Perpetual steam power plant

[Bluefoxfire]

This is it in it's basic form. The temp plates are all diamond, all the tiles except for the line above the steam gens are insulation(I know that making insulated tiles with insulation is overkill, I did it to show the placement of them, though I forgot to do it to the center ring where the steam is.), the tiles above the steam gens are granite, and the pumps, aquatuner, and the steam gens themselves are thermium, along with the metal tiles.

 

This is the wiring setup, pretty simple, everything is tungsten. That stray wire you see was because debug wasn't letting me without taking out the stuff on it too.

 

As you see here, the aquatuner pipes are all filled with super coolant(the pipes to the far upper right were made to do the initial pumping of it into the system. The spent water from the steam gens is piped to the pumps below, which put it back into the steam chamber. Now the radiant pipes you see is to basically delete the heat coming off the steam gens and to help keep it from eventually freezing. All of the other pipes are made of insulation( I wasn't sure if normal insulation pipes would be enough so I went safe and did the insulated version.


Now this was made merely as a proof of concept, so if you are going to say anything about it, please keep that in mind.

 

PS. I don't know why the images uploaded as low quality.

[axxionx12]

Wouldn't this end up deleting a lot of heat and eventually liquify/freeze the whole system? I guess the proof of concept is the whole thing is power positive?

[yoakenashi]

36 minutes ago, axxionx12 said:

Wouldn't this end up deleting a lot of heat and eventually liquify/freeze the whole system?

This is correct.

2 hours ago, Bluefoxfire said:

this was made merely as a proof of concept

It is a good design; however, the math does not add up:

Two steam turbines will delete 1,571.66 kDTU/s converting 200°C steam to 95°C water

One thermo aquatuner will add 1,181.6 kDTU/s when handling 10kg/s of super coolant

Two pumps will add 4 kDTU/s (assuming 100% uptime)

-1571.66+1181.6+4 = -386.06 kDTU/s

This means that your steam will eventually start to lower in temperature, generating less power, and eventually go cold.

I have also looked at all buildings that could be used to generate heat and make this system power positive. The only building that I found to do this was the power transformer. The problem was that you would need several hundred transformers to heat the system; at least 386 in your design.

Some may think, "With all the equipment I have in my base generating heat, I can easily add 386.06 kDTU/s to this system, then it would be power positive." The problem with that is that all of that equipment requires power to run, making the system power negative.

[suicide commando]

To make a system like this power positive, you need to make it a little bigger, add 1 or 2 more turbines and for that magic touch, a little bath with a liquid tepidizer in it. You run the supercoolant through this to heat it up. A tepidizer produces 4M DTU/s at the cost of 960W so you can easily produce the extra heat you need to make this run and be power positive.

 

[yoakenashi]

1 hour ago, suicide commando said:

bath with a liquid tepidizer in it

This will not work under normal conditions as the tepidizer only heats to 85 C, well below the needed temperature to create steam. There is an exploit/bug where you can pulse the tepidizer above 85 C, but per the wiki that may be a little buggy.

[Gurgel]

26 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

This will not work under normal conditions as the tepidizer only heats to 85 C, well below the needed temperature to create steam. There is an exploit/bug where you can pulse the tepidizer above 85 C, but per the wiki that may be a little buggy.

I have pulsed tepidizers several times now, at least no obvious problems.

[Nitroturtle]

What is the point of the side chambers and pumping the water into the central chamber?

[Bluefoxfire]

39 minutes ago, Nitroturtle said:

What is the point of the side chambers and pumping the water into the central chamber?

It was the only way I could think of isolating the steam itself from where the turbines were at that time.

[psusi]

4 hours ago, Bluefoxfire said:

It was the only way I could think of isolating the steam itself from where the turbines were at that time.

What?

And did you actually try this thing?  It should 1) produce less power than it consumes and 2) freeze.

[Bluefoxfire]

On 4/9/2020 at 2:25 PM, psusi said:

What?

And did you actually try this thing?  It should 1) produce less power than it consumes and 2) freeze.

1) Yes I did actually run it for several cycles, at max steam gen output, it is in fact power positive(the batteries you see on the top of it are in fact slowly charging despite the amount used).

2)Eventually, it would yes, but it dropped at most 1.5- 2 degrees F for each cycle that passed. This is based off of the total run time of around 25 or so cycles.

[Badpip]

I don't understand the propuse of this system, it's not perpetual even if you put the same amount of dtu in the steam chamber than the steam turbine can delete you can't recover the deleted heat from the steam turbine inside your supercoolant loop tu make it perpetual, the sc will always solidify unless you put external heat in it and i don't think the power generated by this building can be used to heat up the sc enough with liquid tepidizer so it's just a watt/dtu waste  build :/

On 4/9/2020 at 3:44 AM, yoakenashi said:

This is correct.

It is a good design; however, the math does not add up:

Two steam turbines will delete 1,571.66 kDTU/s converting 200°C steam to 95°C water

One thermo aquatuner will add 1,181.6 kDTU/s when handling 10kg/s of super coolant

Two pumps will add 4 kDTU/s (assuming 100% uptime)

-1571.66+1181.6+4 = -386.06 kDTU/s

This means that your steam will eventually start to lower in temperature, generating less power, and eventually go cold.

I have also looked at all buildings that could be used to generate heat and make this system power positive. The only building that I found to do this was the power transformer. The problem was that you would need several hundred transformers to heat the system; at least 386 in your design.

I have make a post about power transformers for free power  you don't need a complicated design with at , at is just a waste of power just put transformers inside the steam chamber and cool the steam turbine with the output water of the steam turbine, it work, even with only one power transformer but unless you put 878 transformers you will not have a constant supply of power, for exemple with only one power transformer you will have only 850 watt every 878 second, which is ridiculous and useless . (It's not 878 but a little less because steam turbine produce heat too ).

 

In summary: if you want to build a perpetual steam turbine setup, you need to find  a heat generator who can produce the equal amount of dtu than a steam turbine can delete minus the the heat generated by the turbine itself and this heat generator must cost you less than 850 watt to be power positive. Another thing to keep in mind is that a aquatuner DON'T PRODUCE heat but move it

[Bluefoxfire]

Due to people suddenly being up in arms about this not being efficient, better, viable, or anything other of the sort, I'm going to put this here.

I NEVER said it was meant to have any real in game usage. This was simply a case of have an random idea and see where it goes, nothing more.

This is made in a testing realm file, for the very reason listed above, ok?

[Badpip]

it was a nice idea but i just wanted to say why it can't work / how it could work sorry if you took this the wrong way

[Bluefoxfire]

8 hours ago, Badpip said:

it was a nice idea but i just wanted to say why it can't work / how it could work sorry if you took this the wrong way

It wasn't at anyone in specific, just that the general mood of the posts seemed to start to shift in that direction and wasn't going to put up with it.

[psusi]

It should freeze up within a cycle or two.  If you hardly saw it lose temperature over 25 cycles then there must be a bug happening here. Also even ignoring the fact that the turbines are deleting heat that isn't being replaced through any legitimate means, one AT doesn't pump enough heat to keep two turbines running full power.

 

 

[Bluefoxfire]

6 hours ago, psusi said:

It should freeze up within a cycle or two.  If you hardly saw it lose temperature over 25 cycles then there must be a bug happening here. Also even ignoring the fact that the turbines are deleting heat that isn't being replaced through any legitimate means, one AT doesn't pump enough heat to keep two turbines running full power.

 

 

I actually remembered that the steam mass through out was like 100k. Maybe that could be why?

[psusi]

16 hours ago, Bluefoxfire said:

I actually remembered that the steam mass through out was like 100k. Maybe that could be why?

That is quite a bit of thermal mass but still, two steam turbines should bring it down by 1 degree every 38 seconds.

 

 

[lee1026]

I don't think you should be mad at people telling you why your design isn't going to work; I rather find out from forum comments that a design isn't going to work instead of when I build it for realz.

[psusi]

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

I don't think you should be mad at people telling you why your design isn't going to work; I rather find out from forum comments that a design isn't going to work instead of when I build it for realz.

He said it seems to work, so that is one more bit of evidence that there are still serious bugs in the thermal simulation.

[calibayzone]

Quote

I actually remembered that the steam mass through out was like 100k

You mean 100,000 kg? That would explain it...

[psusi]

17 hours ago, calibayzone said:

You mean 100,000 kg? That would explain it...

I did the math before with 100,000g, not 100,000 kg.  That makes quite a difference.

[calibayzone]

Actually it can't be >1000kg because the liquid vents would overpressure.

So where is the error coming from!?

[lee1026]

On a room that big, it takes a very long time to cool it all down with two turbines. Each tile at 1000kg pressure would last about half a cycle or so, and well, I see a lot of a tiles. ~200 tiles, I think?

 

At about 3 minutes per cycle on fast forward mode, a room that size can last a good 5 hours with no heat input at all. While I won't claim that the OP is lying about thinking that it worked, I doubt the OP actually ran the thing for 5 hours.

 

I often build simpler versions of this to generate power to quickly test something in a debug build, since steam turbines are the only power source that don't require power or dupes to kick start (you can spawn in natural gas, but you still need power to pump it). I would just make a big room, fill with a ton of hot steam in every tile, and I would have the power to test crap for a while. I would never run out, because big rooms take a long time to run out, but it isn't sustainable in the long run.

[psusi]

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

On a room that big, it takes a very long time to cool it all down with two turbines. Each tile at 1000kg pressure would last about half a cycle or so, and well, I see a lot of a tiles. ~200 tiles, I think?

But they aren't at 1000kg... he said 100,000, and as calibayzone pointed out, that must have been grams, not kg, and I calculated that with that volume, it would go down by a degree every 38 seconds.  Even if it were 1000kg, that would still be nearly 2 degrees per cycle.

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

At about 3 minutes per cycle on fast forward mode, a room that size can last a good 5 hours with no heat input at all.

How do you figure?  The size of that steam room appears to be 15 x 9 = 135 tiles.  Each tile of even 1000 kg of steam holds 1,000,000 * 4.179 = 4.179 mDTU per degree.  Two steam turbines will eat about 1,750 kDTU/s.  That means the temperature should drop by a degree after 322 seconds at 1x speed.

[lee1026]

>That means the temperature should drop by a degree after 322 seconds at 1x speed.

If we started with 200 degree water, it will have about 75 degrees to drop before the turbines stopped. That is about 7 hours.

 

Not counting whatever potential energy is in the petrol tank near the aquatuner.

 

Actually, I think the mystery is solved by OP's post:

>Eventually, it would yes, but it dropped at most 1.5- 2 degrees F for each cycle that passed. This is based off of the total run time of around 25 or so cycles.

 

Yep, the thing is dropping temperature; OP just isn't running the thing long enough to see it fail. OP essentially build a big thermo battery and is draining it very slowly.