Just finished my first magma Steam Turbine power plant

[Unfawkable]

It's nothing revolutionary, but I felt really proud so I wanted to share. I dislike using doors to stop heat transfer when needed as it was not thematic for my taste, so I used a Rail with Diamonds to transfer the heat through vacuum and Diamond window tiles instead. It uses 10 tons of water inside, and 600 Kg of Supercoolant in the loop to keep the Turbines cool, and a whopping 5+ tons of Steel for the Aquatuner, shutoffs, and of course the Rails so they don't melt. I only just finished it, so once the heat equalizes everywhere and when all of them are engie tuned up, it's about 6 Kw:

 

[Neotuck]

interesting design, how many cycles do you think it will last?

[Unfawkable]

7 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

interesting design, how many cycles do you think it will last?

I'm sure there is a formulaic way to calculate that by the amount of KDTU the turbines delete, but I do not have the faintest clue how to do that  

The magma right underneath dropped about 10 degrees from 1610 C to get the system to a working temperature, and is for now reducing unnoticeably slowly. I made the automation system to stop transferring heat when the steam rises above 200 degrees, and the turbines of course stop when power isn't needed, and that combined with the powerplant room I made to engie tune up them for more power per KDTU ensures they'll last for as long as humanly possible. Anything beyond 500 Cycles is fine by me honestly, by then I'll tame the 3 mini volcanoes for renewable power.

[cokess]

On 2/23/2022 at 12:06 AM, Unfawkable said:

It's nothing revolutionary, but I felt really proud so I wanted to share.

I know how it feels like!  I still remember my very first magma tamer. It was overengineered and didn't work as intended and it broke down after 100 cycles or so. But I was proud nonetheless! I know you didn't ask (haha) but I have some unsolicited suggestions on how you could improve the efficiency of your turbines further.

You need to be careful here. Insulated tiles will noticeably exchange heat when exposed to gases. The equilibrium temperature of these insulated tiles would approach the steam temperature. In reality you wouldn't see them reaching that temperature, not because they won't, but because excess heat would be conducted to the carbon dioxide outside the steam room. This would slowly cook your base and make power generation less efficient.

You should either double insulate this area, or vacuum out the nearby tiles containing carbon dioxide.

 

Are these liquid bridges and pipes made of insulation? If not, their placements are quite problematic. If you can avoid using them at all, or if you could use the bridges and run those pipes in the vacuumed area below the aquatuner instead (without going through the diamond tiles), I'm pretty sure you could cut down the thermo aquatuner's uptime significantly.

If the steam turbines are running 100% of the time at max capacity (i.e. continuous 200°C steam), then the aquatuner should be up no more than between 40%-45% of the time. If yours activates significantly more than that, or around that range even when the turbines don't run all the time, then the supercoolants are really leaking temperatures where they shouldn't.

 

 

[Unfawkable]

On 2/25/2022 at 3:27 PM, cokess said:

 

You need to be careful here. Insulated tiles will noticeably exchange heat when exposed to gases. The equilibrium temperature of these insulated tiles would approach the steam temperature. In reality you wouldn't see them reaching that temperature, not because they won't, but because excess heat would be conducted to the carbon dioxide outside the steam room. This would slowly cook your base and make power generation less efficient.

You should either double insulate this area, or vacuum out the nearby tiles containing carbon dioxide.

Huh, I didn't know that, that sounds as if it wouldn't waste too much heat in the long run thought? I'll make a vacuum layer in between anyway. 

On 2/25/2022 at 3:27 PM, cokess said:

 

Are these liquid bridges and pipes made of insulation? If not, their placements are quite problematic. If you can avoid using them at all, or if you could use the bridges and run those pipes in the vacuumed area below the aquatuner instead (without going through the diamond tiles), I'm pretty sure you could cut down the thermo aquatuner's uptime significantly.

If the steam turbines are running 100% of the time at max capacity (i.e. continuous 200°C steam), then the aquatuner should be up no more than between 40%-45% of the time. If yours activates significantly more than that, or around that range even when the turbines don't run all the time, then the supercoolants are really leaking temperatures where they shouldn't.

 

 

I was under the impression that the bridges don't transfer heat between the liquid and the environment since they don't actually contain the liquid, just teleport it from the input to output? If not I'll give that a fix too, though the aquatuner uptime seems fine now, a lot less than 40% or so it seems

[gabberworld]

On 2/22/2022 at 8:29 PM, Neotuck said:

interesting design, how many cycles do you think it will last?

it depends how big is that hot area but one is sure it not last forever unless you keep include the lava

it probably would run longer if you add more steam turbines, increase the temp and close the non needed valves

[OxCD]

On 2/25/2022 at 3:27 PM, cokess said:

You need to be careful here. Insulated tiles will noticeably exchange heat when exposed to gases

Imo, depending a lot on materials used. Mafic & Igneous do good, ceramic does very well and insulation... well is close to perfect. However I agree that adding a second layer is worth it most of time when ceramic/insulation are not used, and if saving space isn't a priority.

 

On 2/25/2022 at 3:27 PM, cokess said:

Are these liquid bridges and pipes made of insulation? If not, their placements are quite problematic.

May I ask you why, for bridges ?

Also ceramic insulated pipes do pretty well too. However like my comment above, I agree that if you can run the pipe into vacuum, it's a plus.

[cokess]

On 2/27/2022 at 1:30 AM, Unfawkable said:

I was under the impression that the bridges don't transfer heat between the liquid and the environment since they don't actually contain the liquid

 

On 2/27/2022 at 2:34 AM, OxCD said:

May I ask you why, for bridges ?

I thought I'd run an experiment to elaborate my point about bridges. So I'm posting the experiment and result. I will be the first to admit that this experiment is poorly controlled, but I think in the end it doesn't matter. I just want to show that it's generally a bad idea to use bridges when you cross two different temperature environments, regardless of the materials used for the bridges. And I think this lazy experiment sufficiently demonstrates that:

...

The Setup:

Make two separate rooms with an external area of 7×7 each. Separate each room into two equal smaller rooms as below. This is to simulate a steam turbine room and the steam room beneath it. Fill the rooms with cool water and hot steam respectively as below, and lay the pipes and bridges (all made of ceramic) as shown.

Fill the pipes with super coolant at 20°C.

Every insulated tiles, pipes and bridges are made of ceramic, with the exception of the pipes that feed the cooling loop.

Put in some thermometers and notifiers and timers and run automation wires through them as appropriate.

In this experiment I've set the automated notifier to pause as soon as any thermometer detects water temperature exceeding 50°C.

Then unpause the game and let the cooling loop run.

Results:

In the above, we see that just 19 seconds later the water temperature in the room to the left has already exceeded the 50°C threshold. The water temperature in the right room is still 20°C. (In reality it's much lower than 19 seconds, the notifier paused the game after barely 10 seconds or so, and I thought something went wrong, I just didn't think it would reach climax so quickly xD). I didn't want to reload because OMG just reloading takes 4 minutes for some reason.

Further commentaries:

Obviously I realise this is not exactly comparable to Unfawkable's original design. His liquid bridge didn't cross into the steam room like my experiment did:

But what ends up happening here is the 95°C water output by the 5 steam turbines will exchange temperature with the carbon dioxide atmosphere, the coolant that floods the turbine, the turbine itself and that insulated tile.

Unless the aquatuner is set to turn on only if the coolant temperature exceeds 95°C, I would generally deem these exchanges as undesirable because you're cooling the water that would be boiled anyway later on. Furthermore, you generally don't want the super coolant to unnecessarily cool other things down.

If bridges are to be used at all, you should instead bridge over the coolant like so:

In this modified design, you minimise the crossing between two different temperature environments. It is still not perfect because the 95°C water is still exchanging temperature with the bridge and the coolant on the floor, but at least that exchange is minimised because the insulated pipes are slowing down the transfer. 

 

Alternatively you could do something like this. The steam turbine is in vacuum, and the bridge only exchanges temperature with the insulated tile, where it doesnt matter:

Or this, where the cooling loop simply doesn't go the entire length of all the turbines:

 

On 2/27/2022 at 1:30 AM, Unfawkable said:

though the aquatuner uptime seems fine now, a lot less than 40% or so it seems

Based on my math (I've rechecked just to be doubly sure), the theoretical minimum uptime for that aquatuner should be 39%. If yours is much lower, even as all 5 turbines are running 100% of the time absorbing 2kg/s of 200°C steam each, then you should be alarmed, since something else is cooling the turbines at a rate much faster than you would normally accept (maybe the CO2? Or the coolant on the floor was recently poured, and the system hasn't reached its thermodynamic equilibrium).

But my gut says the aquatuner runs a lot less than 40% because the turbines aren't running as often. What you can do is either temporarily deactivate the battery automation or multiply 39% by the average time your turbines currently activate and you should get the revised theoretical minimum uptime for the aquatuner. That's the target you should work on to evaluate the efficiency of your cooling. However, any exposure to the environment will make your estimated calculations erroneous. 

 

----

To be honest though, if your computer is fast and you have so much in-game power to know what to do with anyway, then frankly it doesn't matter. But if your computer struggles like mine and you don't feel like feeding Nvidia and Intel execs anytime soon, then minimising the length of time things activate in your game by optimising your designs will gain you those precious FPS to fly through the late game. Personally I've noticed the game runs much slower for me when there are many opportunities where temperature exchanges could occur. Therefore where practicable I don't leave things for the game to calculate. My comments here are therefore necessarily shaped by that slow gaming experience, and others who are well-endowed may find the opmitisation that I normally seek far too tedious.

 

[Fradow]

3 hours ago, cokess said:

 

I thought I'd run an experiment to elaborate my point about bridges. So I'm posting the experiment and result. I will be the first to admit that this experiment is poorly controlled, but I think in the end it doesn't matter. I just want to show that it's generally a bad idea to use bridges when you cross two different temperature environments, regardless of the materials used for the bridges. And I think this lazy experiment sufficiently demonstrates that:

[...]

That's a whole lot of experimentation that just confirms a common knowledge that bridges conduct heat. Nothing surprising there.

3 hours ago, cokess said:

Further commentaries:

Obviously I realise this is not exactly comparable to Unfawkable's original design. His liquid bridge didn't cross into the steam room like my experiment did:

But what ends up happening here is the 95°C water output by the 5 steam turbines will exchange temperature with the carbon dioxide atmosphere, the coolant that floods the turbine, the turbine itself and that insulated tile.

You overlook a very important fact there: Steam Turbine exchange heat with their foundation tiles (here, the insulated tiles), at a much greater rate than the bridge can. While bridges exchanging heat can matter in some places, that particular bridge is perfectly fine.

The fact that Steam Turbine exchange heat with their foundation tiles is why you'll see the recommendation to use Ceramic specifically for those tiles, even if the rest use a less insulated material.

 

I don't have anything to say on the rest of the conversation.

 

[cokess]

On 2/27/2022 at 1:30 AM, Unfawkable said:

Huh, I didn't know that, that sounds as if it wouldn't waste too much heat in the long run thought? I'll make a vacuum layer in between anyway. 

I was under the impression that the bridges don't transfer heat between the liquid and the environment since they don't actually contain the liquid, just teleport it from the input to output? If not I'll give that a fix too, though the aquatuner uptime seems fine now, a lot less than 40% or so it seems

I think I'm having my Fauci moment here xDD. You are probably right and I was wrong lolll: it does seem that bridges don't exchange heat with the liquid "containing" it. Oh it sure hurts to write that . Oh well...

What prompted me to reexamine my belief was your statement that the liquid merely teleports. While I did know about this before, I didn't think of the implication of this until today. So I redesigned the experiment in the following manner:

This time I made 3 rooms. Each loop is filled with 180kg of super coolant at 20°C of initial temperature (445.4MJ). The left-most room contains the maximum amount of bridges. The middle and right most are timed such that the coolants end their respective loop simultaneously.

All pipes and bridges that matter are made of ceramic. I then filled each room with 1800°C of 200kg/tile of hydrogen, with heat energy totalling 79609.0 MJ.

The first liquid temperature sensor that detects liquid above 50°C will send a green signal to the automated notifier which pauses the game ending the experiment. All liquid coolants will then be expelled (not shown here) and final temperature and heat measurements would be taken.

After running the loop for 2 cycles and 84.6 seconds, the right-most sensor detected the target temperature and paused the game:

 

The results are as follows, which directly contradicts my post above :

 

From the above, it would appear the loop containing the most bridges lost the least amount of heat to the pipes. The middle room lost the most heat to the pipes. There seems to be insignificant amount of heat lost from the hydrogen gas to the super coolants in the middle loop compared to the right most loop. This would suggest that whether your loop contains bridges doesn't actually matter much if at all. However, it is still best to minimise the amount of pipes going through your steam room to reduce efficiency loss. 

Ergh I want to bury my head in sand right now. lol. Bye.

 

[Unfawkable]

1 hour ago, cokess said:

 

Ergh I want to bury my head in sand right now. lol. Bye.

 

A true scientist is happy to be the one to prove himself wrong

[OxCD]

Well as @Fradow said, that feels a little over engineered answer for an old knowledge. But I congratulate the self-experiment and the determination.

That's why I asked you about OP's bridges. None is crossing from the turbine room to the steam room. Bridges inside the same environment don't matter. Just avoid starting or ending a bridge in an insulated tile, if your goal is, well, to insulate.

Actually, bridges are one of the most efficient tool to conduct heat, especially when you need a partition between 2 heat zones. I suggest you to have a look into this topic, which is a good exemple on how exploiting this mecanism can be efficient.

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/118702-never-over-pressurize-bead-and-bypass-pumps-along-with-a-10kgs-single-tuner-crude-to-ng-boiler-the-spiral-boiler/