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The Saltuners: efficient salt water boilers


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After my previous post about an Efficient ST-less Salt Water Boiler I continued trying to improve the design. Good thing I did, because this design was flawed: it was not able to always restart after being clogged, leading to pipes breaking due to coolant being too cold, and the whole thing grinding to a halt after the coolant leaked. While being efficient already, there were still optimizations left on the table too.

I present to you not one, not two, but three new designs, with separate goals:
- The Infinite Saltuner: it is a compact version designed to process Salt Water as it comes and store it in an Infinite Storage. It has been tested up to 10kg/s, since for all practical purposes, 10kg/s is the most you will see in the wild, but should support up to around 15kg/s without problem.
- The Stoppable Saltuner: it is an optimized version designed to stop safely when the output backs up and is able to restart safely when it’s unclogged. I made it because I try not to use Infinite Storage. On the other hand, it’s not very compact compared to the other design.
- The Hybrid Saltuner: combines both of the previous versions to get the most efficient possible theoretical Boiler. I can't guarantee it will perform as well in a real situation though.

Efficiency numbers are at the end of the post.

A few constraints were taken to keep this build early to mid-game: no Steel, Aluminum or Space Materials (Super Coolant/Insulation) were used. Super Coolant would allow dividing Aquatuner uptime by 2. Insulation makes about 2% Aquatuner uptime difference compared to cold Ceramic (the difference probably goes away once the Ceramic is up to operating temperature, but that was too long for me to test).

 

original_infinite_saltuner.png.8e583cc8027ff6208f20c310ef815109.pngThe Infinite Saltuner
Let’s start with the easy one: the Infinite Saltuner. Special thanks to @Saturnus for the tip about using Airflow Tiles, which led to my discovery of water teleportation (a niche mechanism only known by a few experienced players), which is the main concept used to make this work.
Also credits to @Saturnus for optimizing my design to the more compact and slightly more efficient version detailed here. For reference, here is my original design.

How it works:infinite_saltuner_annotated.thumb.png.aea339af45d3a36efb2228acb09278f2.png

  1. Salt Water flows from your Salt Water Geyser into the boiling chamber.
  2. When there is over 50kg/cell Salt Water in the chamber, the Aquatuner turns on to boil it.
  3. Even with additional flow coming in, it will quickly boil and form Steam on the tiles above.
  4. The Steam is very quickly condensed by being in contact with the Manual Airlock.
  5. When condensed, since the water has nowhere to go, it will try to find any cell upwards it can condense in: that’s in the Infinite Storage. I call that water teleportation, and despite being weird, so far I believe that’s not a bug but rather the normal tile-swapping rules and won’t get changed.
  6. The outgoing Salt and Water exchange a bit of heat with the incoming Salt Water before being shipped/piped out.

Details:

From my experimentation, the Hydro Sensor at 50kg is a nice balance: setting it too low means all the Salt Water will boil, which will lead to Steam forming in that cell (not good), and too high and the Aquatuner will struggle and eventually transfer too much cold in the coolant.

The boiling chamber needs to be as full as possible with Crude Oil or Naphta. Having full tiles of liquid slightly improve the efficiency.

The Manual Airlock and the stored Water will act as a heat bank, which will prevent your coolant becoming too cold between one processing cycle and the next, making the setup more resilient and easier to prime. On the other hand, you want to minimize heat transfer to the stored Water, which means the Manual Airlock should be made out of Gold Amalgam.

You could also have the infinite storage just above the airflow tiles, but your surface contact for Steam condensation would be 95°C Water: Steam wouldn’t condense nearly as fast, and you would lose efficiency.

infinite_saltuner_all.thumb.png.ea3b8f1897d4ef4c6ab7c1b8218f55bc.png

Materials:

Everything insulated should be made of Ceramic if possible. Manual Airlocks should be made of Gold Amalgam. The rest don’t matter.

Priming a Saltuner (all variants):
To prime a Saltuner, you need to get it up to operating temperature. This means the Aquatuner is going to run a lot, and dump cold in the coolant. As a result, you likely won’t have enough heat capacity and your pipes could break from Cold damage.


There are 2 solutions to that:

  1. For the Infinite Saltuner, I recommend running an open loop for priming: feed hot coolant just after the double bypass, and temporarily disconnect the part before to get the cold coolant out. Once it’s up to operating temperature, disconnect the exit and close the loop.
  2. For the Stoppable and Hybrid Saltuners, I recommend a safety Tepidizer. It’s going to be used during priming by counteracting the AT cooling, and will be left in place to heat up coolant if it ever gets too cold.

 

The Stoppable Saltuner
Now let’s move on to the Stoppable Saltuner. Special thanks to @Hjoyn who suggested using a liquid blade, which led to the idea of having a heat exchanger.

How it works:

  1. Salt Water flows from your Salt Water Geyser into the liquid blade stoppable_saltuner_annotated.thumb.png.64e375a26cfab882a0183aa700e3f7b8.pngentrance.
  2. If it’s clogged, the liquid blade entrance will stop the flow.
  3. After unclogging, the liquid blade will restrict the flow to a rate the AT can handle.
  4. When going through the liquid blade, Salt Water exchange heats with Steam below, and a bit of heat with Salt being counter-flowed.
  5. At the end of the liquid blade, a door controls how much salt water there is in the boiling chamber.
  6. The Aquatuner boils the Salt Water to Steam.
  7. There is a door linked to an Atmo sensor to only let Steam out above 20kg/tile. That door prevents a drip of water forming on the ledge it sits on, which otherwise negatively impacts performance, especially on restart.
  8. Steam goes through the heat exchanger to be pre-cooled by the incoming Salt Water.
  9. Some Steam will condense before reaching the end of the heat exchanger: that’s why it’s 3 tiles high, so that water isn’t in range of Tempshift plates.
  10. At the end, Steam is condensed by the Metal Tiles, dropping directly into the reservoir to be pumped.
  11. If that reservoir gets too full, the liquid blade entrance is closed. There is a large safety margin so that Salt Water/Steam already in the heat exchanger can go through.

stoppable_saltuner_all.thumb.png.9ea969d0e100a4b67114d0374ebebf63.png

I landed on a heat exchanger design with sections of 3 heat-conductive tiles with Tempshift plates on both sides. That’s because the temperature differential is so low that you need as much heat exchange as possible. Using Conveyor / Automation bridges does nearly nothing with that low of a differential, and even heat conductive tiles without Tempshift plates are not enough. I’ve not fully explored other solutions, let me know if you find a better way to exchange heat.

For tests, the heat exchanger used Diamond. You should be able to replace it with any Refined Metal, at the cost of efficiency or more exchange sections.

No matter what, I advise against using more than 8 heat exchange sections: Steam will condense before the Metal Tiles, and you will need a Cold dump. For so little cold, it’s not really worth it to actually use it somewhere, and if you use a Tepidizer, the Tepidizer will use more power than you save on the AT.

hybrid_saltuner_all.thumb.png.c443a00da17de8ecf7a5c4c6a3fe8d2b.png

The Hybrid Saltuner


Finally, the Hybrid Saltuner is a variant that combines both previous versions to get a very low power usage.
When starting/restarting, Steam will condense before reaching the airflow tiles, and will have to be pumped. On the other hand, once it’s up to operating temperature, Steam will go up until the Airflow Tiles and be condensed there directly to the Infinite Storage.

There is a trade-off to make: efficiency at operating temperature vs speed to get up to operating temperature. The longer the heat exchanger, the longer it gets to get back to operating temperature, meaning more pump usage. The shorter it is, the faster it gets back up to operating temperature, minimizing pump usage, but it will have less efficiency overall.

No matter what, your heat exchanger should never be longer than 8 sections: if you get above that, Steam will always condense before the Airflow tiles. About 5 or 6 should be a good trade-off.

 


Efficiency numbers:

All numbers are for 10kg/s of 95°C Salt Water, and shipping to get the Salt out is excluded (with a pressure plate to 900kg, it amounts for only around 6W anyway).

  • 1200W for 2 Desalinators with a Salt Water pump.
  • 1330W for A ST-based boiler, without Split Turbine, you need to heat 95°C to 125°C Steam, which translates to 1230kDTU/s. Using Water, this means 210% Aquatuner uptime, or 2520W. Using the 0.969W/kDTU/s figure, you get 1192W back, for a net use of 1328W.
  • Designs using an external heat source are out of scope. They are nice, but have different design challenges and are not really comparable.
  • 500W for the Infinite Saltuner which has a 42% AT uptime. Since you are already putting the Water in an Infinite Storage (that you’d otherwise vent from a Desalinator or ST), the pump is not factored in.
  • 500W for The Stoppable Saltuner which has 22% (8 sections) to 24% (5 sections) AT uptime, which translates to 264/288W. With the addition of 93% (the amount of clean water you get from boiling) of a pump (223W), that’s a total of 487/511W.
  • 300W for the Hybrid Saltuner which has around 25% AT uptime (6 sections), but will tend to fluctuate between 300W and 500W in a real situation, when Steam condenses before the end of the heat exchanger.

 

Which build should you use?

  • If you want a compact, no trouble solution that pumps to an Infinite Storage, the Infinite Saltuner is the way to go.
  • If you don’t want to use Infinite Storage, the Stoppable Saltuner is a very good build. I recommend using a less efficient heat exchanger to avoid trouble and save space and materials: about 5 sections is good enough.
  • The Hybrid Saltuner is if you really want to save on power to the extreme. In my opinion, you’ll be better served by building more power production rather than saving here. It is the least tested of the bunch.

Can these builds be optimized?

You can probably find a few micro-optimizations here and there, feel free to try them out. I doubt you are going to find more than 1% to 2% AT uptime (my measuring stick) without going into a totally new approach or using space materials.

Obviously, using Super-coolant rather than Polluted Water can cut all ATs usage by 2, but that makes the build late-game.

An approach that I only tried briefly before discarding it is flaking: I found it too cumbersome to make in practice, and the limited tests I performed did not show great results. On the other hand, if someone finds a way to reliably flake the Salt Water, it could cut either the space used by the heat exchanger or improve the efficiency. The main obstacles are the 3°C threshold below vaporization point requirement and the variable input of a Geyser. Any pump added before the boiler will wipe out any savings you could do on the boiler, so you have to deal with free-floating salt water.

 

short stoppable saltuner.png

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Are you opposed to using tepidezers near the 120C range and plastering down steam turbines as 1.2kg/s pumps? You can easily trick a turbine to run with lower than 125C going in 3 ports.  If you are OK with a setup like this (so 8 turbines for 9.6kg/s flow) then we can even make it power positive. It all depends on what tricks you are willing to use.

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5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Are you opposed to using tepidezers near the 120C range and plastering down steam turbines as 1.2kg/s pumps? You can easily trick a turbine to run with lower than 125C going in 3 ports.  If you are OK with a setup like this (so 8 turbines for 9.6kg/s flow) then we can even make it power positive. It all depends on what tricks you are willing to use.

Yes, I'm clearly opposed to using Tepidizers above 85°C, as it's not a game mechanic but plainly an exploit since it relies on one of two temperature target bypass. And yeah obviously you can make it power positive.

Those setups aren't bug chasing (though they gave some people ideas to abuse matter teleportation even more), they are setups you can build in survival, and pretty early too.

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18 minutes ago, Fradow said:

..., they are setups you can build in survival, and pretty early too.

That I believe is the main point. Since none of these builds require steel or plastic, and can be built with minimum use of ceramic tiles as well it means that you can make an efficient Salt Water Geyser tamer before making a CSV tamer which is normally the go-to method for early game water source.

SWGs like CSVs are present on almost all map types, so you do have at least one SWG on your map (well, almost always anyways).

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25 minutes ago, DimaB77 said:

I can advise an extremely simple scheme 2 in 1, desalination and development of the volcano.

So you just need a metal volcano? Metal volcanoes usually produce power in any normal metal tamer set up, so since you need to pump in the salt water and you miss the power normally harvested from the metal volcano, you're probably effectively losing a few hundreds watts of power by doing this.

Besides there's no chance in hell this will ever be able to consistently process 10kg/s salt water like the Saltuners can. I have my doubts on even being able to process the average output of a regular salt water geyser but I'll let that rest because @Fradow very clearly states this in his post about builds using an external heat source:

Quote
  • Designs using an external heat source are out of scope. They are nice, but have different design challenges and are not really comparable.

 

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The average productivity of a saltwater geyser, taking into account the dormant and active stages, is only 3.1 kg/s (more often even less). What is the point of calculating a circuit for 10 kg/sec?

On the issue of development of metallic volcanoes - you can't get much energy from them, unlike magma volcanoes.

I do not insist, and only offer a simpler version to the general piggy bank of knowledge.

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That solution may be simple, but it's far from efficient and I have doubt it can even be left running for extended period of time without breaking.

Just looking at it, we can already see you need to pump the Salt Water, then pump the Water. Using 10kg/s equivalence, that would mean 240W (for 10kg/s Salt Water) + 223W (for the 9.3kg/s resulting Water), so it's already 463W without counting the opportunity cost of not using the Volcano for power, which is at the very least 100kDTU/s, about 100W using Steam Turbines for 3kg/s of Salt Water from 95°C => 103°C (since you don't show an efficient heat exchanger), putting the build above 500W. That's more than any of the Saltuners.

You don't talk much about how you deal with de-synchronized erruptions periods, but that's going to be a crucial part of making a Volcano-based build work properly, which is what I alluded with "different design challenges".

 

In general, combining several geysers is fraught with pitfalls, and I wouldn't really advise it unless the player knows what they are doing.

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Spoiler

My circuit is designed as a substitute for a standard desalter, consumes 149 W (in terms of 3.1 kg / s), and it also requires a pump for pumping salt water. In my circuit, the consumption (not counting the pump at the salt water geyser) is only 69 W. The main point of the scheme is that only 1 element - the pump (you do not need conveyors, if you do not need salt), is able to solve both the issue of desalination and the issue of development of the volcano.
I'm not saying that your scheme is bad or unnecessary. I just showed probably the easiest way to master volcanoes, at the very, very beginning of the game.

However, this is all off-topic for this topic. I'll leave now.

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