Water Wheel Generator

[Arturius]

Hello all! 

This game is so much fun that I decided to make an account here and try to contribute some ideas.

So the first one is a Water Wheel Generator - since I have experienced it's quite hard to obtain "clean" power, besides the hamster wheel.

It's idea is quite simple - water falling from a height turns a big wheel, which in turn produced electrical power.

It should produce at least as much power to supply a water pump (to transport water up) and still new a little positive balance.

Of course developers would need some kind of drawbacks - I can thing of two - the machine could be big (wheel occupying much space) or it could produce lots of noice, similar to snoring effect.

If you have any other ideas about it please post here.

[Kasuha]

The problem is that pump needs the same power regardless how high you pump the water. Make a deep hole, put a pump at the bottom, pump the water at the top, and put twenty water generators in the way. 

It's not like the game shouldn't give you sustainable energy (it does) but it shouldn't be too easy and too unlimited.

 

[Arturius]

Hmm, you are right.

Still it would be nice if there could be some way for it to work in the early game and not be over-used in later stages.

Maybe some form of decaying resource used to build the water well? Similar to starting oxylite ore.

[JePaPix]

On 4/25/2017 at 10:53 AM, Kasuha said:

The problem is that pump needs the same power regardless how high you pump the water. Make a deep hole, put a pump at the bottom, pump the water at the top, and put twenty water generators in the way. 

It's not like the game shouldn't give you sustainable energy (it does) but it shouldn't be too easy and too unlimited.

 

Well this can be resolved with the inclusion of simplistic fluid mechanics and energy conservation.  Granted that this isn't the most simplest of tasks but Klei could make some could make simplifying assumptions like ignoring friction resistance in pipes etc.  

So for this scenario pumps should only pump to a certain height against gravity.  Thus the higher you want to pump, the more pumps would be required.  More pumps requires more energy.  Ultimately it comes down to increasing the gravitational potential energy of the water.

On the water wheel side (or hydro-electric generator), it essentially comes down to extracting a certain portion of gravitational potential energy.  How much will depend on how the water wheel is implemented but the key thing would be that the maximum amount of energy that can be extracted must not exceed the amount of gravitational potential energy of the water.

Thus by ensuring conservation of energy, one won't get the scenario you described which is a perpetual motion machine (or at least that is how I understood your comment).

I think including a water wheel would be a great mechanic for two reasons.  First, one can use it to make big "hydro batteries".  Batteries that exceed the capacity of the batteries already in the game.  These batteries work using the same principles as the batteries currently in the game.  One uses the excess energy generated by your power supplies to drive a water pump to pump water to some height.  This stores the excess energy as gravitational potential energy.  Then during your "discharge" time, one simply lets the pumped water flow through your water wheels to your bottom reservoir and thus extract the energy stored in your hydro battery.  It's a practice commonly used in our world today.
 

The second use would be to use it as a source of hydroelectric generation which exploits water reservoirs that are already located t high altitudes in the world.  Granted that this is technically free energy but it is not as if you had control over where the world generator would place the water reservoirs in the world.

[Maverick42]

I like it. But make it produce less wattage per kg of fluid than a pump uses. Then it becomes useful as a way to harness geysers and random runoff points in the base. Could be exploited though with dupe vomiting. But that'd be kinda hilarious actually.

The other issue is pumps don't use more power under higher pipe pressure, meaning you COULD exploit a single pump and many many hydroelectric generators to get net positive power. Hmm.

[Kaleb Jander Greek]

What about turbines instead water wheels? You know, like those used in an actual dam.
A way to setup this and avoid some exploits mentioned earlier would be by adding certains characteristics ti the turbine:

- Pipe input should have a certain input pressure (calculated using total mass of the body of water and height difference with the turbine)
- Turbine would break if you input polluted water (as with electrolyzers)
- Power generated by packet should be 50% of the power you need to pump a packet

..and so on. I'd love if they could also add a special switch to change the turbine from water to steam mode, so it also harness energy from geysers (given certain max temp, intake pressure, etc.)
 

[eboLag]

The idea is great, but it shouldn't produce more energy than it consumes. You can't "create" new energy, you can only convert it from one type to another (in this case from potential energy to electric energy). Also, the pumps should consume energy based on how far the liquids/gases are pumped(x units of energy/1 pipe tile, with x being the amount of energy required to transport 1 unit of material). So, for example, if you want to pump 5 units of water(with each unit requiring 1 unit of power to be transported) for 10 tiles, it would consume 50(5*1*10) units of energy. Or you want to transport 10 units of oxygen(each requiring 0.1 units of energy per tile) for 17 tiles, it would consume 17(10*0.1*17) units of energy. Maybe even add a base power consumption, which is a constant, so the total energy usage would be

(base consumption + (units of material * energy per unit(each material having a different value) * energy per tile)).

Later, maybe even add pipe/pump upgrades, transporting faster or more efficiently.

[Executive_Lurker]

I think they are eventually going to add rivers so this may actually become a thing