Cool steam vent tamed with excess

[Fugnu]

I decided to give up on a world due to bad layout in early game, so i decided to enter sandbox and try to tame the cool steam vent that I had been eyeing on and these are the results after following and optimizing it for 30-40 cycles. Final setup tested for ~15 cycles. (Hamster wheel in picture is set to charge at 0 at 1 priority, didn't happen with the system in its final form)

 

Summary: 600 g/s excess water after self sufficiency, loads of oxygen (cooled by running together with base coolant from aquatuner), potential for more energy. As most of the power is generated from the hydrogen, this is actually a glorified steam condenser with the benefit of cooling down your base instead of heating it. There is no point in doing this if you don't want the cooling or aren't in desperate need of water with no other ways to cool it.

 

 

Only the left most input of the turbine is heated, requiring far less energy than heating all of the steam. The layout is sub optimal. While the U shape completely separates the hot and cold side, it means that during eruption the steam vent reaches max pressure. I am fairly confident that this vent could handle a second turbine with a similiar setup, but I would rather recommend directly cooling the excess steam with something else and using the hot water to allow more cooling electrolyzers and power if needed. Additional steam capacitance would also be beneficial as there is very little steam left after idle period, around 200-500g / tile

 

 

As for power, there is nothing special. A wattage sensor controls the second oxygen pump to not overload the system as the potential load is 2040 W. The turbine provides 100-280 watts of power depending on the aquatuner load and heat spill to the cool side.

 

 

Plumbing is a mess, I know. This setup produces excess water at a rate of 600 g/s with occasional 1600 g packets if the electrolyzer shuts off. This could be used to run a second part time electrolyzer for more hydrogen and thus power. Here I am dumping it into space because I forgot that steam turbines produce more water than 1 kg/s and I didn't want to redo the piping wiring etc because the sandbox delete tool destroys everything and not just a single type of thing like destruct tool.

 

The aquatuner heat source is just passive base cooling with granite pipes through granite tiles.

 

I initially thought to only cool the turbine with it's output but with a metal refinery hooked up to the cooling line it can occasionally overheat the turbine especially if you were playing this normally. I just used the metal refinery to boot up the system. Overheating means no coolant in this case so I added an optional route for some cooling and the benefit this setup is that it provides the most cooling when the aquatuner is the most active aka when it is most needed ;). This could most likely be automated but didn't want to do it as this was mostly an experiment.

 

 

Initially I tried with only a single hydrogen gen, two tiles open to the cool side and no downstairs but that resulted in severe heat leak. The excess hydrogen was also needed for self sustainability so this is the end result.

 

Automation simplified: aquatuner max temp 200, coolant low temp 23, aquatuner limited to 24% low battery to prevent full shutdown, electrolyzer + pumps are the most important to keep running. All gates shown are AND gates or NOT gates. Transformer only runs when hydrogen gens are off, meaning there is excess power; This is only occasionally. The electrolyzer room setup is bad and you will find way better designs, use them instead of this.

 

Additional thoughts / miscellaneous

 

Aquatuner right up against the intake might be bad due to gas temp following the aquatuner nearly perfectly and causing excess heat use. More preferable would be to use some kind of heatsink to introduce thermal mass and reduce temp fluctuations. Allowing it to heat up is required for it to maintain temp due to inconsistent loads from cooling. Cooling need needs to be matched to heat need or it will use too much energy to be self sufficient. Aquatuner average use in 5 days is only 15%. (The excess water, could be used to allow more run time). This could be rate limited with automation instead of constant thermal load on cooling system but without additional cooling this might be risky.

 

Theoretically the hot side only needs (400 g/s) * ((4 DTU / (g * C)) * 15 C = 24 kDTU/s if all the heat was going into the hot side with no outside leak and there was no over heating of steam above 125. Realistically some kind of buffer OR rapid reaction to eruption is needed in addition to leakage so a constant load of 24kDTU/s isn't going to cut it as a buffer will always overheat and a rapid reaction is not constant.

 

Steel is only needed for the aquatuner, all other items never reached 125 C, though the second hydrogen gen is at 115+ constantly so it is cutting it close.

 

I would do dormant period storage by storing water instead of steam, but I don't use infinite storage so I can't comment on the behalf of it.

 

Restarting after dormant period might be though if the area cools down too much but the hydrogen gen alone was enough to slowly evaporate water with the 110 C steam coming in as long as it doesn't get flooded.

 

The steam makes pretty swirls when the pressure wave hits :3

 

[Gurgel]

While I typically pipe all excess water in a colony into an anti-SPOM (original design referenced below still works nicely at the original efficiency), I have wondered whether this general idea would work with just a cool steam vent alone. Nice to see it does!

Also like the turbine trickery! I take it that if you have one input over 125C, the others just need to have steam to work?

 

 

[Fugnu]

16 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I take it that if you have one input over 125C, the others just need to have steam to work?

Yes this is exactly the case. Though the 110 C steam only produces half as much power in the turbine compared to 125 C. It's 15 degrees to get from 110 to 125 and from 110 to 95.

Also nice design for electrolyzers. That saved half a kW nearly 100% of the time would go a long way to self sustainability in many cases.

Edited March 3 by Fugnu

[Kderosa]

Here's what you can do with a 3x Tuned Cool Steam Vent (170C, 8.3 kg/sec)

1. (Mostly Self-Powered) - Creates excess power when Vent is active, needs some power when Vent is dormant

2. Has a cooler injector for free base cooling (power free while vent is active, partially power free when dormant)

3. Cools turbine water output to Bristle Blossom temperature (24C) (95% power free)

4. Pump-free design

I threw this together on my latest run to see if it was power effective to see how much water I could cool for free from a cool steam vent instead of just using the condensed steam to feed to my electrolizers.  Turns out you can cool almost all the condensate water to 24C for free and get a little over 1KW of free power while the vent is active.  Uses only steel, aluminum, and pwater (i.e., what was available).  I had super coolant and some diamond, but they aren't necessary.

Uses a very standard steam vent cooler design (instead of condensing the steam to 95C with a cooling injector, you use an aquatuner  and geotuners to heat it up above 125C and let the turbines condense the steam).  The only tricky part is maintaining the steam room temperature - too low and the AT will overheat, too high and the vent will over-pressurize).  In this design I prioritize about 100 kg of turbine condensate (about ten pipe lengths) back into the steam room when either the temperature gets too hot or the pressure gets too low using a simple liquid bridge with the overflow directed into hot water buffer tanks.  The rest of the controls are Flintstone level stuff.

It's been running about 300 cycles in the background without issue.  I only check on it periodically to see if I need more buffer tanks.  I even left it unconnected from the main power grid while the vent was active throughout the entire active cycle. no problem.  It didn't run out of power until well into the dormant part of the cycle. (And it didn't break, it just stopped). A few more batteries and it might make it all the way depending on the cooling needs of your base. Or just hook up a smart battery and a power shut off to hook it back into the grid when the batteries are full or empty.

 

[Fugnu]

Damn I might yoink that cooling system.

 

For efficiency though your setup has a lot of advantages such as super coolant and above 125C steam from the gecko that allows for far more power use for cooling.

[Kderosa]

2 hours ago, Fugnu said:

For efficiency though your setup has a lot of advantages such as super coolant and above 125C steam from the gecko that allows for far more power use for cooling.

The Drecko is the secret sauce.   

[SkunkMaster]

Here I was thinking I had over build and over engineered my steam vent tamers.

Guess I wrong:

[blakemw]

31 minutes ago, SkunkMaster said:

Here I was thinking I had over build and over engineered my steam vent tamers.

Why use 2 tiles of heat exchange when 100 tiles work just as well?

[Charletrom]

4 hours ago, SkunkMaster said:

Here I was thinking I had over build and over engineered my steam vent tamers.

Guess I wrong:

Gotta love the mirrored steam turbines. Very tasteful

[SkunkMaster]

3 hours ago, Charletrom said:

Gotta love the mirrored steam turbines. Very tasteful

Then It might please you to know the Aquatuners are also mirrored

[psusi]

On 3/27/2024 at 4:48 AM, SkunkMaster said:

Here I was thinking I had over build and over engineered my steam vent tamers.

Guess I wrong:

I can not figure out what is going on there at all.  Why all of the metal tiles above the turbines?  You shouldn't need those to keep them cool.  And on the right, it looks like you are dripping water onto the vent to suck the steam up?  But that also tends to make it condense.  Then all of the metal tiles seem to be heating the steam on its way to... the locked door that prevents it from getting to the turbines?

 

[SkunkMaster]

On 4/2/2024 at 6:23 PM, psusi said:

I can not figure out what is going on there at all.  Why all of the metal tiles above the turbines?  You shouldn't need those to keep them cool.  And on the right, it looks like you are dripping water onto the vent to suck the steam up?  But that also tends to make it condense.  Then all of the metal tiles seem to be heating the steam on its way to... the locked door that prevents it from getting to the turbines?

 

The metal tiles above the turbines also cool the water that comes out of the turbines. - Sweet 5c water.

It is super-coolant used to "drip" on the steam-vent. It's called a gas elevator and ensures that the vent never overpressures. (usually i use oil/petrol but i had sc and was lazy)

The middle part (where the pump is) acts as a storage of sorts, gas pressure here can go as high as 1200 - 1400 kg. 

The door is pressure control, it opens when ever pressure goes under 20kg. 

Turbines are pressure controlled. - So they don't suck the chamber empty and have the AT's overheat as a consequence.

 

Edited April 4 by SkunkMaster

[psusi]

On 4/4/2024 at 4:40 PM, SkunkMaster said:

The metal tiles above the turbines also cool the water that comes out of the turbines. - Sweet 5c water.

Ahh, I see.  So you are getting all of the water out and super cold, and cooling the turbine as a side effect.

On 4/4/2024 at 4:40 PM, SkunkMaster said:

It is super-coolant used to "drip" on the steam-vent. It's called a gas elevator and ensures that the vent never overpressures. (usually i use oil/petrol but i had sc and was lazy)

Ahh, I thought it might be SC but it's hard to tell from the color.

On 4/4/2024 at 4:40 PM, SkunkMaster said:

The door is pressure control, it opens when ever pressure goes under 20kg

Why limit the pressure?

[SkunkMaster]

On 4/8/2024 at 7:44 PM, psusi said:

Why limit the pressure?

Efficiency, it allows the temperature in the room to go higher then what is stored. It might only be 10-20c difference, but still.