Mid-game mini-boiler design

[QuQuasar]

I've been working on a space-efficient boiler design to fit onto a specific four-tile high floor in my current base. Thought I'd share.

 

 

Please note: at the moment, there is little purpose to building a boiler like this. It does kill germs and purify water but that can be achieved far more efficiently with a simple tepidizer and a water sieve. It also nets you some heat deletion, but again, so do sieves. As of Ranching MkII, it's a novelty more than anything else.

 

NONETHELESS:

 

During testing the device processed 6400 kg over the course of 5 cycles, so that's 1280 kg per cycle, or 2.1kg per second. It doesn't use a consistent amount of power (the aquatuner flicks on and off while in use), so it's hard to say exactly how much power it consumed over the same period.

 

It takes in polluted water and outputs clean 25 degree water. The automation is mostly safeguards: the aquatuner won't run if it runs out of water, heats the steam above 150, or if doing so would freeze the coolant.

 

It also takes in hot geyser water (input pipe, top right) when it starts running out of clean water, which is as good a use as any for the cooling it produces.

 

After filling the coolant pipe with polluted water, I needed to detach the coolant input pipe (bottom middle), then deconstruct and rebuild a single section of pipe. Until I did this, the aqua-tuner would not pump. Apart from that, the device is nice and easy to build. You can use the airlock pump to vaccum it out if you want, but you don't need to:I have a mix of oxygen, polluted oxygen and steam in the device and it hasn't made much difference.

[Denisetwin]

I love love builds like this, I know, not really necessary, but so compact and neat looking and honestly, I love building them.  The added input for hot geyser water is a lovely addition!  I am really impressed with the four tile build as well. 

[JonnyMonroe]

Similar to my current boiler and I'll be taking a few design ideas from this but I'll mention some differences from my own setup;

Firstly I'm using a liquid shutoff bypass with an in pipe thermo sensor for the coolant. If it's too cold it loops around again. I found this gives me far higher precision and better response time to overcooled coolant.

Secondly I'm accounting for polluted o2 off gassing. I use a mechanical door between the hot and cold sides and keep the steam over 3kg/tile so polluted water won't off gas (I have another idea to better handle this but rebuilding the boiler is long down the to do list).

Thirdly I have a tepidizer in the clean water side to prevent freezing. If your polluted water is going in too cold and the whole system is at thermal equilibrium it can easily either freeze the water side or back the whole system up. Iirc the polluted water needs to be over 45C to avoid this but mine is about 10.

Nice use of geyser water and an airflow tile to prevent condensation traveling though. Gonna have to steal that. My next version will gas pump the steam from the boiler room and use a sweeper to suck up dirt.

[0xFADE]

Very nice though since you are using suit access you could also use a waterlock with a mini pump if any steam condenses in it. Maybe use the waterlock as the water reservoir. 

[QuQuasar]

On 5/15/2018 at 2:36 AM, JonnyMonroe said:

Thirdly I have a tepidizer in the clean water side to prevent freezing. If your polluted water is going in too cold and the whole system is at thermal equilibrium it can easily either freeze the water side or back the whole system up. Iirc the polluted water needs to be over 45C to avoid this but mine is about 10.

Yeah, the geyser water input is my safeguard against freezing. As soon as the clean tank cools past the target value (25C), it’s pumped out. That lowers the water level, which triggers geyser water to be pumped in, heating up the tank again and allowing me to utilize those low temperatures to cool a bit of geyser water.

 

If the geyser water runs out and the polluted water isn’t hot enough, the thing should turn itself off before it does any damage. But I might be able to add a tepidizer to prevent that: I want to increase the width of the cooling pool to increase the aquatuner’s up-time and match the size of a 16x4 barracks, and I might be able utilize that extra space with a bit of shuffling.

On 5/15/2018 at 2:36 AM, JonnyMonroe said:

Secondly I'm accounting for polluted o2 off gassing. I use a mechanical door between the hot and cold sides and keep the steam over 3kg/tile so polluted water won't off gas (I have another idea to better handle this but rebuilding the boiler is long down the to do list).

Hmm. Keeping the polluted water from offgassing with steam pressure... I never thought of that. I’ve got room to add a mechanical door and atmo-sensor: I might do an experiment and see if that works for me.

[JonnyMonroe]

2 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

Hmm. Keeping the polluted water from offgassing with steam pressure... I never thought of that. I’ve got room to add a mechanical door and atmo-sensor: I might do an experiment and see if that works for me.

To be honest it's not the best solution. It's causing me more problems than it's solving right now. I'm gonna re-do my design at some point and see if I can't come up with something better.

[Carnis]

Completely unrelated I made my own version. In debugmode tests I had no overcool problems with preheated water and could get it to run at 10l/second with slight overheating on the aquatuner, as long as I fed over 107 C PW. Also overpressuring the PW chamber to avoid offgassing and have had 0 problems related to *that*.

In the live game version I've ran into such overcooling problems Im forced to run the aquatuner on a 50% timer... But adding a counter heating to the coolantpool we will likely be able to run the tuner at least 90% of the time after. My problem is, the boiler aquatuner overheats to above 175 degrees when the surrounding polluted water is near 120 degrees.. Also a pipe broke, that never happened in testing, expecting 0 problems from that broken pipe though.

Adding a tepidizer + metal refinery to the PW feed side later to get pre-heated 107 degrees PW. (I need the metal anyways, got no metal volcano).

Adding an electrolyzer coolant loop to the 2nd aquatuner that is not powered at the moment.

Automation ports are: buffer 1s, buffer 1s. Hydro sensor below 300kg, hydro sensor above 1kg.

Insulated tiles are only added for aesthetic reasons, the chamber is in abyssalite.

For me the boiler is not a novelty but rather the heart of my industry for several reasons:

1) Our geysers can support about 15 duplicants with water, we are running with 39 and counting upwards.

2) Turning natgas to PW for oxygen means we are not lacking power, we are lacking water and natgas.

3) Perfect heatdump for making metals.

Still, I'm also using a water sieve in my toilets as its a lot more reliable =).