Can You Do Better?

[Argelle]

Hello !

Thanks to @abud idea of oil cooling & steam engine, my colony has now access to a leaky oil geyser.

One thing is left, automated collecting oil (when cool enought) and open doors so dupe can get rid of the sand.

Let's do both at the same time!!

Spoiler

polluted water cools the hot oil, goes to steam, but leave sand. And cool oil, the all point of this.

Top left : test for oil < 125 °C and hydro test > 10 kg = there is oil, and it's cool enough.

Bottom right : tank for cool oil.

Problem: if tests both ok, all doors open, if not, close all doors, and then open the middle one (for vaccum to keep heat in).

Crappy solution:

Oil is present but too hot: close the gates !!

Oil is ready  (125°C or less) Let it flow !!

The idea is to add a XOR gate, as to prevent the middle door to close in the last situation.

I only start to fiddle with automation really yesterday (wiki, forum, debug mode) but I feel it can be made smarter and smaller.

May be with a memory gate ? (SR latch ?) What do you think?

 

 

[Yoma_Nosme]

I'm not good either with automation. I cant play at the moment so i cant fiddle around to help, I think a memory gate is the right idea (set and reset of the doors statuses)...just here to watch and learn from the first row. I'll go and make popcorn. 

[blash365]

Why are you using PW instead of water? After the recent preview patch you will no longer have loss of heat when PW changes to steam.

For the logic problem, you can just connect an OR gate to your middle door and have one input be the current and the other input be the negated value of one of the other doors delayed with a filter gate.

Middle door --  OR --- current input

                                | ---- Filter (0.1s) ---- NOT --- other Door

 

Also, please provide more screenshots. I'd love to see your build.

[Argelle]

Use of polluted water is exactely because I'm not playing the preview patch for now, so yes, this set up will be different in my next game.

Even so, I feel that it provides two benefits:

* cooling hot oil

* purifying polluted water

Do you say that with the new patch, polluted water will be a worse coolant? But then, I do not see a better one:

With Specific heat nerfed from 6 to 4.179, it will still be the best liquid, no? what do you use now?

 

As for the logic, I did this with a "XOR" so that two "1" signals will not trigger the middle door, but I will try your "OR" option.

 

I'll post more screens when I go back to my game, but the credits should go to @abud for the original set up!!

Only difference is that the steam engine seems to work quite well and more often than @abud claim.

[blash365]

9 hours ago, Argelle said:

Do you say that with the new patch, polluted water will be a worse coolant? But then, I do not see a better one:

With Specific heat nerfed from 6 to 4.179, it will still be the best liquid, no? what do you use now?

Same as water, yes. I am not sure whether some other materials might also be suited as better "coolant" on different temperatures (e.g. liquid oxygen or molten copper).

[Djoums]

Technically clean water will be a little bit better than pwater because it has a slighty higher thermal conductivity (0.609 vs 0.58), but I'm not sure we could tell the difference in game.

[beowulf2010]

38 minutes ago, Djoums said:

Technically clean water will be a little bit better than pwater because it has a slighty higher thermal conductivity (0.609 vs 0.58), but I'm not sure we could tell the difference in game.

I lean towards the opposite with Polluted Water's wider temperature range. 

[Argelle]

On my particular application, polluted water is better, as it does not vanish in steam at 100°C

Speaking of...

Here is a little engineering problem.

Top (1) is hot oil (320°C)

Middle (2) is cooler oil (down to 120°C)

Bottom (3) is oil ready to be used (120°C).

I need to transfer oil from middle to bottom and get access to middle part by dupes without breaking the atmosphere in the middle. Reason is that in debug mod I noticed that a single tiny drop of oxygen (or anything above steam) will stuck to the bottom steam engine (4) and paralyse it. Other constrain is to keep the heat inside the middle chamber, so 3 doors (vaccum in the middle on stand by).

Doors as they are let oil out, dupes in, but other gas in. Steam engine drama.

Is there a way to get the oil out without pump (it will break as oil is initially at 300°C +) and without polluting the pure steam atmosphere?

[Yoma_Nosme]

I have an idea. Use the door compressor build as a liquid shovel. 

Or some kind of siphon. Like a liquid lock overflowing on one side so to say because the liquid is higher on the other side. And then the thermal barrier doors to keep the heat inside

[Argelle]

Siphon with doors seems to do it.

Doors closed (exept no 2) during oil cooling,

all doors (red) open during maintenance (flow of oil in bleue, dupes come to remove sand in green).

Seems nice, I'll try this. Thanks @Yoma_Nosme

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Argelle

I thought more like this otherwise you could get oil inside the doors and could break the thermo seal.

But I'm not sure  your design maybe totally viable but to be save here's mine

[Argelle]

True remark, it cannot be a siphon and a shovel pump for liquid that would eliminate every drops of liquid

Either design, if oil is flooding on doors opening, there could well be some left. Your design is fine to mop it up. Or shovel it away.

If none of the design can do both tasks, may be I should go for two systems?

I guess tubes out because of the plastic melting at 169°C?

Sad, that would get the dupes in for maintenance, and a narrow, separate, siphon for the oil ?

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Transit_Tube

 

[Argelle]

EDIT: after experiment, best design so far is:

The other one simpy do not let oil go fast enough...

[Yoma_Nosme]

That looks quite good in my opinion. Now you'll need a maintenance path. You have to build another vacuum door thing above I think. I don't know if it's possible to automate the flood doors to be passable by dupes because door no1 and no3 are locked and dupes don't see a path. But there's enough space above the flood doors.

Maybe you need an water lock too because a little bit of steam could skip out

[Argelle]

Thanks for the automation, I did expan it, so that dupes do not decide when to go in. Here the sensor (top left) are ok (oil present and cool) so it's open (waterlock- oil lock in fact - not finished yet).

Now, the oil is too hot (virtual oil yet, the project is finished in sandbox, wip in real game), so the door close. i would not want the dupes to get in and get burn. Although I do not now how hot the dupes can stand with an atmo suit?

 

[Yoma_Nosme]

Very cool! When you finish would you post the full picture with the full automation? 

The max temperature for atmo suit is the melting point of copper ore if I remember right.

[Argelle]

I'll give my scientist a go to analyse the leaky oil geyser then, since it's only 320 °C !

[Argelle]

On 30/08/2018 at 9:38 PM, blash365 said:

Also, please provide more screenshots. I'd love to see your build.

It took a long time, (one or two days in god mod, then more to build it in a real game... I understand now why people dislike steam turbine) but here is Abud's oil cooling elegant project reproduced (or EPR* in short).

EPR building

Just removed the inside gas pump to vacuum the all lot, middle left siphon is quick and dirty and should not be reproduced.

 

EPR up and running

Priming the EPR is quite anoying. There will be a tiny drop of polluted oxygen on the first run, and it will stick just under the steam engine, blocking the rest of steam. So a dupe maintenance is compulsory inside to build a block and deconstruct it at pO2 place. Hence the quick and dirty siphon.

 

EPR the plumbing

Oil once cooled go to a reservoir (bottom right) but not pump is constructed. Same for clean water evac, the pipe leads nowhere yet.

 

EPR, the automation

Thanks for all, I really appreciate your comments, input and suggestions !

 

 

(*)

Spoiler

any relation to the french EPR not intended, although the waste of time and poor result in power production are quite similar

 

[Cipupec2]

On 8/30/2018 at 9:18 PM, Argelle said:

 

Something doesn't make sense about this setup. Assuming I understand what you want todo, there is no reason for both buffer and filter. 

Edit: try removing the filter.
Edit2: Here, you can do this with either one:

Spoiler

 

1 hour ago, Argelle said:

It took a long time, (one or two days in god mod, then more to build it in a real game... I understand now why people dislike steam turbine) but here is Abud's oil cooling elegant project reproduced (or EPR* in short).

Does steam turbine run with input port blocked error? 

[Argelle]

@Cipupec2 The steam generator goes "green" and generate power (batterie is full) but, yes, because of all inputs but one are blocked, the is an error. It seems to work anyway.

For the automation, I need two states:

- all doors open (purge cool oil)

- all close and later, the middle one open (vacuum)

So it may well be that only filter or buffer is necessary, but when I have something working, I did not look further

Spoiler

working out how automation works step by step takes me 30 minutes every time .... and a headhatch

I'll try to simplify it when the first batch of cool oil will be ready.

By the way, steam engine is just a bonus, my first goal was to tame the volcano and cool oil