.

[vjek]

I had a problem with Volcanoes as well, and even during testing, found dormancy too much of a problem to rely on them.  It seems like the duty cycle of activity doesn't scale with time compression, possibly, as well.  I was looking for a stable power source that would run, unattended, for many tens of cycles.  Neither geysers nor volcanoes seem to fit that criteria, currently, but YMMV.

In any case, here's my solutions.  This generates 850W for 150+ cycles:

And this generates 1700W for ~88+ cycles:

Essentially, this is just an molten aluminum heat source with a super fluid radiant cooling system.  The method for extracting the heat (for steam generation) out of the aluminum is the ceramic interface tile.  No pumps, no automation, just turn it on and it's worry free power.  The steam/water is a closed loop, so there's no loss or gain once pressure is established and the pipes are full.
Features:
12x12 or 12x18 size, reasonably compact.
Works entirely within a vacuum jacket, if desired.
Doesn't rely on geysers or volcanoes, both of which suffer (greatly, in my testing in RP-383949) from long-term dormancy/unreliability issues.
No pumps, valves, heaters, coolers, or any other draws on power.
Long term stable power output.
Quick and easy to make in sandbox or debug mode.

There are several other variations you can use (like molten lead and a metal interface tile), but I chose this combination because it seems to last the longest before the metal starts solidifying, and/or the turbine reaches 100'C and stops working.  Certainly, there are also other choices you can make with respect to cooling the turbine room, but this design met my goals.

If anyone wants more details regarding the design, I'll be happy to provide them.

[Zarquan]

You can create stable systems that involve volcanoes and geysers.  You just need to use less than or equal to the amount they produce over an entire activity cycle.  What you do is have the volcanoes dump in to a large reservoir and use a door to  control the amounts removed from it.  You can figure out how much it produces using a geyser calculator. 

I have a petroleum burner that does this (crude oil -> petroleum). 

This machine never turns off, even over hundreds of cycles without refining metal for additional heat.  The way the volcano portion works is when the door opens, an amount of lava pours out.  This lava heats the heat sink and solidifies in to sweepable chunks.  This only happens if the heat sink is below a certain temperature thresh  Then, the igneous rock is removed by a sweeper and carried to a second heat sink, where it cycles around until the igneous rock is below a certain temperature, at which point it is removed from the system. 

Note that the volcano chamber is full of magma.  This is the reservoir I mentioned.  The door at the bottom right controls the flow of the magma out of the chamber.