Ultimate Magma Power

[devblazer]

Hi all, this is my first and likely only post.  We all know how ineffective steam power is in the current state of game,  whether it be difficulty of setup or a serious lack of power produced per joule of heat.  This leaves us with a lot of magma at the bottom of the map and a lot of heat, but with few good options to capitalize on it to produce power.

You could drop crude oil on it to evaporate it into methane for your NG generators, this is actually a very good solution that is capable of producing huge amounts of power when compared to steam turbine designs.  However, you will face some difficulty when trying to get the 550+ degrees Celsius gas into a gas pump.  This will require extensive cooling systems, which in turn cost you power, thereby reducing its effectiveness.

Ironically this is where a steam turbine actually shines!  The one thing a steam turbine is really good at, is getting rid of (wastefully consuming) any heat above 250 degrees Celsius.  So when we combine this into our magma, oil to methane approach, we are able to arrive at some very good results.



The following design is able to mostly self power itself from the excess power produced by the steam turbine, leaving the pure methane production to power your own NG generators.  I was able to safely extract 750g / second of methane from it, that's enough to run 12.5 NG generators (15KW tune-up of power), full time!  The crude oil supplied to this system, or I should say the amount of  water required to pump out enough crude oil from an oil well for this is: 135 kg water per cycle.  Of course you don't have to run it at 750g methane / second if this is too much water for your liking, just tone down the liquid valve on the top right.  Point is, this system needs 10.1 kg of water per cycle per NG generator you want to keep running.

This system does have a small radiator pipe for a bit of required cooling, but I normally have a hot polluted water tank (about 80 degrees Celsius) near my base, and I just use that as the coolant.  You can run with lower temperature coolant than that if you want, just keep in mind, if you are gonna use a dedicated polluted water coolant tank just for this, then you should not cool the polluted water down below 80 degrees Celsius if you can help it, as it will cool the methane down more than necessary and you'll just be wasting power on cooling.

The water pooled below the steam turbine in the image (about 15 tons is a good amount) will eventually heat into steam and fill the steam room with very high pressure steam, which works wonders with the 'chained doors' to drive lots of steam back down rather quickly to keep the steam turbine going.  It's more than enough, such that the steam turbine is usually just waiting on enough run off heat to power it up each time.

As for the switches on top, the one on the left is used to force all four doors open, for when you are loading the steam chamber up with water.
The one in the middle turns on the door timers.
The one on the right, turns on the oil supply.

When oil drips onto the metal magma plate, it immediately evaporates into 550 - 700 degrees Celsius methane.  As the gas moves up a little, it contacts the tempshift plate and the steam chamber siphons off most of its heat, to turn into steam power.  As the gas moves past the plate, it is now between 250 and 300 degrees Celsius.  It then contacts the radiator pipe with the 80 degrees Celsius polluted water coolant and that brings the methane down to 80 - 100 degrees Celsius before it reaches the gas pumps.

The chamber above the steam room, is a vacuum chamber whose purpose is to stop thermal transfer between the heavy watt connector of the steam chamber and the rest of the world (it works really well for this sort of thing).

Also all building materials are: Abbysalite -> Diamond -> Tungsten, with all liquid valve, shutoff and gas pumps being made from gold amalgam.

When building this setup, be sure to completely vacuum out the methane chamber, steam chamber and upper vacuum gap chamber, before turning it on the oil supply!









So after some pseudo science and math of my own admittedly limited knowledge, it looks to me like you should be able to use this system to provide yourself with 15kw of power for over 10000 cycles on most maps, before all the magma's heat runs out.  If anyone out there can do a better job of crunching the numbers and provide some actual insight into said crunching, to provide a different answer.  Please feel free, I'm all ears.

One last note is that you must never let the methane extraction pipe clog up, or it will cause a lot of problems for the system.  My solution to this is to dump all my global methane into a 15kg / tile chamber and when the pressure gets past this (i.e. I have way too much stored gas), then I start transferring the excess into a long terms storage unit that cools the methane down to -170 degrees Celsius and stores it as liquid methane (super dense storage), but that's another whole story  

[Neotuck]

With enough pipe you can use the oil as coolant to cool the methane while pre heating the oil

It takes some trial and error to get the balance right but once you do the boiler will cool it self

[0xFADE]

11 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

With enough pipe you can use the oil as coolant to cool the methane while pre heating the oil

It takes some trial and error to get the balance right but once you do the boiler will cool it self

Oh yes, it is infinity better as it reduces the amount of heat needed to get that oil to a boil.  The best possible design.

[avc15]

clever way to capture and use waste heat!

7 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Oh yes, it is infinity better as it reduces the amount of heat needed to get that oil to a boil.  The best possible design.

How does the dimensional analysis work out? Half an order of magnitude? A whole order of magnitude?

Also have you accounted for the phase changes from oil - petro - ng being exothermic?

[0xFADE]

1 minute ago, avc15 said:

clever way to capture waste heat!

How does the dimensional analysis work out? Half an order of magnitude? A whole order of magnitude?

Well over an average game it probably doesn't matter.  But last I checked heating up 100c oil to gas consumes more heat than heating up 400c oil.

[avc15]

oh, in the context it seemed like you were suggesting that capturing waste heat into oil is better than capturing waste heat into water. It'd take a bit of analysis to prove that out, since all we can talk about here is Qin whereas efficiency is (Qin - Qout) / Qin

I was being a smartass. Because, I applaud the introduction of previously-unexplored approaches.

[Carnis]

6 hours ago, Neotuck said:

With enough pipe you can use the oil as coolant to cool the methane while pre heating the oil

It takes some trial and error to get the balance right but once you do the boiler will cool it self

Nope, your system ran on pipe Bugs. I tested with 84 metric tonnes 84000kg oil, without outside coolant My gas stuck at 201.

[JonnyMonroe]

That will break after a while. Once the water in your steam turbine boils it will not conduct heat out from your ng boiler fast enough. The hot gas will then break your pumps. As other have said the oil to gas phase changes are exothermic so you can't build an equilibrium heat recapture.

Conduct heat out above the steam turbine as well as below - the steam above will be cooler and thus more effective at taking heat from the gas. Also I would make the boiling plate regulated so it stays just hot enough to boil and no hotter (use an element or hydro sensor and a mechanical door to acheive this).

[Denisetwin]

@devblazer  very cool design, neat concepts and ideas.  I really appreciate your screenshot that shows the buffer/filter values!  Thanks for posting your work!

[fredhp]

nice design! One thing that i think is missing is a emergency stop system - if, by any motive, you want to shut down the whole system, you can't because the heat source is always active.

If you add some automated wolframite doors between the magma and the tungstein plate ( tungstein <--> wolframite doors <--> tungstein ), it will be possible to stop heat source when needed, and, with a little bit of automation, prevent excessive overheating. There is a lot of examples of this mechanism in the forums.

That is what i do in my similar cooker designs - magma convert oil into natural gas, natural gas turns water to steam, oil are used to cool natural gas before it can be pumped, and the pumped natural gas are used as coolant for the primary gas converter chamber,  and then feeded to natural gas generators. In case of overheat, automated system disconnect heat source. Works nice in a vulcano.

When Klei fixes cosmic update, i will make the system again in a new save and post screenshots - right now my game is unplayable thanks to the overheating building bug (99999000000C... ) 

[devblazer]

So I don't know why you say it would break once the water boils and the steam generator cycle gets going, as I have run this system like this for many cycles without any problem, with the boiled steam.

As for the emergency stop door, that would be very costly to use in this system as the high density steam would end up feeding off its temperature for a long time into the cooling radiator via the NG chamber.  You could only stop this by finishing pumping out all NG gas (which would defeat the purpose of the emergency stop in the first place.

However that being said, I like the idea of using a door to control the hot plates temperature to just hot enough to boil 750g/second of oil and nothing more.  This will reduce the amount of steam power siphoning off heat, since the steam generator is way less efficient than the NG chambers power output potential and this would overall extend the magma's lifetime.

[eggsvbacon]

On 6/18/2018 at 4:50 PM, fredhp said:

nice design! One thing that i think is missing is a emergency stop system - if, by any motive, you want to shut down the whole system, you can't because the heat source is always active.

SCRAM THE REACTOR AND DUMP POLUTED FRIGID WATER ON YOUR MAGMA FOR A PERMANENT SADNESS BUFF.

Darn, I really want nuclear reactors in the game, that way I can SCRAM the reactor and or have it fail horrendously. I wonder if the "flammable" gasses will ever go boom or ignite. Hydrogen boom boom pressure build up? Honestly, given how things are steam punky... I feel like a nuclear reactor would be the most complicated power source in ONI because it could go wrong in so many ways. (Which is what is exciting about the prospect of it.)

Also, not sure if this mod still works but it cranks up all the heat producing and pump buildings to a super high heat resistance: https://github.com/nicktime/ONI-MovableHeatMod