Failed experiment: Saltuners applied to CSSG

[Fradow]

A while ago, before Mergedown and the Cool Salt Slush Geyser (CSSG) introduction in vanilla, I designed the Saltuners with the help of @Saturnus, a series of 3 designs to tame Salt Water Geysers in a stand-alone build that doesn't use Desalinators or external heat sources:

Since Mergedown hit vanilla (and a bit before from SO players), I got asked about using it for CSSGs. The latest was a conversation with maxi, @von_skeltal and @Saturnus when we were all happy to say that "use the Infinite Saltuner without the Infinite part, stick a big-ass heat exchanger on it, and it should work". It shouldn't be too hard right?

And that's how I got nerd-snipped into trying it:

That thrown-together prototype has a boiler borrowed from the Saltuners at the top left, that was modified a bit to fit the bill

There is a safety tepidizer just below it, and a big ass heat-exchanger that counterflow incoming Brine against Steam/Water and Salt.

Below is a small pre-heater I experimented with, but which just makes matter worse in practice.

 

So why did it fail? Turns out with that design you get roughly 0°C water output, that's great! And a 80°C Brine coming in the boiler. Huh. Not so great. 80°C to 105°C of 10kg/s is 850kDTU/s, more than the Aquatuner can even provide! For comparison, 2 Desalinators will process 10kg/s Brine for 1200W, so that's the number to beat.

 

Getting back to numbers, by doing some very approximate calculations (I know those are not the exact numbers and hystheresis is not there: that won't change the conclusions):

• 7kg/s Water from 100°C to 0°C is 2925kDTU/s
• 3kg/s Salt from 100°C to 0C° is  210kDTU/s
• 10kg/s Brine from -10°C to 100°C is 3740kDTU/s

In other words, there is a missing 605kDTU/s. And that means the heat from Water + Salt can only heat up Brine up to around 82°C, which lines up with my experiment.
 

But what about pre-heating? Well, you are using power for that, it's not free, and you also reduce the amount of heat Water/Salt can provide. It's really not a great option.

 

Conclusion : just use a Desalinator or an external heat source instead of trying to be fancy with a self-contained build. You'll save yourself headaches and you'll save power too. The removal of Dupe labour is really not worth building that abomination.

[tuxii]

Desalinators are also ridiculously cheap at 200 Metal Ore to build.

Nice test.

[Fradow]

Yeah.

Another update: @Saturnus and me tried to make a build using the left-to-right heat transfer bug to create some of the missing heat.

That involves flowing the Brine in a left to right staircase, and piping the water up that staircase.

While it does improve the performance, it comes at a cost: simple designs still don't create enough heat to make the build worthwhile, and it introduces several issues that have to be designed around (partial packets require an inline packet stacker, the variance of staircases means some water packet will still freeze in pipes, you need to regulate the brine flow into your staircase and avoid clogging your boiler ...)

 

It's probably possible to have a working design that involves pre-heaters at strategic places and several stage, but it's a fool's errand. Both Saturnus and me have stopped spending time on it.

 

If you go the exploity way, might as well use a tricked Tepidizer and call it a day.