Volcano Pumps for Unified Energy Generation

[Zarquan]

I decided that building volcano tamers on each volcano was getting annoying. It meant that if I wanted to tap in to all the power, I would have to run heavi watt wire everywhere or a ton of conductive wire to feed in to the main grid and then all my materials would be scattered all over the place unless I wanted to convey them to other places

So, I decided that I won't deal with the volcanoes on site. Instead, I will use my full magma pump design to take all the magma from the 8 volcanoes, 1 minor volcano, and 3 metal volcanoes to send all the hot liquids to a central powerplant. I will also eventually process the core with this mechanism.

This is an example I put up on a cobalt volcano:

 

This design uses a mass of 100 mg of 4 types of gas to prevent the metal from interacting with the pump. This results in no heat transfer between the cobalt and the gas so the pump does not overheat.

The pump sends the liquid metal down a pipe. The pipe starts as a ceramic insulated pipe, then goes straight to a bridge, then repeats the following pattern: Insulated obsidian pipe embedded in insulated tile -> normal obsidian pipe -> bridge. The secret here is that unless the pipe backs up, then there is never actually any liquid on the inlet of a bridge, as it immediately teleports to the outlet. With this technique, I transport the hot liquid through atmosphere without adding a significant amount of heat. This technique also works for conveyor rails and gas pipes, but keep in mind the debris on rails conducts heat with the tile below it if solid, so that needs to either be insulated or non-solid.

There is also a pipe coming in from the side. This pipe is designed to override the cobalt pump if another liquid is coming through. This one comes from a gold volcano, but will also eventually carry magma as well. I use two main pipes to transport mixed hot liquids to my cooling system.

 

 

Here, we have where all the material gathers. I have a bar of steam with igneous rock temp shift plates. It is designed to stay between 700 and 825 C, with a failsafe to ensure it never goes below 600 C due to the steam turbines.

Here, I use a double flaking boiler capable of boiling 50 kg/s water in a manner more efficient than conventional boiling. I am currently maxing out at 40 kg/s with my 20 steam turbines.

The steam bar heats the steam room through the petroleum bypass pumps.

Under each liquid vent, I have a tiny amount of liquid uranium. This prevents a bug where when a material solidifies in to debris on top of other debris, heat is deleted. The liquid vents on top of the uranium and instantly solidified and merges properly with the material below. Currently, it is taking in cobalt and magma.

 

The material travels through the steam bar until it is below 850 C. Then, it enters the high pressure steam room. If the steam room gets too hot, the material is blocked from entering until the steam cools down. It then cycles around the steam room until the material is below 250 C, where it enters the lower steam turbine room and cools to 140 C. Then it passes through the liquid on top of the lower steam turbines, cooling it down to well below boiling.

I intend to eventually use my steam bar power other heat driven processes, like petrolem boilers and refined phosphorus production.

 

 

 

HOW TO BUILD THE PUMP:

Building the pump is not that difficult, but an error can cause a massive explosion and a nasty cleanup, so you should be careful.

1. Uncover the volcano except for the tile marked in black

2. Build the solid structure to the right of the volcano and the airflow tile. It has to be to the right because of the mystery about pump range.

   1. The normal tile near the pump is igneous rock. It will melt in to magma and be pumped away later. The other solid tile materials are not that important, I used a mix of ceramic and igneous rock.

3. Add around 300 g of crude oil and water to produce the liquid locks.

4. Vacuum out the volcano and pump rooms.

5. Add a significant amount of water (I have 800 kg) and build the lower pump and water plumbing (mine is out of steel, but it can be copper or gold amalgam). Set the liquid valve to 100 g/s.

6. Add the gases. They don't need to be the same as mine, but there must be 4 of them.

   1. I did this by building a 100 mg gas dispenser with all the gases. It had a gas shutoff on a manual switch, a valve set to 0.1 g/s that sent it to a gas bridge, and a loop to send the rest of the gas back to the shutoff switch.

   2. I then used plumbing to remove the gas from the pipe and the object Move To to put the gas on top of the airflow tile.

   3. I then opened (with a pause in between) the hydrogen canister, the CO2 canister, the oxygen canister, then the natural gas canister in that order (due to the heaviness of the gases). Note that the natural gas may delete the oxygen and itself when opened, so you may need to try more than once.

7. Build the hot liquid pump, the hot pipe and some tungsten automation wire to the igneous rock tile. On a gold volcano, steel is insufficient, but steel can often be used.

8. Uncover the volcano and remove all the debris. It will take a few eruptions, but the igneous rock tile should eventually melt.

9. Once the tile melts, put a hydro sensor made out of tungsten on the tile. Set it to below 1000 kg until the magma is gone, then set it to above 150 kg.

10. Add a pipe element sensor set to water on the water the pipe and a NOT gate to a notifier set to pause the game and alert you that the water for the waterfall is running out. You may also put other warnings, like "The waterfall isn't a waterfall" (for if the waterfall ever breaks) or a temperature sensor outside.

11. Since the gas is heated by something, I added some material to transfer that heat in to a tile. The energy is insignificant, but the temperature is dangerous. DO NOT MAKE WIRES OUT OF LEAD OR ALUMINUM. I learned that the hard way.

This process will work on any volcano type, although normal volcanoes require a reservoir to store the mass they eject (I will add an image here once I have a design I want to share.)

 

EDIT:  This is my volcano design.  There are a four magma volcanoes, one minor volcano, and one iron volcano on this line, so I added a reservoir under the volcano capable of holding about three eruptions, just in case. 

Note that they share an insulated pipe such that the upper volcano's pump output will block the pump of the lower volcano.  All my volcanoes are in series in this manner.

The extra automation wire is just to give another volcano down the line priority. 

Also, if you ever need to retire the pipe or relocate it, the insulated segments will be very hot.  They can easily be cooled to below boiling by building a tile on them and putting some temp shift plates around it.

[psusi]

Why make the pipe out of obsidian instead of something with lower conductivity?

 

[MinhPham]

Unless you're making insulated pipes using insulation, other kind of insulated pipes does exchange heat with the liquid inside and, melt at some point in the future (and loosing heat power in the process)

[Zarquan]

7 hours ago, psusi said:

Why make the pipe out of obsidian instead of something with lower conductivity?

 

2 hours ago, MinhPham said:

Unless you're making insulated pipes using insulation, other kind of insulated pipes does exchange heat with the liquid inside and, melt at some point in the future (and loosing heat power in the process)

Exactly right, obsidian has the highest melting point of any of the common raw minerals.  Some of my insulated pipes are already over 1500 C, but since they are embedded in insulated tiles, it hasn't effected by base.  Though I'm less concerned about losing power and more concerned about dumping heat in to my base.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

Exactly right, obsidian has the highest melting point of any of the common raw minerals.  Some of my insulated pipes are already over 1500 C, but since they are embedded in insulated tiles, it hasn't effected by base.  Though I'm less concerned about losing power and more concerned about dumping heat in to my base.

Hrm... I could have sworn that obsidian had a higher TC than igneous but according to oni-db.com, they are both 2, but obsidian has an SHC of only 0.2 compared to 1.  That means that while it can handle a higher temperature, it will heat up 5 times faster.  That doesn't seem like a great tradeoff.

[Zarquan]

12 minutes ago, psusi said:

Hrm... I could have sworn that obsidian had a higher TC than igneous but according to oni-db.com, they are both 2, but obsidian has an SHC of only 0.2 compared to 1.  That means that while it can handle a higher temperature, it will heat up 5 times faster.  That doesn't seem like a great tradeoff.

It isn't about thermal conductivity or capacity, it's about melting point.  If I ran igneous or some other non-insulation material, the pipes would melt eventually. If that happened, it would be a disaster.  And once the pipes are heated up, there is negligible heat transfer between insulated tile and insulated pipes.

This is a picture of one of my magma pump pipes.  It is 1543 degrees C because it is embedded in an insulated tile and the heat from the magma has nowhere to go.  If this were an igneous rock pipe, it would melt at these temperatures and cause the magma to back up, which must never happen or everything explodes.

[psusi]

1 minute ago, Zarquan said:

It isn't about thermal conductivity, it's about melting point.  If I ran igneous or some other material, the pipes would melt eventually.

Oh, right... the melting point is so high that it is higher than the liquid in them, so while it will heat up quickly, it won't ever get higher than that.  Duh.