Turbine Trouble!

[avc15]

58 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

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

If you're direct condensing, yes. To do it efficiently you need a "heat recovery boiler". This is a thing you can look up online and build in game. Boil the water with your exhaust steam, get your exhaust very close to condensation in the process then just a slight nudge turns it into tepid water.

 

The only heat input is what you put back in your boiler to superheat the steam again. The only waste heat is what you rejected from precooled exhaust - I think it can be a small enough load for one AETN to handle, but haven't got it quite right.

There's a way to do it in game without using the drip cooling bug or exhausting heat everywhere. It's a very large and complex system, and that's exactly the engineering challenge posed by klei by setting up the steam turbine how they did.

 

Or, you could take the shortcut and use door compressors. Depends what catches your fancy.

[Kabrute]

counter current exchange

depending on the medium in play its a simple as a metal rail and as complex as pipe snaking and aquatuner banks

[Neotuck]

7 minutes ago, avc15 said:

If you're direct condensing, yes. To do it efficiently you need a "heat recovery boiler". This is a thing you can look up online and build in game.

There's a way to do it in game without using the drip cooling bug or exhausting heat everywhere. It's a very large and complex system, and that's exactly the engineering challenge posed by klei by setting up the steam turbine how they did.

Interesting, would there be a way to store up enough heat energy to run the turbine during a volcanoe's down time? 

[avc15]

Well, I'm not really sure exactly. What's slowing me down is that I won't use debug mode, at least for now. Just focused for now on making a system that can keep running without wasting energy or destabilizing until it shuts down. Ie.e. it also has to be serviceable by duplicants, gotta be set up pretty carefully.

 

Since your machinery can only interact with cold fluids it makes for quite a challenge.

 

Maybe later I'll know more. Right now my volcano is pumping heat into the magma though, so I'm saving up for it.

[Neotuck]

15 minutes ago, avc15 said:

I think it can be a small enough load for one AETN to handle, but haven't got it quite right.

It can be tricky to use AETNs the heat they delete is slow compared to the heat created by steam flowing from a turbine.  But it's not impossible, we just need to figure out the math

[avc15]

well, it's all about how efficient you can make your counter flow heat exchanger. The AETN at the end with its 80 kW heat sink (8 kw? is it a factor of 20 or a factor of 200?) just reduces how large your condenser has to be by a factor of 4 or something.

 

I can't possibly do the math without figuring out what kind of delta T is feasible with the condenser first

Anyway someone will probably beat me to illustrating how this system works with a video or something but typing about it only goes so far. I'm getting back to work again - been working on this a few weeks tbh in my spare time 

 

[DyingCrow]

This one is fool proof. Easy to get it to 100% uptime, all passively. It can even be done more reliably with tungsten pillars dipped in the magma, risking taking too much energy from the magma too quickly.

Im pretty sure this is how the devs think about it being used. Without the doors of course...

Save has been updated as well

Test world.sav