[Sandbox] Self-powered sulfur geyser tamer

[myxal]

In my search for a self-powered sulfur geyser tamer design I came up empty. Is there some reason for this? (I have yet to dive deep into divergent ranching).

Here's something I cobbled together in debug/sandbox mode, taking inspiration from Luma's CSV tamer (the split-room turbine trick). Caveat emptor - not tested long-term, it might not have enough throughput to keep pace with the geyser, or even your desired sulfur application. Feedback, field reports welcome.

One possibility of a catastrophic failure which I haven't ruled out - if the fresh sulfur manages to re-melt the solid backlog sitting in the spillway, there's going to be multiples of max-mass liquid sulfur in the spillway, breaking the tiles.

With that out of the way... 

Overview and heat:

• Heat transfer between milligram-steam and the sulfur is laughably bad.

Solid materials:

• dirt TSP - wanted something with decent capacity but low conductivity.
• ceramic for ST base (efficiency), otherwise igneous rock everywhere
• electrum (EDIT: I play Baator, where thermal properties of electrum are identical to gold amalgam, but it's utility is worse, hence it's the trash ore used wherever conditions don't require something better), niobium, lead for heat-exposed parts - only to lower capacity and make the build get up to temperature faster. Steel will also work for battery, sweeper and loader, the rest can use almost anything.
• aluminum metal tiles

Gases and liquids:

PIpes & rails:

• 0.1g/s valve to the low-pressure chamber.
• Sulfur allowed to exit if temp is below 103°C.
• Without power sulfur keeps looping in the cool steam chamber.

Random bits & bobs:

• granite gas bridges to help with heat extraction
• close the door and stifle the geyser if the tames is not keeping up (value from default, not tested). Use ~250kg, at 400kg sulfur freezes into blocks.

Other ideas/thoughts I'm currently too lazy to test right now:

• rearrange the cool steam chamber so that loader sits vertically, and..
• ... fill the chamber half-way with mercury (total 1900kg max, it shouldn't block steam inlet when the moercury is displaced by turbine water), should help cool the sulfur faster.
• I'm not sure if the low-flow venting causes the water to be slowly deleted. I recall seeing vented amounts up to 10g disappear, I'm not entirely sure about the mechanics.

[myxal]

Dang these geysers are beefy.  Here's "revision 4A":

• moved spillway door up to avoid flooding the battery (as easily), fix pressure limit to avoid forming blocks
• open sulfur to directly to steam, add mesh tiles to move solid sulfur out of molten sulfur
• add steam chamber door to keep steam inside during dormancy when all sulfur is solidified
• cool solid sulfur by turbine water still in pipes

I'm not 100% sure, but dropping water directly onto sulfur seems to improve the cooling performance dramatically - the top spillway door was constantly open. I then tried to drop the turbine water onto another liquid, and rearrange the buildings inside so that solidified sulfur would stay in this liquid during dormancy, but during activity this was struggling to keep up with the geyser.

Overview, background (diamond TSPs):

• cobalt instead of diamond would also be fine

Rails and pipes:

Elements and automation:

[myxal]

Rev. 4C:

• integrated debris chiller - sulfur comes out at ~102°C, depending on timer settings
• piping rearranged - cool turbine first, then 3-way split into trick stream (0.1g/s), big chiller (950 g/s) and mini-chiller (rest)
• attempt at batch-cooling liquid sulfur to increase throughput (top spillway open when nearly all sulfur in bottim spillway is frozen)

Some other revisions that didn't seem to warrant exploring further after encountering deal-breaking flaws:

Spoiler

Rev. 9 - I thought the high-mass mercury would drag down the temperature of sulfur debris way better than steam. It didn't and insteadbroke the tamer when it randomly spilled to the left of the spillway door. Maybe another liquid would work better?

And I found ghkbrew's tamer, posted here. I tried to integrate a debris chiller and submerging the solid sulfur in nuclear waste, but the turbine runs too sparsely to bring the temperature down significantly - output bath was at ~105°C when I stopped testing it, and its temp was going up.

 

[ghkbrew]

On 10/7/2024 at 10:11 AM, myxal said:

In my search for a self-powered sulfur geyser tamer design I came up empty.

Most of the ones posted to this forum have been power positive, even if it's not stated explicitly:

 

 

 

As a general rule the search feature on the forums is pretty bad.  I prefer to use the "site:" operator on google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforums.kleientertainment.com+sulfur+geyser

 

[myxal]

Yeah, by the time came searching here I was already looking specifically for "self-powered", as on reddit searching for "sulfur tamer" got me only power-negative tamers.

That way of tricking the turbine by automating the vents looks awesome, I'll have to try that.

[myxal]

For completeness' and build sharing's sake, here are some of my takes on ghkbrew's "simplest" tamer, aimed to reduce footprint.

• 1g or smaller glass block over the geyser, to minimise/block heat transfer; In GHK-3 the naphtha will occasionally splash up the step, making this definitely necessary. GHK-2 might work well enough with 10g cooked algae->dirt block, if the liquid vent is submerged, though I'm not sure if this might cause mass deletion when there's liquid sulfur atmosphere around.
• All builds: 400 kg naphtha in the cool steam room, cobalt TSPs
• GHK-3: steel conveyor bridges to bring heat to the ST inlet

GHK-2F:

• Coupled debris chiller with the massive ST/water heat mass. This should keep the water from ever breaking pipes - by the time it got to 102.6 the turbine would stop running.
• Chute timer setting set to match geyser's average active period flow.
• Naphtha thermo sensor in the steam room eyeballed to let sweeper/loader load/evacuate the sulfur from the cool steam room before next eruption. 

Spoiler

 

 

GHK-3H:

• Turns out 3-cells of hot steam are necessary; reducing the size down to 2 with simple automation (atmo sensor -> vent) I've had the turbine sputter (ran out of steam) and/or cool the pool of hot sulfur too much.
• Didn't pursue this one enough to put a debris chiller in what with the reduced space. There's a few options for corner-sweeping the sulfur outside.
• 400kg of naphtha left of the glass block to protect against over-pressure while keeping a decent thermal mass for turbine tricking. The block breakage happened unexpectedly after multiple other iterations, not sure how it got triggered.

Spoiler