Aluminum Volcano taming and efficiency.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I've read quite a few posts dealing with taming volcanoes.  I decided to try my own experiment and built a system in my currently running world.

• The output aluminum must be under 32f -- I'm on Ceres and I'd rather not melt floors accidentally.
• Self-powered is good.
• Power positive is best.
• Must survive dormancy.

Spoiler

Its quite a monstrosity, but it achieves almost everything I wanted.

• Aluminum is -27f.
• Self-powered net positive
  • Could be more efficient by disabling coolant loop during dormant periods.
  • Distributes power into the grid when the AT isn't running, but steam temps are high.
• survives dormancy
• also refines phosphorite into Refined Phosphorus for the research station.

With the volcano boosted, however, there's a bit of an overheating issue -- hence the damaged sweeper.  I'm currently thinking about options to solve the problem.  To melt phospohorite, the bottom chamber must be at least 475f.  The sweeper takes damage at 528f.  That does not give a lot of thermal space to handle the eruptions.  Un-boosted eruptions top out at around 508f.  A boosted eruption doesn't always drop below 500 before the next eruption.

The options I'm thinking about:

1. Add another turbine that only kicks in if temperatures start approaching dangerous levels.  It would probably feed directly to the grid, as the two turbine system is balanced pretty well to power everything.
2. Remove the phosphorite refinery.  I've currently got about 5 tons of the refined material, so I can probably not use it for a while and build something else to handle it later.  If I don't need to melt phosphorite, I can shunt heat from the lower to upper chamber sooner in the process and prolong the overheating.  The question is: Will it make it all the way to dormancy before things start to break?
3. Leave things as is and run it un-boosted until I can replace the sweeper, loader, and AT with something like thermium.  Running the lower chamber at a higher temp would let the system send power into the grid well after dormancy by boosting the volcano.
4. Reduce efficiency by starting the turbines at a much lower temperature.  Might break dormancy. 

If I find a design I like, then I can modify it based on other volcanoes.  For example an iron volcano is definitely going to need three turbines.  The general idea I'm running with is that I never want to run the turbines JUST to cool the system.  I also want power available any time the AT needs to kick in, otherwise I might as well just keep it connected to the grid.  So if the turbines need to run, I want them running at full power without being too hot.  If I run them straight off the volcano, then they end up losing a lot of energy due to high steam temperatures. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

Addendum: I tried option 2 for this run.  I dropped the temperature in the bottom section by 10 degrees and enabled cooling the upper chamber sooner by 5 degrees.  With 26 cycles remaining before dormancy, the upper chamber is no longer reaching its low temperature threshold before the next eruption.  In fact, I'm currently sitting at 410f in the upper chamber, which is about 15 degrees above the 850 watt max output. 
The chamber with the AT and volcano is getting pretty close to over-heat temp, but isn't quite there.  I expect two or three more eruptions until I reach that point.

Currently the system offloads 1kw to the grid when the AT does not need to run but the system needs to cool down.  If I add another transformer, I can up that to 1600 watts (once the batteries are dead).  Unfortunately, the current automation only checks to make sure the AT doesn't need to run.  I would have to do a complete redesign to isolate the load from the source or figure out a way to run heavi-watt wires in there.

I should probably add another thermo sensor or two and logic to force the AT to not run if the steam temp is below the point where the turbines could power it.

 

Anyway, I think at this point I could post a full breakdown of the system if people are interested.  The average up-time of the two turbines over the last 5 cycles was 72%.  Since the volcano has been active over that time, it means that the steam hasn't ever been cool enough to drop below 850 watts.  So 72% of 1700 watts is 1224 watts.  The AT had an up-time of 80% over the same time frame, so 960 watts.  The sweeper and loader only ran 4% of the time, so that's less than 10 watts. That leaves 255 watts of power sent, on average to the grid.  So roughly one wood stove running 80% of the time.

[superscooper]

Wheew, quite a read. And a machine.

Question1: How much steam pressure per-tile are you running? Theoretically, if you increased the amount of steam, you're adding more thermal mass. That mass will absorb more of the heat and help even out temperature spikes.

Question2: Have you tried tinkering with conduction panels? Magnet has a good video on the 'Tube showcasing some very very interesting functionality they possess, even when unplumbed.

Nice work. Like horse-Tomska would say,

"I LOVE IT"

[superscooper]

Also, instead of running heavy watt, you could always run a switchboard. I had devised a simple enough system for my sour gas boiler, but, due to the scale of my device, I would have had to run too many junctions for it to keep up. In your case, where you are only running a couple of things, it should work splendidly.

Screencapped out of one of my debug test maps. The circuit is small enough to be easily condensed; it's merely laid out in an exploded view so that way it's easy to see whats going on. The filter gates are only for 1sec, due to the animation delay, they keep circuits from "crosstalking" at the same time.

Hope that helps you perfect your perfect monstrosity.

[KittenIsAGeek]

11 hours ago, superscooper said:

Question1: How much steam pressure per-tile are you running? Theoretically, if you increased the amount of steam, you're adding more thermal mass. That mass will absorb more of the heat and help even out temperature spikes.

Question2: Have you tried tinkering with conduction panels? Magnet has a good video on the 'Tube showcasing some very very interesting functionality they possess, even when unplumbed.

Question 1, Answer: The volcano chamber is running about 100kg per tile.  Liquid geysers are over-pressure somewhere around 120kg.  The turbine chamber is around 700kg, as the vents will over-pressure at 1000kg.  I'm thinking about adding some more water to the turbine chamber, but I haven't yet.  Right now the thermal inertia is running pretty close to one eruption/idle cycle.

Question 2: I've been playing around with them also, and I might experiment more.  On a related topic, when I first built the system it was bleeding heat from the bottom chamber even when the doors were open. It turned out that I had a conveyor bridge that touched both chambers.  Moving the bridge down two steps so it is completely inside one chamber solved the problem.  

6 hours ago, superscooper said:

Also, instead of running heavy watt, you could always run a switchboard.

I actually use switch mode junctions a lot.  It is something I've been thinking about.  The more design I put into this thing, the more automation I'm using anyway.  I don't really have a good place to put a switched system, other than above the turbines unless I decide to dig out underneath.

Those were all great things to think about.  Thanks for the feedback!

Some more remarks on question 1:  One reason I'm thinking about increasing the amount of water in the turbine room is that I'm using the water itself as an energy battery to run the system into the downtime.  To the right of the large battery there's a liquid shutoff valve.  It is controlled by a thermal sensor in the turbine chamber and the signal output from the liquid reservoir.  Essentially, once the steam temperature drops below a particular threshold, the output from the turbines gets stored in the reservoir. During the eruption period, the steam temperature is usually above that point, so the water comes back in immediately to cool the system down.  I've just recently hit dormancy, so now I can tinker with the details and see how it goes.  I know from earlier that a full reservoir will be emptied to cool the system down after 4 or 5 eruptions.

Further thoughts on efficiency from my previous post:  I lowered the turbine chamber's temperatures slightly.  During eruptions it tops out around 400f instead of 410f.  This reduced the amount of time the AT needed to run slightly.  The end result is that during the last 5 cycles before dormancy, the transformer sending power back to the grid had an on-time of 49%.  Since it transfers 1kw when active, that means the system is sending an average of 490w back to the grid, instead of the 255 watts earlier.  It is now a bit better than a hamster wheel running continually.  I think, in the morning I'll run it for a few cycles and see how it functions at the start of dormancy and then do a breakdown of the full system.

[superscooper]

Another thought is that if you have access/availability to any insulite (a big ask for anyone who plays, which is why I design garbage that can forgo it), look at the heatmap for any outlying insulated tiles that might be glowing (exchanging temperature) in an unfavorable location and swap for insulite. Yes, ceramic is like a .001 conductivity, but its a galaxies difference compared to a flat 0.

[KittenIsAGeek]

So first I'm going to post some details about the build, then I'll talk about how it performs and what I was hoping to accomplish. 

Physical layout:

Spoiler

There are four main chambers. Starting from the top right and going clockwise we have: Final cooling block for the hot aluminum, steam chamber for the turbines, phosphorus refinery, and volcano chamber.  For the last couple dozen of cycles of testing, the phosphorus refinery has sat idle.  I've currently got plenty and it introduced a lot of extra variability into the project that was making it difficult to track efficiency.

Automations:

Spoiler

The steam turbines are turned on simply by a single smart battery.  It is currently set to 100/10, because the turbines have about 4 seconds of start-up time where they are running without producing full wattage, thus wasting some heat.  Running the turbines longer reduces the effect of this loss.  The AND and NOT gates above the turbines switch a transformer on and off based on the temperature of the steam room and whether or not the AT is running.  The thermal sensor for the automation is set to above 380f.  The other thermal sensor in the turbine room is set to above 392f.  When the steam temperature is above 392f, it switches open a liquid valve allowing water from the turbines to enter the steam chamber and cool things down.  The OR gate that is also on that automation sequence trips when the pair of reservoirs are full and lets some water out.  Its currently set to 100/90.  At some point during dormancy the steam room chamber will drop below 380f and permanently disable the transformer sending power back to the grid.  In the phosphorite refinery is a thermal sensor set to  above 490f.  The NOT gate inverts the signal because it was running double duty earlier. A fragment of the removed portion can still be seen in the aluminum cooling block.  Anyway, the purpose of this thermal sensor is to feed thermal energy into the turbine chamber when the volcano chamber gets too hot.  This is not an ideal location and may be messed with later.  Finally, there's the thermal sensor on the coolant line, set to above -30f.  The very last is a switch connected to a conveyor meter that keeps the meter continually running.  The meter itself is set to "Limit 2 units" so each basket of aluminum is 2kg of mass.

The railing:

Spoiler

Pretty simple loop.  The buildings in the volcano room are built with steel.  The AT's overheat temperature is 617f, while the loader, pump, meter, etc, are all 527f.  So running the hottest aluminum past the AT first keeps everything else from breaking.  The aluminum cools down pretty quick.  During an eruption the two hottest points are directly on the volcano and the AT.

The coolant line:

Spoiler

Pretty normal.  Cool off the turbines and the aluminum, but don't worry about anything else.  Standard double-bridge bypass on the AT so that coolant always flows.  BTW, nectar is an incredible early coolant.  Brine would work, as would polluted water, but your temps for both would be have to be a little warmer.  Not an issue if you're not on Ceres with half your base built using ice...

Power lines:

Spoiler

Pretty simple circuit.  The large battery is there to add some extra operating room.  It could and probably should be another smart battery, but it was built before I had extra aluminum laying around.  When the smart battery turns the turbines off, the large battery only holds about 18kj of energy.

Thermals:

Spoiler

The insulated blocks that are red or orange on the far right and far left are because of breaking into the system while it was running to fix/change things.  The blocks were rebuilt with hot igneous, so kept the temperature.  Similar to the red tile below the bottle emptier and the conveyor chute in the phosphorite refinery.  The red insulated blocks immediately to the right of the aluminum cooling block ought to be replaced with ceramic or, as @superscooper suggests, insulite.  The red insulated tiles around the transfer doors are not causing any energy loss and could be normal tiles because when open, there's a vacuum to separate the space.  The black spot above the smart battery is part of a POI that did not fully appear when I entered it.  You can see the edge of a plastic ladder above the transformer that was also part of the POI.

Materials:
One of my goals with this build was using easily available materials.  The most exotic material is steel for the buildings in the volcano room and thermal transfer doors. Tungsten was used for the metal tiles both in the steam rooms and in the cooling block.  The radiant pipes, conduction panels, and conveyor rails are all iron or iron ore.  The tempshift plates behind and adjacent to the volcano are obsidian.  All the rest are granite.  Their primary purpose is thermal mass with the advantage of helping to more evenly distribute the heat.  

 

Initially during the heat up process I ran power from my grid into the system using a large transformer.  It powered the AT and loader/etc until the steam temps reached operating temperature.  During eruptions, the aluminum drops out of the final cooling block at temperatures that are still below -20f at the end of the eruption.  The volcano is boosted once:

Spoiler

The thermal sensor in the phosphorite refinery reaches 517f during an eruption, and will drop to about 480f after.  One advantage of its location is a bit of hysteresis.  It could be handled better with a pair of thermal sensors and a set/reset gate, but this works.  Initially the thermal sensor was set at 500f, but that allowed the temperature to peak at 527f and buildings took damage.  As mentioned above, it is currently set at above 490f.  The lower temperature still works for refining phosphorite -- barely.

When not in a dormant phase, and not refining phosphorite, the transformer pushes energy back to the grid 49% of the time.  This comes out to an average of 490 watts.  One of my goals was self-powered and hopefully power positive.  I think I have met that goal here.  During dormancy, the transformer has an up-time of 72%, increasing the average power to the grid to about 720 watts.  Pretty respectable.  Unfortunately, after only 3 cycles of dormancy, I completely filled a reservoir.  If I increase the steam pressure in the turbine room, there will be enough steam to fill 6 reservoirs and still run the turbines, should I decide to add more.  That is only 18 cycles.  There are 44 cycles of dormancy, meaning the system will not be contributing at all for roughly 26 cycles.  This suggests that the best my current setup will do is an average addition of 280 watts added to the power grid during dormancy.  The power added during dormancy will not be evenly spread, however, but because of how my power grid works, it just means I'll save fuel for later.  Not that it'll be much...

Spoiler

Overall in my base I'm producing about 3000kj of power.  The highest spike is just shy of 4000kj, and the low dip at cycle 511 was 1400kj.  Since cycle 589 I've been wasting only 21 to 27kj of power.  The huge spike at cycle 587 was when I forced the turbines to stay running simply to get rid of excess heat while I was tuning the system.

Now that I've figured out most of the particulars, I believe I could build this system as soon as steel is available and perhaps early enough that the power produced would be useful rather than marginal.  

Some areas for improvement:  Geotuned, the volcano produces an average of 385.5g/s of molten aluminum at 3230.3f.  Assuming an average steam temperature of 500f, that means it adds 532,580.5 DTUs of thermal energy per second. I need to write the math out, but estimating in my head suggests that is about 1kg of 202f water turned back to 400f steam per second.  Each turbine processes 2kg of steam/water per second when running, so at peak efficiency I should be able to average running the turbines 25% of the time including dormancy.  The AT reduces 10kg of nectar by 25.2 degrees when it is running.  The AT appears to run roughly 40% of the time, so that's another 230k DTUs.  Unfortunately, while the AT is running, no power is sent to the grid.  So lets ignore that for now.  Supposing the turbines are adding 25% of their potential power to the grid over a full 107 cycle period of eruption/dormancy, that comes out to about 425 watts.  My current system has the potential for about 400 watts over that same period.  Lowering the steam temperature in the turbine room already improved efficiency, but during eruptions the turbine room still goes above 400f.  At 393f, the turbines produce produce their full 850 watts of power.  I can only allow the turbines to produce a minimum of 800 watts each, so that does not leave a lot of wiggle room.  Below that point, the two turbines will not produce enough power to keep everything running smoothly and the system may need an outside boost of power.

I could also re-configure the power system to use a switched system.  The advantage would be allowing the turbines to run continually when the temperature is ideal, further reducing the efficiency loss when powering up.  The difficulty would be in determining when to turn the turbines off such that the AT can still run if necessary during dormancy.  Alternatively, I could do a hybrid system where the turbines push power to the grid only, and the grid powers the other systems.  With my current base's power needs, this would not be an issue as I'm generally using about 2kw continually.  However, earlier in base development I would still need to stop the turbines if the power grid was full, which puts us back at the power loss from startup losses.

Another idea I had was to redesign the automated systems for better redundancy.  For example, I could add a logic circuit to determine when the system is in dormancy and has reached a low enough temperature point to prevent the AT from running when necessary and throw a switch to bring power in from the grid.  The way things are currently set up, that shouldn't ever happen, but a fully automated system to take care of that edge case would be nice.

I could also expand both steam rooms.  More area = more mass, and more mass = more stability over time.  If I allow for more space, I could replace the large battery with several smart batteries.  With more batteries, the turbines run longer and thus reduce the losses from the startup process.  I mean, I could build them from steel and put them inside the steam chambers, but the point of this was to design a system that is easily built.  The system currently needs 2000kg of steel which can be difficult to produce early in the game.

Overall, I think I did pretty good accomplishing my goals.  If anyone has some other suggestions/ideas I'd be interested in hearing them.

[superscooper]

An easy way to do a switch would be to toss a smart battery straight into the steam room and route that to your AT. Sort of a "master control" battery. When it reached X% charged, it will flip a shutoff that disconnects it from the 'grid'. Y% discharged it would reconnect it. Have a not gate running off of the same signal to another cutoff prior to the turbines that way it isolates the current to flow directly in whichever direction you like. I'd just recommend adding the filter gate for 1-2sec before the cutoff switch like I had posted above. The animation for the cutoff lends to a slight delay where both lines would be 'live' simultaneously, which, the filter gate would eliminate.

And the reason I suggested chucking the battery in the steam room, is, well, thats another 500dtus of heat you can use.

Final thought before I cease intrusion of your masterpiece, you could always chuck an automation switch in one of those vacuumed out tiles in between the steam rooms that connects directly to the doors. Should provide you with the ability to shut off temperature transfer should you need to without interrupting normal operation. Bit of redundancy.

Again, nice stuff. Love the depth of thought put into it.

[superscooper]

Slapped together your design (what I can see of it) to better illustrate what I was referring to. Words can be fickle, so, I don't like to rely on them and hope my deep-rooted idiocy doesn't overwrite them.

The automation may look intimidating, but, I assure you, it's the exact same circuit you have already wired, but I squeezed in the power cutoffs I mentioned. Also some OCD tidy. Feel free to lob brick at your discretion.

Also, I wouldn't 86 the phosphorite part. Could come in handy later melting sulfur for natural farm tiles.

[KittenIsAGeek]

13 minutes ago, superscooper said:

The automation may look intimidating, but, I assure you, it's the exact same circuit you have already wired, but I squeezed in the power cutoffs I mentioned.

Looks pretty good.  I've got some pretty complex automation going in other areas.  I never got around to cleaning up the system after I figured out my design.  It was altered a lot before I finished up, so yeah, my build isn't the cleanest. 

The top most floor with the brick sticking up was just to re-route melting water off to one side instead of having it flood my battery. LOL.  Now that the cooling is under control, it isn't an issue. I just forgot to remove it.  I also can't build anything in the gap because it claims I haven't explored that one spot.  Oh well.

I ran the system for several more cycles unchecked while I was doing other stuff. I definitely need to either cut off the coolant loop or tap outside power half-way through dormancy.  The problem hit once the two reservoirs were full and the turbines started dumping water back into the steam room.  It isn't a huge problem, but it means it isn't _quite_ set-up-and-forget yet.  The quick fix is a cold temperature switch.  The longer fix would be a re-design to avoid the issue in the first place.  I'll have to do some thinking on the problem and figure out how I want to address it.

But that'll wait. I need to get a rocket into space so I can get data disks for research.

 

[superscooper]

At least you are dealing with SO! space and not vanilla, haha.

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

The top most floor with the brick sticking up was just to re-route melting water off to one side instead of having it flood my battery. LOL.  Now that the cooling is under control, it isn't an issue. I just forgot to remove it.  I also can't build anything in the gap because it claims I haven't explored that one spot.  Oh well.

 

As far as that unexplored spot, quick cheat code:

Build a ladder above it and one below it. Then select a dupe, and manually "Move To" whichever ladder would force them to go through that tile.

[Gurgel]

I have an alternate design with 3-stage cooling, two of which are power-positive and the last one from around 140C down to target temperature power negative. The main difference is that I solidify in vacuum. I have run this successfully in different geometric configurations for anything except Niobium and Tungsten Volcanos (did not try, but should be possible). The first chamber needs to be adjusted to the concrete volcano to make sure solidification is minimal-loss.

Note that the auto-miners are a safety feature only. Sometimes things clog up without them. 

No idea how it compares to your approach. Here is an example for an aluminum volcano:

b

The turbine on the left cools the condensation chamber, which is in vacuum. The turbine on the right brings the material down to around 140C. The water-basin at the bottom does the final cooling to target temperature. Note that there is a third aquatuner/turbine combo to cool that water-basin.

To show adaptability, here is one for a volcano that required more cooling and higher material throughput. The condensation chamber requires two turbines here as does the second stage due to bursty output. You can also see the basin-cooler on the left here:

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

alternate design with 3-stage cooling, two of which are power-positive and the last one from around 140C down to target temperature power negative. The main difference is that I solidify in vacuum.

I've done a similar build to that in the past.  The drip solidification in vacuum works quite well, especially for magma volcanoes that put a lot more thermal energy into the system.  The big downside and one of the reasons I tried for a different build was that conveyor rail thermal sensors were shifted to the final stage of research that requires the use of rockets.  This is not a problem, generally, in Spaced Out, but it does make it more difficult to build your sort of system early in the game.  In fact, in some games I find enough disks that I can get one or two bits of the last research done without going to space.

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Note that the auto-miners are a safety feature only. Sometimes things clog up without them. 

Yeah, one drawback that I ran into was clogging requiring a dig-out.  I was glad when robo-miners were moved into earlier research.

 

I'm starting to think about a hybrid design once I get some niobium.  Use the vacuum drip for solidification.  Immediately move the metal (or igneous rock) into a high-pressure, high-temperature steam chamber that acts as a thermal battery.  From there it moves through two separate steam turbine rooms.  Hmmm.  Thanks @Gurgel!

[superscooper]

Ok, Kitten, I need your expertise. I realize this question is odd because I should totally already understand this, but, it's a conundrum I've had for a long time and have never been able to get it to work, which apparently you have.

I'm trying to consolidate my conveyor packets into larger chunks. The chunks my autosweepers are retrieving are far too tiny. I've heard and seen many players use the conveyor meter to accomplish this, yourself included, but I'll be damned for the life of me I have never been able to get it to work. I've tried setting the meter to 20 and routing the reset to a switch (as you have), and it doesn't do anything. Just keeps sending the tiny packets down the rail. I've tried what others have suggested, and connect the reset to the conveyor output. Same result.

My issue is two-fold. I have an industrial power brick/sauna, and, I've got autosweepers recovering the dirt from the boiling polluted water. The packets are too small to be affected by the cooling block, and worse, all of the tiny packets are choking up my conveyor main-line that routes to my storage tile. My base already have two main-lines, one collecting/sorting the regolith and metals from space, and the second handling all of the materials generated within the asteroid. The asteroid rail can get a bit busy when my boilers spit out their Igneous Rock, but its manageable. With the dirt output from the sauna, it just completely backs up.

[sheaker]

Here is design I am using. It is modified version of gold volcano tamer I found long time ago. It is same design for all volcanoes except Niobium. It handles Copper, Iron, Gold, Tungsten, Cobalt and Aluminum. Aluminum one is unique and has more steam, more hydrogen and additional time for filters.

Biggest advantages:
Small footprint,
Unified design,
Confirmed robustness.

Biggest Disadvantage:
It requires 10W of external power source for correct operation.

 

 

 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/19/2025 at 8:38 AM, superscooper said:

I'm trying to consolidate my conveyor packets into larger chunks. The chunks my autosweepers are retrieving are far too tiny. I've heard and seen many players use the conveyor meter to accomplish this, yourself included, but I'll be damned for the life of me I have never been able to get it to work.

OK, so, I'm not consolidating the shipping baskets exactly, but here's some thoughts that might help.

The conveyor meter will allow X amount of material through and then require a reset flip. It does not wait for X amount of material first and then send it.  What is happening in my build is that I have the meter set to a small value that is a fraction of a full basket.  A basket can hold 20kg, and I'm telling the loader I only want to send 2kg at a time.  The conveyor loader gets filled up by the autosweeper, and then 2kg chunks are sent through the meter. The sweeper fills the conveyor loader faster than the meter is letting material out.  If you keep the reset "Green," it will continually send one basket with 2kg of material right after the other.   If I do the same trick, but set it to a full basket of 20kg, then it will send baskets faster than the autosweeper can fill the conveyor loader and you'll get some baskets with 3kg, or 8kg, or whatever based on how much the autosweeper picked up that particular tick from the volcano. 

Another trick you can do is connect the two automation terminals on the meter together.  This gives a one-basket pause between completion and starting a new metered set.  So in my above example with the meter set to 2kg, you would see a basket with 2kg, an empty space, then another basket with 2kg. With it set to 20kg, you might get several baskets in a row until 20kg is hit, then an empty space, and then another short train of baskets -- all depending on how fast the conveyor loader is filled.  If your volcano is emitting more than 10kg/s, then at some point you'll get every-other-basket holding 20kg of material.

Also, you can put a timer or a delay on the conveyor meter.  After sending whatever amount the meter is set to, no more would go through until the timer or delay trips the reset.  So your first round might be oddball baskets until 20kg is reached, but then because of the delay your autosweeper will have put more into the loader than can be sent with one basket.  Lets say you flip the switch every 10 seconds.  You would get a couple of oddly filled baskets, then a 10-second delay, then one basket, then a 10-second delay, and so on, until the conveyor loader is emptied after the eruption has ended.

The final trick, and one I've used in the past, is a two-step system.  You have a sweeper that picks up the dirt and puts it in a loader that immediately empties it just outside of the sweeper's range onto a pressure plate.  When the accumulated material hits whatever point, it goes green and turns on another sweeper that puts the dirt into a different loader that sends the dirt on rails through the cooling area.

On 2/21/2025 at 8:34 AM, sheaker said:

Biggest Disadvantage:
It requires 10W of external power source for correct operation.

 

Those are great.  However, there is one other disadvantage, and that is the conveyor senors.  Those are now, unfortunately, way down the research tree.  Your design will work without them, but you'll have to pass the material through a meter to reduce the packet size on the rails in order to make sure everything gets cool before it reaches the end of the rails.

I think a minor re-design could eliminate the need for an external 10w and also perhaps allow some transfer of power back to the grid during the eruptions.  I'll have to think about it.  The compact design is great, and like mine it doesn't rely on any exotic materials.  

At 130c, you're starting the generators inefficiently low, but I suppose that's necessary to keep the steam temperature from going too high before the end of the eruption period.  Putting pressurized hydrogen in the turbine room is a great idea for better heat transfer between the conveyor belt and the coolant loop.

Thanks!

[sheaker]

36 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Those are great.  However, there is one other disadvantage, and that is the conveyor senors.  Those are now, unfortunately, way down the research tree.  Your design will work without them, but you'll have to pass the material through a meter to reduce the packet size on the rails in order to make sure everything gets cool before it reaches the end of the rails.

I think a minor re-design could eliminate the need for an external 10w and also perhaps allow some transfer of power back to the grid during the eruptions.  I'll have to think about it.  The compact design is great, and like mine it doesn't rely on any exotic materials.  

At 130c, you're starting the generators inefficiently low, but I suppose that's necessary to keep the steam temperature from going too high before the end of the eruption period.  Putting pressurized hydrogen in the turbine room is a great idea for better heat transfer between the conveyor belt and the coolant loop.

Thanks!

I absolutely agree with You. I believe it can be done without pressure sensor and without valve.

I added pressure sensor to trigger the system after first run, where small amount of steam is generated. Most of it condensate around thermo-aqua-tunner. Then putting some material into conveyor belts allows for further evaporation. Not necessary for sure as I think it is easier to let it run on external power until thermo-aqua-tunner reaches 100C. Then just disconnect it forever.

Valve was used to allow for thermo-aqua-tunner bypass during dormancy. I think initially (without externally powered bypass) I ended up boiling some water in pipe before thermo-aqua-tunner. Maybe I tried Igneous Rock while Ceramic pipes would let to withstand entire dormancy.

I am sure You will squeeze even more from this design, although I think it would be hard to make it more compact than it is now, just less complex.