My Upgraded Boiler Design

[Neotuck]

Made some improvements to my boiler design in debug mode.  Polluted water first goes in the top tank with the 3 aqua tuners to pre heat.  Then it is pumped to the main boiler were it is dripped over a tepidizer from 2 vents at 1500g/s each.  The steam travels to the next chamber were gold on conveyor rails absorbs the heat of the steam and turns it into water.  That water is pumped to the tank on the right that is temperature controlled by a door keeping it at 25C.  The big tank in the center is filled with petroleum kept at -10C by the 3 aqua tuners above it.  The cold petroleum draws heat from the gold on the conveyor rails and from the clean water tank when the door between them closes.  

Over all this build converts 3000 g/s PW into clean water at 25C and can run without stopping 95% of the time

(That's over 1700 Kg water per cycle)

On average it pulls less than 4 Kw

 

[Kuirem]

That's one big boiler, I made a smaller one that I'm still improving. I have a couple of question questions though:

• Isn't Tepidizer limited to 90°C? Or did they change that with Ranching?
• Why not just use the Aquatuners to boil the PWater?

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

13 minutes ago, Kuirem said:

Isn't Tepidizer limited to 90°C? Or did they change that with Ranching?

The limit is 85C, but there are some tricks to break through limit. The first trick is use automation signal to periodic switch it.

The second trick is about the temperature monitor strategy of tepidizer. Tepidizer only checks the temperature of liquid block with large mass(>400kg). In OP's case, the two PH2O blocks are colder than 85C, so the tepidizer won't stop working.

24 minutes ago, Kuirem said:

Why not just use the Aquatuners to boil the PWater?

Maybe to save power.(Tepi 960W 4064kw VS Aqua 1200W 840kw)

[Kuirem]

Interesting I will try to incorporate that in my own design to see if I can make a more efficient version.

[onlineous]

1 hour ago, Kuirem said:

Interesting I will try to incorporate that in my own design to see if I can make a more efficient version.

Perhaps this will help you a bit as well:

I heat up the tepidizers to 125 degrees by using a signal pulser. You could make the system smaller by putting the air permeable tiles on the right side.

The current system can boil of around 5 kilograms per second and does not produce polluted oxygen (ok, it shouldn't but in reality it sometimes does anyway. That polluted oxygen stays at the top of the pressure chamber (on the left).

Note that preheating the polluted water, and cooling the clean water / condensing the steam is the same action and happens on the bottom right.

Want more capacity? Just add extra boiler chambers.

[Kuirem]

1 hour ago, onlineous said:

Note that preheating the polluted water, and cooling the clean water / condensing the steam is the same action and happens on the bottom right

So you are using the input PWater temperature to cool down the steam? Guess it should work well with the new Cool slush geyser but if your PWater comes hot your output water will be quite hot as well (depends where you use it I guess).

[onlineous]

51 minutes ago, Kuirem said:

So you are using the input PWater temperature to cool down the steam? Guess it should work well with the new Cool slush geyser but if your PWater comes hot your output water will be quite hot as well (depends where you use it I guess).

Yes indeed. For the most applications the temperature of the water does not matter, only in farms it can be critical (unless you use a valve for every plant, which I used to do in the past, when Bristle Berry needed 80 kilograms of water per cycle, and my cooling setup could not keep up with that).

[Kuirem]

9 minutes ago, onlineous said:

For the most applications the temperature of the water does not matter

It will also be a problem if you want to use a system like that for a closed loop, like with Lavatory. Over time the temperature will rise until it reach the cap of 100°C.

[Neotuck]

1 minute ago, Kuirem said:

It will also be a problem if you want to use a system like that for a closed loop, like with Lavatory. Over time the temperature will rise until it reach the cap of 100°C.

If I used my boiler on on lavatories then it would only kick on for a short period every cycle giving the petroleum plenty of time to keep the water cool.

Remember mine can deliver 1700 Kg water per cycle at 25C with 95% efficiency 

[Kuirem]

@Neotuck I wasn't talking about your design but the one shared by onlineous that use the input PWater temp to cool the steam.

[Neotuck]

Just figured I offer my 2 cents

In most boiler designs cooling steam/water down to a manageable temperature is harder than heating the PW to boiling 

[onlineous]

24 minutes ago, Kuirem said:

It will also be a problem if you want to use a system like that for a closed loop, like with Lavatory. Over time the temperature will rise until it reach the cap of 100°C.

That's true, but I don't really see a reason to use a closed loop with a boiler system anyway. It's a bit of a waste to make a boiler system that can process almost as much water as you want (the system can be expanded as required), and only feed it the lavatory water.

Having the lavatory water in a closed loop makes more sense with a sieve, but you will need to vent water anyway, since the toilets produce more water than they consume.

 

23 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Remember mine can deliver 1700 Kg water per cycle at 25C with 95% efficiency 

What do you mean with 95% efficiency?

[Neotuck]

13 minutes ago, onlineous said:

What do you mean with 95% efficiency?

Despite by best efforts the steam still heats up faster than I can cool it (but slowly) 

So the temp sensor in the middle chamber is set to 100C so if any steam passes though without condensing into water it will shut down the tepidizer and 2 liquid shutoffs allowing the steam to cool down.

After running the boiler for about 10 cycles I calculated the boiler shuts down an average of 30s per cycle.  That's 5% of the cycle

 

[onlineous]

1 minute ago, Neotuck said:

Despite by best efforts the steam still heats up faster than I can cool it (but slowly) 

So the temp sensor in the middle chamber is set to 100C so if any steam passes though without condensing into water it will shut the boiler down allow the steam to cool down.

After running the boiler for about 10 cycles I calculated the boiler shuts down an average of 30s per cycle.  That's 5% of the cycle

 

I actually find that a bit weird. Your system seems to have much more cooling capacity than mine. Is all that cooling capacity used to cool down the fresh water? Does the conveyor belt heat transfer system not transfer enough cold?

Perhaps that could be solved by a door system like you use to cool your water tank?

What also could help is running the polluted water through tungsten piping at the top of the condenser. 

I like certain elements of your system, especially the possibility to control the water output temperature, but I have the idea you use quite a lot of power to pump and transfer heat.

[Neotuck]

3 minutes ago, onlineous said:

Perhaps that could be solved by a door system like you use to cool your water tank?

I keep the petroleum in the big tank at -10C and it takes 3 aqua tuners to maintain that temp, the average temp of the petroleum leaving the tuners is -50C if I add a 4th tuner it will freeze in the pipes.

It took a lot of trial and error to reach equilibrium so the petroleum doesn't heat up faster than the tuners can handle.

The door idea isn't bad I just rick heating up the petroleum too fast

14 minutes ago, onlineous said:

What also could help is running the polluted water through tungsten piping at the top of the condenser. 

Steam temp at the top of the condenser is average 150C.  Might risk boiling the PW in the pipes

16 minutes ago, onlineous said:

I have the idea you use quite a lot of power to pump and transfer heat.

not all systems run at the same time and the conveyor rail uses no power (endless loop with 2 bridges) 

The average power consumption is less than 4 Kw so it does take a good power plant setup to maintain it

[onlineous]

3 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Steam temp at the top of the condenser is average 150C.  Might risk boiling the PW in the pipes

That might actually be the problem: you heat up the steam more than necessary. In the original system I posted the steam never gets hotter than 130 degrees, which makes cooling it down much easier. I think that is a limitation of dripping on an tepidizer. Using a pulser it's easier to control the temperature in the system (of course, if you don't find that an exploit). The added benefit of that way of heating is that you don't accidentally create polluted oxygen which might screw up the system in the long(er) run.

[Neotuck]

17 minutes ago, onlineous said:

That might actually be the problem: you heat up the steam more than necessary. In the original system I posted the steam never gets hotter than 130 degrees, which makes cooling it down much easier. I think that is a limitation of dripping on an tepidizer. Using a pulser it's easier to control the temperature in the system (of course, if you don't find that an exploit). The added benefit of that way of heating is that you don't accidentally create polluted oxygen which might screw up the system in the long(er) run.

I been tweaking my build all morning and improved:

1)  I changed out the gold from the conveyor rails to diamonds. 

2)  Hot water travels though a tungsten pipe below the petroleum tank.

3)  There are 2 doors controlling temperature in the clean water tank

4)  Made a second radiator with tungsten pipe so the -50C petroleum cools the tank before it empties into it

I ran another 10 cycles and steam has still not reached the temp sensor, I think I have reached 100% efficiency 

[cpy]

Heh I always have the opposite problem, enough clean water but not enough polluted water.

[onlineous]

I'm currently building something inspired by your build.

The main problems with systems like these is preservation of energy.

All your appliances create heat, the conversion from polluted water to steam and from steam to clean water costs heat.

So in the end input temp + heat production = output temp + heat losses due to conversion.

I'm not completely sure how heat capacity fits into that picture.

Just now, cpy said:

Heh I always have the opposite problem, enough clean water but not enough polluted water.

Probably because you use fertilizer synthesizers to create natural gas? If you pump the excess (clean) water in an oil well and use a petroleum generator you use way less (polluted) water.

If you manage to heat the crude oil to create natural gas directly it's even better.

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, cpy said:

Heh I always have the opposite problem, enough clean water but not enough polluted water.

Most of my late game energy production comes from natural gas and petroleum, also I like to distill puft slime into algae

I end up with a lot of surplus PW 

[Kuirem]

12 minutes ago, onlineous said:

I'm currently building something inspired by your build.

The main problems with systems like these is preservation of energy.

All your appliances create heat, the conversion from polluted water to steam and from steam to clean water costs heat.

So in the end input temp + heat production = output temp + heat losses due to conversion.

I'm not completely sure how heat capacity fits into that picture.

PWater Vaporization delete heat, around 700 joules per gram of PWater vaporized. Consider a system that vaporize 1kg of water per second that's 700kW of heat removed. If you use only Aquatuner the system will cool over time because of that.

However the Liquid Tepedizer has a huge temperature output (which is why it is so efficient at boiling water) so yes this system will create heat over time. This is generally fine though since Water temperature is irrelevant with machines that have fixed output, which is the case for the high consumption ones : Carbon Skimmer and Electrolyzer. They will just delete that extra heat.

[Neotuck]

4 minutes ago, onlineous said:

I'm currently building something inspired by your build.

The main problems with systems like these is preservation of energy.

All your appliances create heat, the conversion from polluted water to steam and from steam to clean water costs heat.

So in the end input temp + heat production = output temp + heat losses due to conversion.

I'm not completely sure how heat capacity fits into that picture.

Everything except the transformer is submerged in liquid so that takes care of most of the excess heat.  As for the transformer I use a smart battery to cut power when not in use so the circuit draws power from the battery only.  I have had this boiler running for about 50 cycles now and here's a pic of the thermal overlay.  It barely raised in temperature 

[onlineous]

5 minutes ago, Kuirem said:

PWater Vaporization delete heat, around 700 joules per gram of PWater vaporized. Consider a system that vaporize 1kg of water per second that's 700W of heat.

However the Liquid Tepedizer has a huge temperature output (which is why it is so efficient a boiling water) so yes this system will create heat over time. This is generally fine though since Water temperature is irrelevant with machines that have fixed output, which is the case for hte high consumption ones : Carbon Skimmer and Electrolyzer. They will just delete that extra heat.

That's why I'm currently testing a system which uses aquatuners to boil. For my base it doesn't matter to much indeed, but I like the challenge of having a cold(ish) output.

 

5 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Everything except the transformer is submerged in liquid so that takes care of most of the excess heat.  As for the transformer I use a smart battery to cut power when not in use so the circuit draws power from the battery only.  I have had this boiler running for about 50 cycles now and here's a pic of the thermal overlay.  It barely raised in temperature 

It's not only about the transformer. All appliances (as far as I know) have a certain heat output. Pumps, aquatuners, batteries, transformers, they all have their own heat output. That means that less running appliances means the output temp of the water will be colder (the heat has to go somewhere). If the heat deletion by fase change is bigger than the heat generation by the appliances a closed system will cool down, otherwise the temp of everything will slowly rise, making it more difficult to get the output temperature you want.

Of course, in a normal base the water output temperature usually doesn't matter too much, but I like this opportunity to test the efficiency of certain systems:)

[Kuirem]

5 minutes ago, onlineous said:

That's why I'm currently testing a system which uses aquatuners to boil. For my base it doesn't matter to much indeed, but I like the challenge of having a cold(ish) output.

That's what I did with this setup :

Spoiler

The liquid Tepidizer is only here to ensure that the PWater tank don't freeze.

[Neotuck]

So far the most efficient way to control water temperature is automating doors, I have used a similar setup with a AETN that cools water down to 5C for a sleet wheat greenhouse