Taming Hot steam with only bypass pumps and force of will

[Mo Stlee Simian]

(...and ok an aquatuner and a nearby salt geyser as well).  But I don't need anything more exotic than steel to get this done even though the steam is 500C.

Summary: Use bypass pumps to get the steam away from the vent so it doesn't overpressurize, dump in water from the salt water geyser until the temp is low enough to be eaten by the steam turbines.  In doing so I seem to have come up with a pretty simple design that ensures the vent never overpressurizes and yet doesn't require anything too fancy.

Background: I built the below in in debug mode to reflect something I'm trying to build in my current spaced out playthrough.  Basically I have a hot steam vent and a nearby salt water geyser and I wanted to see whether I could combine the two. I was inspired by Mathmanican's gas bypass pump vent design and Tony Advanced's tamer (which uses a bypass pump and door compressor) but wanted to make something that balances itself somewhat and doesn't need complex calculation or precise temp control to get working as I generally fear starting up anything that needs to be super accurate.

Why is this hard? Steam vents (not cool steam vents) emit steam at 500C, so things like pumps would normally require space materials.  Also as stated, you need to get the steam away from the vent or you lose sweet sweet steam. Lots of designs end up being very large or very fancy.  Thanks to the incredible power of bypass pumps this is neither.

The pipe layout is pretty straightforward, but is the most complex bit.  I use valves on the incoming salt water to only take an amount I know I can sustain over the whole life cycle of the salt geyser and use a thermo sensor to control a shutoff.  When the steam room is too hot we dump in 95C salt water to cool it down.

 

The cooling loop is just water and is also used to drive the bypass pumps, so all the lower liquid valves are set to 0.1g/s, but you will need to boot this loop from an external water source or the bypass pumps won't work. This will cause the steam vent to overpressurize and stop giving off steam, leading to the device not heating up so the steam turbines won't work so your loop won't ever fill.  Bootstrapping problems causing a vent to overpressurize are obviously common, but here you can easily avoid them by just filling the cooling loop first.

The output is 95C water, which I'm just dumping in a tank for this illustration.

Automation is nothing special.  I use a thermo sensor to control the flow of incoming salt water and ensure the device doesn't overheat and a liquid pipe thermo sensor to control the aquatuner and make sure the cooling loop doesn't freeze. I also have an atmo sensor controlling one of the steam turbines. This is because over the whole life cycle of the two geysers this device should condence 4.3kg/s of steam so that's just a bit too much for 2 turbines. I don't want 3 running all the time or the steam room will get empty during dormancy. 

 

The bypass pumps are the star of the show here and make sure the vent never overpressurizes. I'm using 250g of naptha underneath each of the 4 liquid vents and drop 0.1g/s of water on them. This means the vent itself is in a vaccuum even though 2 tiles away I can have 100s of kgs of steam pressure. 

 

Here are my calculations of the vent yields etc.  Obviously these will be different for different vents.

 

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85 kb · Done

The design is self-powering over the whole dormancy cycle but I have a dev power source above so I don't need to spam batteries to keep it alive during dormant periods.  In actual practise I'll just hook it up to my grid in and out and that will ensure it stays alive.  I will probably harvest the salt using an autosweeper so I have a sustainable source of sand.

Let me know what you think.  It's my first go at using bypass pumps so I was excited to play with them and I'm pretty happy with the results.