The Brimstoner: power-positive Sulfur tamer

[Fradow]

Sulfur geysers are fascinating: they output 165.2°C Sulfur, which, when cooled down to 125°C is a whole 42KDTU/s at an average 1.5kg/s flow, or about 40W using a Steam Turbine.

While it’s low, I’m not one to pass up the opportunity to have a self-contained build that can just run on its own without any external input! Can we do that with a measly 40W? Of course we can!

Enter the Brimstoner!

Thanks to @Saturnus for the great name. Brimstone is an old word that means Sulfur.

Summary of the build
To understand the build, you need to know about 2 concepts: the 10% of pipe capacity mechanism and the Split Steam Turbine design.
The 10% of pipe capacity mechanism allows superheating water above 100°C without breaking pipes. In this build, that means exchanging heat up to about 110°C before putting it back on the hot side.
The Split Steam Turbine design allows one to run a Steam Turbine with part of the Steam colder than 125°C as long as at least one inlet has 125°C+ Steam under it.

Put together, that means we can have a hot side that runs at above 125°C (about 135°C during eruptions) and a cold side that runs under 125°C (about 115°C during eruptions).
That allows cooling down to lower temperatures.

But 115°C is still not cold enough to freeze Sulfur, that’s why we must also use the Turbine exhaust to cool it down further. In that, a double chamber design is great because it allows to have more exhaust water from the same amount of hot material, further helping freezing Sulfur.

Last but not least, once solidified, the Sulfur is still hot, and a small heat exchanger can be used to scavenge some of that hot back into the exhaust water. No need to go overboard, I’m not even sure that a heat exchanger is necessary, it’s just something I added as a pet peeve of mine (I like squarish forms).

Automation
Left from right:
- [IMPORTANT]: an additional 120s Buffer Gate is required for high-eruption geysers, see update below.
- Only run the Steam Turbine when there is an eruption, otherwise the hot chamber is over-cooled and the build struggles to start up again.
- Only run the Conveyor Loader when there is an eruption too, otherwise the heat exchanger gets too hot and pipes break on next start.
- Always leave the door open if there is nearly no liquid in the under the hot side. This Hydro-Sensor is only used for priming and always stays off afterwards.
- Close the door when it gets too cold, and keep it closed for a while after it gets hot enough so the Steam Turbine can get a head start with the exhaust water, to avoid Liquid Sulfur running through and overpowering the cooling.
- The Conveyor Meter is only used to limit the Sulfur flow to a maximum of 10 kg/s, to avoid bursts of heat in the heat exchanger.
- The Sweeper has a power-saving feature. Since there are multiple debris locations, a large enough green window is required. My usual 10s is definitely not enough.

Building materials
- Plastic for the Steam Turbine is going to be the main limit to how early you can build it.
- Copper/Iron/Gold is used for all Metal Tiles, Tempshift Plates and Shipping machinery inside the build, as an effort to have a very early build. While you can improve to Steel machinery and Diamond Window Tiles and Tempshift Plates, it’s not required. There is an additional priming detail if not using Steel though.
- Gold Amalgam is used for the Jumbo Battery and Liquid Valve, for the same +50°C overheat as Copper.
- Igneous Rock is used for all Insulated Tiles and Pipes. Ceramic is not needed.

Priming
To prime the build:
- Ensure the whole build is vacuum. Some parts may work with a thin atmosphere, but that was not tested.
- Put a full Pitcher Pump bottle of 200kg Water in each Steam chamber.
- Put a Pedestal bottle of 1kg of Water in the bottom right part of the Sulfur chamber if you don’t use Steel machinery.
- Vent 2kg/cell of Oxygen (or right up to a normal Gas Vent limit) in the Steam Turbine room. 500g/cell of Hydrogen also works.
- Once it gets up to operating temperature, manually sweep any debris not in range of the Auto-Sweeper. It only needs to be done once.

You might be surprised by the 1kg of water in the Sulfur chamber: that’s because most of the time, Liquid Sulfur doesn’t reach the right-most part of the build, which means the machinery sits in a vacuum and overheats when not built with Steel.
Creating a very low density atmosphere allows machinery to exchange heat with the liquid Sulfur to avoid overheating, with very little visible impact on performance.

The last priming step is very important: if left inside, debris not in range of the Auto-Sweeper will eventually melt again, flooding the bottom-right chamber, which will make the Battery flooded but more importantly overwhelm the exhaust cooling capabilities. Even if it somehow powers through, you will have tile formations, which the build is not designed to handle.

Power used
Power is only used by 5 building:
- The Auto-Sweeper uses the bulk of it, at 8% uptime and 9.6W
- The Conveyor Loader is the second with 4% uptime and 4.8W
- The Jumbo Battery run-off is at 3.3W
- The Conveyor Meter, with its 15% uptime at most uses 1.5W
- The Mechanized Door could be left unpowered, but averages 0.0% uptime. There should be a 1 somewhere, but it’s rounded down by the UI, so it’s negligible.

That’s a grand total of a measly 19.2W, well under the 40W the Steam Turbine provides down to 125°C. Since the Sulfur is ejected at below 110°C, it’s even a bit more than that: slightly above 55W, or nearly 3 times as much as needed. It’s safe to say that it’s strictly power-positive!
On the other hand, 35W excess isn’t worth the cost of linking the build to your main grid, so just let it sit in a corner by itself.

About Sweetles
You might be worried about feeding 100°C+ Sulfur to sweetles. That’s fair.
Turns out, it’s not a problem!
There is no heat transfer when a critter eats: the debris is simply deleted. That heat doesn’t transfer to the critter excretion either: excretions are created at the critter temperature.

All of this means you can put the debris into a small insulated 1 tile pit with either Chlorine, Carbon Dioxide or a drop of Water and leave it at that! Chlorine is ideal (despite the gas to solid multiplier), Carbon Dioxide a close second, and Water is the easiest liquid to acquire at that temperature range if you want to ranch with unsuited Dupes (to avoid gases mixing and carrying some heat away from the pit). Or even better, if you only want Sucrose, ranch Sweetles in vacuum.

Conclusion
The build was tested with a simulated 6kg/s eruption for 275s every 691s, which is the upper end of a Sulfur geyser throughput. I don’t think it’s running anywhere close to any limit, so it should be safe to use on any Sulfur Geyser.

I think it’s a nice way to tame a Sulfur Geyser because you can just build it, sweep the initialization Sulfur and let it sit in a corner. It's not even susceptible to brownouts.

 

Bonus section

Some simple builds that don't focus as much on power-efficiency!

That build uses the 10% of pipe trick to greatly cool down Liquid Sulfur so it's outputted as cold debris. A very nifty build for those that worries about hot debris:

But if, like me, you really don't care about debris temperature, you can do even simpler, with a basic ATST, for an almighty rectangle, like nature intended:

From top to bottom:

• The Steam Turbine room has a 2kg/cell Oxygen atmosphere (really the simplest atmo for a Self-cooled Steam Turbine in my opinion).
• The Thermo Aquatuner is built out of Gold Amalgam and thus sitting in a pool of crude with some Steam above (just drop some water on the crude to initialize it). The crude is optional if the AT is made out of Steel. The actual temperature on the pipe thermo sensor does not matter at all, as long as it quickly solidify Sulfur.
• The Geyser room has any atmosphere available as long as it's not a vacuum to cool down machinery.

Considering the very low SHC of Sulfur, this is a very cheap power-wise, something under 100W average after the Turbine return.

[tuxii]

What are you on about now? I don't see any brims getting stoned here...

This is extremely neat.  I was gonna say cool, but that sulfur is coming out at 125C.

I have to drop my sulfur tamer... the sales department is slacking off.

[Fradow]

After building this in survival and getting (un)lucky to get an above average Sulfur Geyser .... It didn't work as well as expected.

My survival geyser has a higher eruption rate than what I tested, and who would have guessed, it broke.

Note: it averages out to 1.47kg/s, which is perfectly average, but the eruption is probably stronger than average.

Here is the fixed version:

I'll spare you the "spot the differences" game,  the only difference is the buffer gate at 120s: since the eruption is shorter but stronger, the Brimstoner doesn't have enough time to handle the Sulfur during that eruption, and must continue working for a while after the eruption stops.

This seems to totally fix the issue, though I have added an unsightly Robo-Miner for peace of mind. Normally, it should not ever have to work, but if the worse happens and the Brimstoner clogs and form tiles, it will dig them out. Considering how much excess Sulfur this produces, it's not a huge loss to me anyway.