the infinite source of steam - geothermal fail - need help

[Nerokiwi]

Hi there. 

I need some help. I have a base done in the ocean setup. Just below my starting point, I found an area full of superhot steam (500kg at 600°C), and decide to get the most of out if. After countless duplicant scalding, I manage to build a battery for 6 steam turbine on top of it. Lovely. It gave me a clean free energy for more than 600 cycle. then... the temperature went down to 180°C, making it less effective.

Beside the disaster to find another source of energy when you have a full industry active, I investigate the cause. I think there was an ice biome, sitting on top of some volcano/hot stone/petroleum biome below (I found several wheezewort seed at the bottom). 

The problem is that even if the rocks below are still superhot (around 1200°C) they are not heating the steam enough, and it now not flow fast enough to circulate in the huge space of steam available. 

I tryed to excavate the hot stones in a "radiator" shape to maximise the heat exchange, and expose the rocks below. I even went all the way to expose the magma underneath but... with no luck. the steam in that area raise to 800°C, but quickly drop temperature raising, and it not flow to the top (or if it does, it's just too slow). 

 

How do I get out of this? Should I move my steam turbine nearby the bottom, where is more hot? 

Should I just give up on this, and instead find a way to clear up all that steam and make a better use of the space? (btw, how do i efficiently cool down a huge area of 500kg of steam?)

any help is much appreciated! 

 

 

 

this is the my harvester. my starting point of the game is just above the water tank. for many cycles i use a very low-tech door system to control the heat (use to be 600° outside the door) with a double filter to let just 200°C reach the turbine. for many cycle they worked perfectly. 

 

I think this use to be an ice biome. and now is just an endless source of steam. temperature at the top 180°, temperature at the bottom about 500°

my attempt to built d a radiator (and exploring). I found some lava on the bottom left, but no volcano. just rocks rocks rocks. surface is 200-300°C, just underneath they go up to 800-1200°C depending on the area. (temp graph just show endless red). 

 

 

any help is much appreciated! 

 

 

[Nedix]

Do you still want to use it as a steam/power source? I had a similar situation in the past and I started siphoning out the water from the turbines. After the steam cooled enough and the turbines were not producing any energy, I made a cooling loop with an aquatuner and petroleum in the pipes and cooled the remaining steam into water. In the meantime I also padded the "reservoir" with insulated tiles.

[suxkar]

Yes, steam sucks at cunducing heat on its own. Everything depends on your needs:

If you want to use as much of the power as possible, you should use tempshiftplates to move the heat from bottom to top. It will require a lot of materials but there is not much else to do. Circulating heat with hydrogen in radiant pipes would help, but very marginally since it's just 1kg/s per pipe.
Circulating liquid is dangeroous since you are talking about temperatures that can flash petroleum into sour gas. Building metal tiles that basically connect top and bottom heatwise will help as well and will be less work intensive then tempshift plates, though you probably can't use aluminium for the temperature and you might not have access to thermium. Diamond or gold would do.

If you want the area to be dealt with as fast as possible and don't care about saving heat for power, then mining everything hot is very effective: it halves the mass, thus halving the heat. You can then, carefully and selectively, sweep the hot debris into another steamtoom or directly underneath the steam turbines, so that you are, quite literally, moving all of the heat physically. Sweeping the debris on top or aluminuim or thermium tiles will hasten the heat transfer. Even better, trapping all of the debris, once swept, inside a door (steel or thermium) underneath steam turbines is the best solution to extract heat from debris (other the shipping it around in rails, which is impractical for tons of material).

In any case, consider these 2 VERY important things while dealing with a lot of heat with steam turbines:
1) I think many players don't realize that the exhaust from a steam turbine is part of the heat transfer process itself: if you let the 95C water drop right below the steam turbine, you are actively cooling the area below it, effectively slowing down the turbine. If instead you pipe the exhaust water ALL the way down to the bottom, you let the steam turbine do its job AND cool down the hottest area. Furthermore, the pressure differential that this generates (you are siphoning out 4kg/s per steam turbine at the top and moving it to be bottom) will make the steam "move" upwards, effectively moving more heat. Trust me, it makes A GIGANTIC difference. So big that you should be careful when you do this, the temperature above might rise very quickly (again, believe me, I've made many messes)
2) In these kind of big, temporary setups, it's easy for atmosphere composition to get messy. You should make sure that at the very top, right underneath the steam turbines, there is steam and steam only. Non steam cells in the steam turbine inlet (the 5 tiles right below it) effectively act as a blocked input, slowing down the process. With a pressure of 500kg, there can't be many, but still a single cell of oxygen will slow down a steam turbine by 20%, unless of course the temperature is high enough.

Apologies if I overstated stuff you already knew about.

[TheMule]

You had the right idea about the 'radiator shape' thing... but the 'blades' should be made of highly conductive material... diamond possibly or some metal tiles.Also it's possible you've triggered the heat deletion bug by releasing water into high pressure steam, so much of the thermal energy has been deleted rather than being converted into electricity.

[psusi]

15 hours ago, Nerokiwi said:

Beside the disaster to find another source of energy when you have a full industry active, I investigate the cause. I think there was an ice biome, sitting on top of some volcano/hot stone/petroleum biome below (I found several wheezewort seed at the bottom). 

I have the same thing in my current world.  I haven't gotten to see where the heat leak is yet, but there's another chunk of oil biome that's very hot because a buried volcano ( not sure why it tells me what it is when I hover the mouse over it when other geysers don't ) spawned on the border between the oil and magama biome and replaced some of the abyssalite.

I'd suggest draining the water out of the room then if you still want to use the heat for power, rebuild the turbines closer to the heat.

[Nerokiwi]

thank you very much for all the replies. 

I think I'll try to keep those steam running as much as possible. I love steam due to the low energy-low effort-low CO2 balance. I can move to petroleum, but that mean cooling, co2 handling, lot of mess. my slickers keep dying, oxifern always too hot.. and then you enter a loop that you need a lot of energy to generate energy. 

anyway... 

18 hours ago, TheMule said:

You had the right idea about the 'radiator shape' thing... but the 'blades' should be made of highly conductive material... diamond possibly or some metal tiles.Also it's possible you've triggered the heat deletion bug by releasing water into high pressure steam, so much of the thermal energy has been deleted rather than being converted into electricity.

what's the head deletion bug? 

19 hours ago, suxkar said:

Trust me, it makes A GIGANTIC difference.

I'll definitely try that. 

22 hours ago, Nedix said:

I had a similar situation in the past and I started siphoning out the water from the turbines. 

I was thinking about it. I still have huge amounts of polluted/salted water all around me, and water sieve/desalinizator are so far energy cheaper, but eventually I'll have to think about and start reducing that mass of steam. 

How to cool it down? Using termo aquatuner to go from let's say 95° to 25°.... uff.. I could you to tune it down to 75° and use it for oxygen purpose, but i cannot think any other use of such hot water. 

Maybe I can cycle it around over and over a thermo nullifiers till is cold? kind of working in batches? oh. can i fill up a tank nearby the thermo nullifier and cool it down all together? then have a automation than release the water when is cool enough? 

 

thanks again you all, you save my base!

[suxkar]

21 minutes ago, Nerokiwi said:

How to cool it down? Using termo aquatuner to go from let's say 95° to 25°.... uff.. I could you to tune it down to 75° and use it for oxygen purpose, but i cannot think any other use of such hot water. 

Maybe I can cycle it around over and over a thermo nullifiers till is cold? kind of working in batches? oh. can i fill up a tank nearby the thermo nullifier and cool it down all together? then have a automation than release the water when is cool enough? 

 

thanks again you all, you save my base!

95 water can be used in electrolyzer setups: if you circulate the 95C water in radiant pipes around eletrolyzers, there is enough "cooling" to keep the situation stable, provided electrolyzers are made of gold amalgam (or steel). Of course the resulting oxygen will be around 97C, but that is MUCH easier to cool (electrolyzers destroy heat in certain conditions simply because 1kg of water has much more SHC then 888O2+112H2 grams). So easy that, if you don't have many dupes, you can get away with not cooling it at all for many cycles.
Conversely, feeding cool water to electrolyzers can generate A LOT of heat due to fixed temp output (although you can still use the water to cool the O2, right before being used).
Just to be clear, you should enclose such setup in insulated tiles to avoid heat leaks all around. I suggest the so called Rodriguez setup, you can find it in Francis John tutorials about O2 production.

EDIT: you should always try not to cool down water, it is EXTREMELY power expensive, even more before super coolant.

[TheMule]

32 minutes ago, Nerokiwi said:

what's the head deletion bug? 

I was referring to this:

 

Every time you drop water into a steam room, with high pressure, it is possible that heat gets deleted. Sometimes it's a lot, if both pressure and temperature are high.

[Nerokiwi]

boom! I cleaned up excess gas and now turbines works better than ever! who could have though that hot oxigen is lighter than hot steam....

Now after 50 cycles in perfect conditions, all the turbine are overheating.. it's a nightmare! 

I guess one aquatuner for 3 turbine is not enough...?