My first take at a polluted water treatment plant

[manu_x32]

Inspired by one of Brothgar's recent video, I decided to take a shot at it. 

It's a pretty expensive device energy wise, not sure I would ever build that in a real game, maybe late game if I have lots of extra power. But it was a very fun challenge.

1 aqua tuner and 1 liquid pump running full time.  liquid pump output also runs fairly often.  The rest runs rarely. Haven't checked the exact output rate yet, but it seems more than 2kg/sec when watching the output hydro switch. The liquid tepizer is kind of optional, I put it there in case water starts to go too cold after a while.  The gas pump is to make sure not too much polluted oxygen accumulates in the room. It doesn't run often, and instead of going in a void, it could output to a polluted oxygen treatment plant.

If you guys made similar devices, I would be very curious to see them!

I made a new youtube channel to be able to share these easily in the future. A video is so much better!

Cheers!

 

EDIT:  some numbers calculated over 10 cycles

• treated water:  14 391.8 kg total = 1439.16 kg/cycle = 2.39 kg/s
• power consumption:  average of  12987.9 kj total = 1298.79  kj/cycle
• water output temp: around 25 C (seems controllable too, but I haven't done many tests)

 

So i guess it's not a bad device. Seems to compare well with to the ones posted in the Water plumbing heat experiment thread posted in replies below. I'll see if I can improve it with some tricks found in that thread...

EDIT: no it does not compare, theirs is way better.

 

Save file :  pwTreatmentPlant_manu_x32.sav   (right at the end of the tenth cycle of testing)

 

 

 

Brothgars vid: 

 

[trukogre]

Did you see the recent threads from Sevio and Saturnus about this?  The design they kinda ended up both working on went through about seven iterations, seemingly.  pretty exhaustive coverage with how many variations they tried.

[manu_x32]

1 hour ago, trukogre said:

Did you see the recent threads from Sevio and Saturnus about this?  The design they kinda ended up both working on went through about seven iterations, seemingly.  pretty exhaustive coverage with how many variations they tried.

No I didn't see it, the threads names were misleading. I guess you are talking about this thread?

Thanks for this, I'll take a look...

EDIT: Took a quick look, and his throughput seems way higher than mine. I guess the only advantage my design has is better control of the clean water output temp. I'll take a better look at this big thread...

[manu_x32]

4 hours ago, trukogre said:

Did you see the recent threads from Sevio and Saturnus about this?  The design they kinda ended up both working on went through about seven iterations, seemingly.  pretty exhaustive coverage with how many variations they tried.

So after more testing it seems that my device as a pretty good throughput and fairly cheap in power consumption. See my edit with numbers on first post.

[Saturnus]

I regards to the thread above I ended up having 5650g/s throughput at 1248KJ/cycle. Output water at 47C. So almost 2.5 times better efficiency (2.35x higher throughput and 0.95x times the power consumption). The key thing in mine is that it's used for recycling dirty water from showers, lavatories etc so the output water temperature is not important as long as it kills the germs in the water.

You should really study the thread because there's a lot of good point on how to avoid the heat cancellation bugs in the game. For example. If you want to preserve water temp, or least not lose heat, a pump should see the input water coming to it's bottom right corner. If it has to flow across the pump from the left side then you lose heat, between 0.1C and 0.2C.

It's all about the temperature you can heat the water to before the aquatuner boiler. That's the important part. In mine it's heated to 98.9C on average. And sometimes even going up to 101.2C.

There's also this if you don't mind cheap tricks
 

 

[manu_x32]

12 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I regards to the thread above I ended up having 5650g/s throughput at 1248KJ/cycle. Output water at 47C. So almost 2.5 times better efficiency (2.35x higher throughput and 0.95x times the power consumption). The key thing in mine is that it's used for recycling dirty water from showers, lavatories etc so the output water temperature is not important as long as it kills the germs in the water.

You should really study the thread because there's a lot of good point on how to avoid the heat cancellation bugs in the game. For example. If you want to preserve water temp, or least not lose heat, a pump should see the input water coming to it's bottom right corner. If it has to flow across the pump from the left side then you lose heat, between 0.1C and 0.2C.

It's all about the temperature you can heat the water to before the aquatuner boiler. That's the important part. In mine it's heated to 98.9C on average. And sometimes even going up to 101.2C.

Hi Saturnus, thanks a lot for this information.  I guess I read numbers wrong in the thread.  I never saw the numbers you posted above, where are they? The highest numbers I've seen is on the first shared version of The First Law which says it outputs 5kg/s, but I though posts after where saying that this device had issue with germs mixing in the output water.   So what devices are the correct ones?:  The First Law, The First Law Take Two, The First Law cleaned???  this is a bit confusing to be frank. And some of the links to .sav files are not correct.

I'm trying to go through the thread slowly, but god is it hard to digest and find where is the key information in there. Is there a summary somewhere describing the bugs we need to avoid and the conclusion of this research?  And how much of this effort is useless if they fix the bugs?

[Saturnus]

It's a modified version of First Law Take Two.

[manu_x32]

6 hours ago, Saturnus said:

It's a modified version of First Law Take Two.

Is the save file for that one in the thread somewhere? there are so many links

 

[Sevio]

15 hours ago, manu_x32 said:

Is the save file for that one in the thread somewhere? there are so many links

 

Ask and ye shall receive. This is the boiler with the highest throughput from the research thread. Makes very hot water so you have to not mind that or cool it with the dripping glitch.

 

 

[Saturnus]

The only change I did after that was to change direction of heat exchanger flow as discussed in another thread (or later in the same thread, can't remember) which got it to 5650g/s without using more power.

[manu_x32]

8 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Ask and ye shall receive. This is the boiler with the highest throughput from the research thread. Makes very hot water so you have to not mind that or cool it with the dripping glitch.

Thanks. This brings me to the main thread. I tried all the machines on that thread and could not find the one that Saturnus was referring to.  So I guess we're back to one of the initial ones then? this one?

[manu_x32]

8 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

The only change I did after that was to change direction of heat exchanger flow as discussed in another thread (or later in the same thread, can't remember) which got it to 5650g/s without using more power.

ok thanks. I tried recreating a similar machine from scratch to understand it better, but one thing I didn't get is how you prevent the water from overflowing where the aquatuner is, there seems to be now aqua switch for the pump, the one beside the aquatuner is for him right?. And how do you prevent too much water pressure in the 1 tile high tunnels? no apparent switch there either...  This seems a bit magical.

 

[Sevio]

4 minutes ago, manu_x32 said:

how you prevent the water from overflowing where the aquatuner is

...

And how do you prevent too much water pressure in the 1 tile high tunnels?

For that, you might want to take a look at my Final Boiler Fantasy V build where I expanded on the separated flow heat exchanger and expanded on reliability. Extra hydro switches control the amount of polluted water in the aquatuner basin and the heat exchanger and a valve prevents overpressure in the polluted water channel of the exchanger. Testing this design was very easy and straightforward with no accidental spills (with associated heatloss) at all, it just runs stable and needs no tweaking beyond the initial settings for all the switches.

It's hampered a bit on max throughput compared to Saturnus' hot boiler due to the heat exchanger design though, but the basic concepts are applicable to either design.

[Saturnus]

But as we also conclude. It fun but a water purifier is just a better and more simple solution in most cases. You just have to go digging for the large sand deposits in the ice and green biomes.

[Sevio]

While both the water purifier and my earlier cold-boiler designs that did not separate the clean and polluted water output germy clean water, having germs in clean output water tends to be a non-issue in the current game because most players just stay with meal lice as food forever, so there is no vector for germs in clean water to end up in your dupes.

You can work around germs in clean output water by putting it in a separate output tank, then cutting off the flow and letting it sit still for a while before you start using it.

[Saturnus]

15 minutes ago, Sevio said:

While both the water purifier and my earlier cold-boiler designs that did not separate the clean and polluted water output germy clean water, having germs in clean output water tends to be a non-issue in the current game because most players just stay with meal lice as food forever, so there is no vector for germs in clean water to end up in your dupes.

You can work around germs in clean output water by putting it in a separate output tank, then cutting off the flow and letting it sit still for a while before you start using it.

At the current moment showers and lavatories actually do not output any water at all so there's only the germy water from sinks to process.

But in case they fix that bug, just heat the polluted water with a tepidizer, and process it through a water purifier. The output of the purifier is always 40C no matter what the input temp is. 

[Sevio]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

At the current moment showers and lavatories actually do not output any water at all so there's only the germy water from sinks to process.

Wait, they don't output any polluted water at all? And I was just wondering why my PWater tank was staying almost empty in my preview survival base... Hope they fix that soon.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Wait, they don't output any polluted water at all? And I was just wondering why my PWater tank was staying almost empty in my preview survival base... Hope they fix that soon.

They also don't use any water at all. They just need to be hooked up and used once by a dupe. Then you can disconnect the water lines completely and they'll still work.

[manu_x32]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

They also don't use any water at all. They just need to be hooked up and used once by a dupe. Then you can disconnect the water lines completely and they'll still work.

I didn't see that bug in outbreak (but I've mainly been using debug lately), is this in the oil update?

[Saturnus]

Just now, manu_x32 said:

I didn't see that bug in outbreak (but I've mainly been using debug lately), is this in the oil update?

Yeah, or as I call it, the oil experience because it's definitely a very buggy premature release that can take you on an emotional roller coaster ride, and not in a good way. Sometimes crashes catastrophically, so don't do anything important in the background when playing it.

[manu_x32]

28 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Yeah, or as I call it, the oil experience because it's definitely a very buggy premature release that can take you on an emotional roller coaster ride, and not in a good way. Sometimes crashes catastrophically, so don't do anything important in the background when playing it.

I think I'll just wait for the release in a week or two. I watched vids to see the new features and that was enough for me, there's already enough frustration with the current version, I don't want more.

 

[manu_x32]

On 9/24/2017 at 3:51 AM, Saturnus said:

You should really study the thread because there's a lot of good point on how to avoid the heat cancellation bugs in the game. For example. If you want to preserve water temp, or least not lose heat, a pump should see the input water coming to it's bottom right corner. If it has to flow across the pump from the left side then you lose heat, between 0.1C and 0.2C.
 

Another question about the above if you don't mind.  The tests that Sevio show in the first posts seem to relate to water dropping, not travelling left to right.  I couldn't find anything about that part in the thread. 

I recreated his tests along with a couple of additional cases to make sure I properly understood the info in the post, but I don't see any problems with water travelling sideways as you can see below.  I even did the mirrored versions of all cases to be sure because of your quote above. Or are you just referring to the water temp being changed by the pump temp?

 

And one thing I just found is that the bug stops in this configuration once the vertical row is full. Not sure if it comes back if that vertical row continually shifts because of a pump at the end though...

[manu_x32]

11 hours ago, Sevio said:

For that, you might want to take a look at my Final Boiler Fantasy V build where I expanded on the separated flow heat exchanger and expanded on reliability. Extra hydro switches control the amount of polluted water in the aquatuner basin and the heat exchanger and a valve prevents overpressure in the polluted water channel of the exchanger. Testing this design was very easy and straightforward with no accidental spills (with associated heatloss) at all, it just runs stable and needs no tweaking beyond the initial settings for all the switches.

It's hampered a bit on max throughput compared to Saturnus' hot boiler due to the heat exchanger design though, but the basic concepts are applicable to either design.

thanks I looked at it quickly but will take a better look.

In case you're curious here's the quick prototype I did which is kind of a mix of Saturnus and yours. I liked the way his hot chamber was open, and liked yours for separating water and polluted water. Had issues with tiles breaking and overflowing over the aquatuner so I put a second pump on a liquid switch for the polluted water input flow.  Also had issues with the feedback loop getting water too cold and also the aqua tuner output water getting too cold by itself even without the feedback loop. It was not really working well with the valve settings from your .sav scenes.  Anyways it still seems to work much better than my initial little prototype.

Great job guys!  Thanks to you pre-aqua tuner water is really hot, comes close to 100C.

[manu_x32]

On 9/25/2017 at 2:19 PM, Sevio said:

For that, you might want to take a look at my Final Boiler Fantasy V build ...

Ok I took a better look and like that one very much, the flow of different liquids is going in the proper direction everywhere for heat exchange, which was not the case in the other prototypes. I'm experimenting with a mix of that design and the others now.

By the way, maybe you have the answer to the question I was asking Saturnus above since you're the one who posted the water plumbings experiments tests in the first place.  He seems to be talking about a bug when water travels from left to right, but I don't see that bug with my tests.  Thanks again!

[Le0n1des]

On 9/26/2017 at 7:18 AM, manu_x32 said:

one thing I just found is that the bug stops in this configuration once the vertical row is full. Not sure if it comes back if that vertical row continually shifts because of a pump at the end though...

I Reached the same conclusion... I'll just shamelessly quote myself from another thread

On 9/15/2017 at 4:43 PM, Le0n1des said:

When you maximize the pressure - you kill the heat destruction bug, which is basically - the same bug that enables to instantly cool a column of fluid by cooling only the thin top layer... With maximum pressure there is no thin top layer