A Steam turbine setup you can easily build and run without debug mode

[JonnyMonroe]

Disclaimer: I did actually build this in debug mode. My goal was to build something that was safe for dupes and very simple and easy to build and run. The goal was not to make it super efficient, just functional and not require dupes to manually pump magma.

 

The Setup:

The rail is made of wolframite so as to not melt. Once built, it's loaded with obsidian. Once loaded with obsidian the abby wall at the bottom is dug out to flood the chamber with magma.

 

Loading the Rail:

Running:

It's not actually practical to do this for the small return on power. You need a lot of magma for a small throughput. A more complex design could better regulate gas pressure with mechanical doors but this serves the purpose of showing that you can boil gas up that hot in a normal game by using a conveyor system to move the heat from the magma biome. If you want to use something like this for power you're much better off cooking oil into petroleum or natural gas (as I did in that little chamber on the right of the last screenshot. It cooked way faster and the potential energy gained is massive by comparison).

[Neotuck]

This will slowly cool the magma biome

[JonnyMonroe]

1 minute ago, Neotuck said:

This will slowly cool the magma biome

Yes, you are extracting heat from it. Currently the only way to heat anything above 175c without exploiting or destroying metal is by cooling the magma biome. This was just a proof of concept to show you can extract heat from it without having dupes manually pump magma (which is slow and risky).

[Neotuck]

Load the conveyor with diamonds, it will transmit heat better than obsidian

[JonnyMonroe]

3 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Load the conveyor with diamonds, it will transmit heat better than obsidian

Good thinking. I'll do that when I set something like this up in a proper colony (actually, I'm setting up an oil cooker currently)

[Saturnus]

I'll point out the obvious limitations here. Once the bottom chamber gets filled with a bit of igneous from magma cooling down everything stops as magma cannot flow into the chamber to provide heat. You've made no attempt at making the area safe for dupes to dig the igneous rock out again, let alone made use of automation to make it possible to run without player interaction, so this is not really more than a test build. I prefer other offerings already posted.

[JonnyMonroe]

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so this is not really more than a test build

Yes.

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You've made no attempt at making the area safe for dupes to dig the igneous rock out again

Easy enough to incorporate.

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let alone made use of automation to make it possible to run without player interaction

Also easy to do.

 

I didn't bother making a proper automatic steam turbine design at the top end because there was no point. There are already plenty on here. But every time one gets posted there are responses along the lines of 'You couldn't build it in a proper game because you couldn't get the magma into it'. I wanted to make a proof of concept that you could heat such a build without shipping magma from a pump or using some other elaborate design. You could build this in the home biome if you wanted as long as you insulated the rails coming up. I guess the main point was to show the utility of rails in moving massive amounts of heat for boiling water or cooking oil.

[Neotuck]

42 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Good thinking. I'll do that when I set something like this up in a proper colony (actually, I'm setting up an oil cooker currently)

I'm thinking of doing an oil cooker myself that will use the excess heat to boil PW.  Can't wait to see what you come up with

[JonnyMonroe]

25 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

I'm thinking of doing an oil cooker myself that will use the excess heat to boil PW.  Can't wait to see what you come up with

The difficulty is in using automation to detect when the oil is cooked. If you're cooking to nat gas it's no problem as you can use an atmo sensor but if you're cooking to petroleum (for some reason) the best I've come up with is using a hydro sensor and setting it to petrol density (petrol is less dense). It's a messy solution.

 

Edit:

In response to the above comment about digging out igneous rock; something like this (but on a larger scale) should let dupes safely mine the rock as and when the magma solidifies:

 

 

Judging by the heat exchange I'm getting from that, you would probably need to scale it up to 5 tiles high for better effectiveness. That small example there only heats the diamond up by 200 degrees per loop.

 

2nd edit:

 

Requires a few dig actions every dozen cycles or so. If you ignore it for too long you'll have to deconstruct the tile walls and shift them over a bit, along with the rails.

[Saturnus]

29 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

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You've made no attempt at making the area safe for dupes to dig the igneous rock out again

Easy enough to incorporate.

Quote

let alone made use of automation to make it possible to run without player interaction

Also easy to do.

Really? Everything else is easy. Transferring heat with conveyor rails is not exactly a new concept either.

The real challenge of a working steam turbine design is an automated way to replenish the magma heat source. And an automated system to get rid of the igneous rock once it's cooled down too far to function as a heat source. All the while keeping the steam turbine running without interruption.

[Luminite2]

22 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

The difficulty is in using automation to detect when the oil is cooked. If you're cooking to nat gas it's no problem as you can use an atmo sensor but if you're cooking to petroleum (for some reason) the best I've come up with is using a hydro sensor and setting it to petrol density (petrol is less dense). It's a messy solution.

This comment shows a cool illustration of how to do it: 

 

Kind of like what you said, it uses density, but it uses the fact that if the oil is cooked into petroleum, adding more oil will displace the petroleum up a tile, allowing it to spill away and to trigger a separate sensor.