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Bead-Inspired Metal Volcano Tamer


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So currently just a proof of concept, and probably already done before:

image.thumb.png.3f540e5967ce36df91ccd9a7903503d3.png

As you may or may not be able to see, on the ledge is a package of molten gold (yes, this does mean it can't be used to tame Gold volcanoes). This forces the molten metal to actually interact with the metal tiles, rather than just teleport to the bottom. Conveniently, this also stops it from setting as a tile. On the other side of the tiles is a cooling solution (choose whichever you want).

I did attempt to find a way to tame gold volcanoes with it, but none of the denser liquids were suitable, all evaporating within molten gold's heat range.

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1 hour ago, Yunru said:

I did attempt to find a way to tame gold volcanoes with it, but none of the denser liquids were suitable, all evaporating within molten gold's heat range.

You can start a waterfall without a second liquid by using a mechanized airlock and a hydro sensor.  Put the  hydro sensor level with the ledge and the door directly below it (just below the ledge). Have it open the door with >0g of fluid.

You'd have to make them out of wolframite and tungsten to withstand volcano temps, I think.

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Just something I'd put up as a test a while ago:
Right to left waterfall

9 hours ago, Yunru said:

I did attempt to find a way to tame gold volcanoes with it, but none of the denser liquids were suitable, all evaporating within molten gold's heat range.

Liquid gold is the heavier metal, so there won't be a usable molten liquid to bead underneath it.

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This also has an advantage where you avoid the solidification heat bug.  Nice!

If you want to see what liquids go under what other liquids, you can go to ONI-DB and sort their list by Molar Mass, the value that is used to determine layering.

 

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On 10/16/2020 at 10:42 AM, ghkbrew said:

ou can start a waterfall without a second liquid by using a mechanized airlock and a hydro sensor.  Put the  hydro sensor level with the ledge and the door directly below it (just below the ledge). Have it open the door with >0g of fluid.

Sadly, this doesn't work.

While the door's open, liquid can (and does) teleport to the bottom.

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2 hours ago, Yunru said:

Sadly, this doesn't work.

While the door's open, liquid can (and does) teleport to the bottom.

 

Hmm, a screenshot of the build would help. Nevertheless, I see we've failed to mention that the direction of the liquid counts.

For example:

If the liquid drops from right to left, then you get a waterfall (commonly called booger... for whatever reason :D) the door usually helps automate the process and no helper liquid bead on a ledge would be needed.

If the liquid drops from left to right then you'd get a bead. The build varies in the fact that the helper liquid bead will most definitely be needed to start the dripping behavior.

Liquids that are the heaviest in their category are troublesome in that they would lack a liquid heavier than them to provide a helper bead in the game. Liquid gold is an example of this.

Hope this sheds a little light on the issue.

 

 

 

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15 hours ago, Yunru said:

Sadly, this doesn't work.

While the door's open, liquid can (and does) teleport to the bottom.

So I've done some testing in sandbox and it does seem to have issues.

Here's my setup:

459156771_GoldWaterfallTest.thumb.png.593928e436ffa950ea15cdf57a72ab89.png

If you fill the reservoir with molten gold it works great at first:

1793657943_GoldWaterfall-working.thumb.png.1e4894e4fffeb8a354be187c26f59428.png

But right before it runs out the waterfall collapses:

518477164_GoldWaterfall-failing.thumb.png.7b02cf72d9c26cc52ce6d7140e4341df.png

It drips for less than the second it takes the door to close, but I suspect if you tried to used this for a volcano you'd never have enough molten gold at one time to make the waterfall work.

I'm not sure why that happens, I've never seen it with other liquids. Water in particular works great even at very low flows.  I suspect it has something to do with the high viscosity of molten gold.

Paging @mathmanican

P.S. This is entirely of academic interest, since there are definitely better ways to setup a metal volcano tamer. This is my go to build. Variants of this are also quite viable.

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@ghkbrew : What's the temperature of the liquid gold used in your waterfall?

In any event I would say this only reflects the low SHC of gold...

(Just saying this because when one paints gold in with sandbox mode it is put in at 1727ºC and the wiki has 2626ºC for the material from volcanoes...)

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2 hours ago, JRup said:

What's the temperature of the liquid gold used in your waterfall?

2626.85C  I used the temperature of a gold volcano.

2 hours ago, JRup said:

In any event I would say this only reflects the low SHC of gold...

Nope, it looks to be entirely due to fluid dynamics.  For one thing everything the gold is touching before the diamond tiles is either insulated insulation or metal at 2626C.

1652247319_GoldWaterfall-labeled.png.c1773657d870c70908c73e2b7712bf05.png

After more careful testing and debug frame stepping, what happens is that when there is plenty of gold in the reservoir there is a steady leftward flow of 100kg per tick (the viscosity flow limit for gold).  This keeps 100kg of fluid in A and C, and 500kg In B.  Since flow is 1/4 of the difference between cells, that keeps things in steady state.

When the reservoir begins to run out, flow (and quantity in A) will steadily decrease until it would be below 25kg (the minimum flow for gold).  When that happens nothing flows from B to A.

2088769017_GoldWaterfall-1.thumb.png.936f497e3ca7ca276fd75a25955522f2.png

But flow does happen from D to B so on the next tick there will be enough in B to cause flow into A.

849215647_GoldWaterfall-2.thumb.png.524d313a2b6276300291eb8934b9a5a1.png

The system briefly alternates like this, making an anomalous left sided bead pump.  Until there are two ticks in a row with no flow from B to A.

437463626_GoldWaterfall-3.thumb.png.c1e407233b3ccf1de2bbf31f44cac25d.png

Now, because there is no fluid in either A or C the fluid in B drips over the ledge and bypasses the heat exchanger.

 

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8 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

have you tried moving the door up one tile.

Just tried it.  You still get dripping when the flow runs out.  It seems to be identical dynamics in both cases, which makes sense, since the waterfalls breaks down while the door is open making it effectively not exist. So it doesn't matter where it's not existing :-)

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For what it's worth, I also have issues with unwanted dripping doing the door thing. If one really wants to make a gold waterfall for whatever reason, I think the robust way of doing so would be to pre-cool the gold enough so you can float it off molten lead. AFAIK that always produces a bead. Lead's boiling point is sufficiently high to run a petroleum boiler, or a sour gas boiler, or even a regolith melter. Only really crazy shenanigans would be out of reach.

That said, I agree there are better ways to extract heat from molten gold. Which isn't to poo poo the discussion, it's an interesting and valuable learning opportunity. Personally I dislike the "just a room of steam" method shown in the Francis John video as it seems potentially susceptible to the debris solidification bug. The iron volcano in the video seems to be triggering the bug for example. Maybe not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I would advocate adding a layer of crude. The volcano metal materializes on top of the crude and floats there. Metal debris sinks fast enough to avoid the bug. As a bonus, the crude is a convenient way to add thermal mass and sucks heat out of the debris faster than steam. Swap the crude with molten lead to enable boilers.

 

 

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8 minutes ago, JRup said:

BTW: Small reminder, this turbine is self cooling and with the thermo sensor exactly where it is then setting it to 127ºC will keep it stable. Should net about 350 W on average.

It's not really a practical build in any case though :D

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2 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

It's not really a practical build in any case though :D

Pros: Looks neat. Works for hydrogen vents or quick sandbox builds. Probably maintenance free.
Cons: No easy maintenance. Little power gained for the trouble put into actually building it.

In short, I agree.

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13 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

You still get dripping when the flow runs out.

So we find a way to work around the "runs out" issue.  Move the hydrosensor back a bit to sense for when the flow gets, low, and close the door then. I haven't yet been able to get this design to drip. The hydro sensor is at 800kg.  The doors have a filter that opens the bottom door 1 second after the top opens. 

image.thumb.png.847ad3b2cb368d042edf91edb3aa8817.png

I'm sure the design can be optimized even further to be smaller.  This is just a prototype that I figure someone else can perfect. (looking at you @ghkbrew).  Thanks for the paging.  You got me to open the game this week (life is a little crazy in education right now). 

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On 10/16/2020 at 3:38 PM, Yunru said:

So currently just a proof of concept, and probably already done before:

image.thumb.png.3f540e5967ce36df91ccd9a7903503d3.png

Maybe I'm missing something here, but, uhh, I thought the point of volcano taming was to, y'know, get the metal and the heat out. Not seeing an exit for the metal here?

(I thought I was very clever yesterday with an autosweeper in vacuum to conveyor the metal away, before realising that vacuum may protect you from volcano temperatures, but it don't protect you from self-heating temperatures... ;_;)

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40 minutes ago, Tsabo said:

(I thought I was very clever yesterday with an autosweeper in vacuum to conveyor the metal away, before realising that vacuum may protect you from volcano temperatures, but it don't protect you from self-heating temperatures... ;_;)

yeah, it happens because vacuum don't have mass, oxygen and other gases have that soo they can take heat also for themselves. that is probably also one off reasons why our earth atlatic is melting, we make too much heat from factors and other sources

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1 minute ago, gabberworld said:

yeah, it happens because vacuum don't have mass, oxygen and other gases have that soo they can take heat also for themselves. that is probably also reason why our earth atlatic is melting, we make too much heat from factors and other sources

I think I'm going to try it again without vacuum; I'll just put everything (volcano, sweeper, and conveyor loader) inside the steam chamber. If I get the steam pressure high enough I'm hoping it'll have enough thermal mass that the temp never rises so high so fast as to damage the sweeper before the turbine deletes the excess.

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12 minutes ago, Tsabo said:

I think I'm going to try it again without vacuum; I'll just put everything (volcano, sweeper, and conveyor loader) inside the steam chamber. If I get the steam pressure high enough I'm hoping it'll have enough thermal mass that the temp never rises so high so fast as to damage the sweeper before the turbine deletes the excess.

vacuum is good you want that heat or cold stay away via air, for example if you make vacuum tunnel for your own base then it dosen't really matter what temp map you play,

 

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16 minutes ago, gabberworld said:

 

vacuum is good you want that heat or cold stay away via air, for example if you make vacuum tunnel for your own base then it dosen't really matter what temp map you play,

 

Well the thing is I need to heat-conduct the autosweeper's self-heating away from it but NOT heat-conduct the volcano's output heating to it. But since the autosweeper needs to be able to sweep the dropped metal, this is difficult.
Maybe I could do something where the chamber is vacuum but the autosweeper sits in petroleum, which is then radiant pipe cooled?

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19 minutes ago, Tsabo said:

Well the thing is I need to heat-conduct the autosweeper's self-heating away from it but NOT heat-conduct the volcano's output heating to it. But since the autosweeper needs to be able to sweep the dropped metal, this is difficult.
Maybe I could do something where the chamber is vacuum but the autosweeper sits in petroleum, which is then radiant pipe cooled?

it may even work

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