Turbine Trouble!

[FullMetalArthur]

Hi everyone.

I've been struggling to make the steam turbine work. Since it usually last tech and setup at the end game near the magma biome I've had issues to make it work. 

I have the cables ready to feed power to my colony and have enclose it with a small water supply. Ive put metal flooring to act and some of a grill for water, at first just dripped some water directly to the magma but turned into igneous rock. I made some steam, even though my pipe broke afterwards due to the heat and it says overpreassure, which means I have more steam above than below and don't know how to control that. It worked for a few moments before shutting off again because it pulls steam upward and reaches the point where there is more steam above than below again. So I figured to keep a constant flow of water but dont work because the steam is not "used" just cooled and ended up having 16-20kg of steam per square.

This is hard. Have struggled for nearly 35 cycles. Even made a transit tube across half the map just for my dupes to get there and work on my constant modifications. Can someone post a pic of their steam turbine setup? I dont need much explanation just something to start working on and have an idea why all I do don't work.

Thanks for the help.

P.D. Also tried to put a gas pump to move steam from above to the bottom but my gas pump breaks due to the +200°C lol)
Also tried to put wheezeworts to cool down the gas back into water and the poor wheezewort died lol.

[Luminite2]

Some consider it an exploit, but you can use door compressors. A row or 3+ doors on an automation circuit that just loops forever can move a lot of steam if timed correctly.

[TheGCat]

Can u post your setup, what u have tried ?

How Luminite2 said, I personally use the compressor method, because I have not found a other build, that functions correctly.

[BlueLance]

Man that is pretty complex XD 

[Arash70]

what is this with door pump designs?

all it needs is some heat at the bottom + 1-2 gas pumps on top + a high pressure vent at the bottom to pump steam to the bottom + a little bit of automation.

I still can't understand why everyone over complicates the designs.

[BlueLance]

33 minutes ago, Arash70 said:

+ 1-2 gas pumps on top +

I am gonna ask this cuz I assumed its not possible, but a gas pump will take damage after 125 Degrees, the steam that comes out is still way hotter than this? 

I had planned to use to different methods to boil water,

One was to use Super heated Hydrogen to draw heat from the heat source (Volcano for me) and use it to boil water.

Another was to use a triple door system with the middle door being a vacuum and close it to boil a set amount of water so that the system doesnt become too pressurised.

The last one was to drop a lot of water onto the hot material and have the steam generator be in the same room.

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, Arash70 said:

1-2 gas pumps on top

not possible they break too easy.  Door compressors are the only solution unless you plan to condense the steam back into water and pump it which will waste too much heat

[Arash70]

Hmm can't you make pumps with some sort of better material?

Can't you use diamonds?

[JonnyMonroe]

10 minutes ago, Arash70 said:

Hmm can't you make pumps with some sort of better material?

Can't you use diamonds?

Nope. Raw metal only. Your best option is gold amalgam which will let it run at 125c

 

Edit - you could technically set it up such that you can use gas pumps by cooling the upper chamber and keeping it high enough pressure that the incoming gas doesn't overly raise the temperature. Doing so would be wildly inefficient and likely more complex than just a door pump design (which I don't consider an exploit as each element is working as intended)

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

I have some ideas which may help gas pump work in hot environment without overheated. But they don't help if you want to play with turbine.

The main trouble is not the temperature, but the pump rate.

steam turbine pumps 10kg steam from bottom to top per second, which meams you need 20 gas pumps to keep the gas pressure.

Of coursr you can use the trick to reduce the turbine pump rate to 2kg/s, but you still need 4 pumps.

[BlueLance]

Quick question, what would you even use 4kw of power for out of curiosity that would require you to run it for long periods?

[SkunkMaster]

39 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Quick question, what would you even use 4kw of power for out of curiosity that would require you to run it for long periods?

4KW is honestly not much...

[JonnyMonroe]

56 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Quick question, what would you even use 4kw of power for out of curiosity that would require you to run it for long periods?

I don't think of turbines as a source of power but rather a source of cooling. Most other cooling solutions have a net power cost and many involve exploiting bugs. The turbine is fairly elagant for cooling with the caveat that it will only cool down to around 200c depending how you set it up. When you're cooling volcano products that can still be a large majority of your cooling needs.

[TheGCat]

2 hours ago, Arash70 said:

I still can't understand why everyone over complicates the designs.

Hmm, u have not seen my 4 Steam Turbines Setup. Other solutions with pumps seem to be impossible, because the temperature. And by the way: "I love to over complicate the things"

[BlueLance]

Just now, DustFireSky said:

Hmm, u have not seen my 4 Steam Turbines Setup. Other solutions with pumps seem to be impossible, because the temperature. And by the way: "I love to over complicate the things"

Ok, what the heck would you use 8kw of energy on?? Even my power hungry set ups consume at most 3.6kw and i only have them run for a quarter of a cycle due to my current power system

6 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

I don't think of turbines as a source of power but rather a source of cooling. Most other cooling solutions have a net power cost and many involve exploiting bugs. The turbine is fairly elagant for cooling with the caveat that it will only cool down to around 200c depending how you set it up. When you're cooling volcano products that can still be a large majority of your cooling needs.

ideally you should never have anything hot enough that needs cooled by this mean, obviously some of the new geysers run hot enough so I can understand using it for them though

[TheGCat]

31 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Ok, what the heck would you use 8kw of energy on?? Even my power hungry set ups consume at most 3.6kw and i only have them run for a quarter of a cycle due to my current power system

Hmm, Mac Gyver came by and built some stuff in my colony. All was fine and as he left the Colony, i need much more energy as before. Why ? I don't know it. Ask Mac Gyver I need constant ~15KW to support my colony with 24 Dupes, over 1000 Cycles. Maybe, the Dupes breath too much

[JonnyMonroe]

37 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

ideally you should never have anything hot enough that needs cooled by this mean

You know a way of turning oil into natural gas that doesn't involve getting it up to 540c? Heat cracking is an important part of a mass positive oil loop which acts as an effective sustainable late game water source.

[BlueLance]

12 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

You know a way of turning oil into natural gas that doesn't involve getting it up to 540c? Heat cracking is an important part of a mass positive oil loop which acts as an effective sustainable late game water source.

Ok, I do not cook Oil, so that would be why i never thought about it haha

[Denisetwin]

3 hours ago, Neotuck said:

Door compressors are the only solution unless you plan to condense the steam back into water and pump it which will waste too much heat

Would you be willing to post your automation overlay for this?  thanks!

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

The design about using gas pump in an extremely temperature environment. Though I don't think it's helpful to set up a steam turbine.

Hot pump.sav

BTW, it's also extremely hard to build it even I use debug mode.

[Neotuck]

59 minutes ago, Denisetwin said:

Would you be willing to post your automation overlay for this?  thanks!

[FullMetalArthur]

6 hours ago, Neotuck said:

 

O

M

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There is really no other way? A simplier way?
I really don't use automation except for simple cables going from A to B and to shut off generators when power is at max. Also to control pumps and heaters. It's complicated to me automation as it is. That up there is like a nightmare.

I'd like to know how the developers intend us to use it. If moving gas through doors is an exploit, there must be the "legal" way. Inicially it was supposed to give 8k of power, but nerfed it before the official release, it seems too much work and trouble for just 2k power know. BTW i dont use debug mode. It's the only item in the current game I still can't effectively use yet.

[DyingCrow]

Here is an example sketch of something simple and very compact that can be applied to a real scenario. It was build with dev stuff for convenience, but all the materials used can be found and fabricated in a real scenario. It's pretty much elbow greased by dupes and a gold volcano. I just picked one original in the map, instead of using a spawned template. I did move it, but the plant could have been built in the original location. The magma load issue would be offset by more available dupes to haul the stuff. Since this is just a test environment, theres only 3, couldnt bother getting more.

The setup started with a vacuum power plant chamber and 20kg hydrogen pressure volcano chamber, both things that can be easily done in game, with some proper planning. The vacuum in the chamber can be slowly achieved with a pump at the top that can later be isolated by a vacuum airlock, which i didnt do. Then its a matter of letting the dupes haul magma, and keep the water flow at some 250g/s so it doesnt cool down the plates too much if the dupes get lazy. The steam build up is VERY slow, but it will get there. There is no sensor input for the steam doors, they just run on a very simple clock loop, and adjusting the timings when/if necessary is dirt easy. There is a switch above to turn the doors off in open position, if necessary.

It doesnt have a 100% uptime yet, pressure is still building up, but i think its fair enough for a low tech rough sketch. Several improvements can be made to it, but i havent got there yet

Save file is attached, feel free to tinker with it

 

 

Test world.sav

[avc15]

there's a way to do it without door compressors but very challenging to do it without exhausting tons of heat everywhere.

The reason I don't like door compressors for steam turbines is well, it bypasses all the engineering of the thing. You're given this challenge to work around constraints. Doors just don't seem intended, and they solve the entire thing's engineering too cleanly in a single system (magic compressor + gate logic that takes no power and can somehow complete your gas cycle! In real world engineering compressing steam is simply not an option, for lots of good reasons)

Basically let's say, I consider this a fun challenge to get it working without door compressors, but more than that, get it working at high efficiencyw too. You need a number of special systems with carefully balanced flow and control logic. It's a fun engineering problem.

But also quite difficult to make it run stable for more than a little while at a time, which is why I haven't posted mine yet. Still working on it. Challenging to balance heat in a heat recovery condenser / heat recovery boiler pair to keep the thing running stable for a long time.

 

[Neotuck]

17 minutes ago, avc15 said:

Challenging to balance heat in a heat recovery condenser / heat recovery boiler pair to keep the thing running stable for a long time.

If your talking about condensing the steam into water and pumping it back below the turbine to boil again the idea had been checked by many players, you'll end up using more power then the turbine generates