Exploit-free Steam Turbine attempt

[blash365]

Here is a sandbox build of my attempt to get the steam turbine to work without any exploits. I feel that i got pretty close already, but i am hoping that some of the more creative people among you can take the remaining steps.

The build consists of 3 components:

•  water -> steam transformer
  • water needs to be heated up to steam phase, but not hotter than the overheat temperature of gas pumps
  • for simplicity sake i used a cold steam vent, but any other build (e.g. controlled meteor/lava usage, liquid tempedizer, glas forge/metal refinery/kiln heaters) would also be suitable.
  • the pumps are followed up by a gas reservoir in case there are fuzzy input rates
• steam heater
  • the steam needs to be heated up to at least the steam turbine operation temperature (~230°C)
  • here i am using a painted in petroleum bath
  • alternatives include: lava, meteors, leaky oil fissure, glas forge/metal refinery/kiln heaters
  • i have also added a reservoir at the end of the steam heater to prepare new "fuel" while the bottom chamber of my steam turbine is still under pressure
• turbine room
  • the heated steam needs to be released with a high pressure vent
  • it takes a while for the bottom chamber to heat up
  • the steam above the turbine needs to be (re)moved with appropriate means (door pump, space, cooling to water, gas pumps)
  • the main problem is that the steam above the turbine seems to cool down the turbine too far, stopping its operation as soon as it reaches a full green bar. To improve the uptime of the turbine, the input temperature needs to be increased.

That's where i stopped. I havent seen any steam turbine using a gas pump yet, so it seems like something that has been missed out so far. If any of you tinker-happy guys wants to pick it up from here, you are welcome to do so.

 

Spoiler

Thanks to @babba for the gas pump idea.

 

P.S.: If there is any instant-dig/instand-destruct hotkey in sandbox, i'd be interested to know.

[tzionut]

Problem whit your build:

1 wizeworh..after 95 degrees they become stale...

2 steam circulation...

[Djoums]

Just a random thought, what if you put a layer of heavier gas on top of the turbine, ideally with low thermal conductivity (chlorine ?). Would that force the steam upwards and protect your turbine from cooling ?

[blash365]

9 minutes ago, tzionut said:

Problem whit your build:

1 wizeworh..after 95 degrees they become stale...

2 steam circulation...

I addressed that in my text.

Just now, Djoums said:

Just a random thought, what if you put a layer of heavier gas on top of the turbine, ideally with low thermal conductivity (chlorine ?). Would that force the steam upwards and protect your turbine from cooling ?

That would be an exploit in my book. There is already a working gas exploit, which i tried to avoid.

[XEVEN]

Nevermind. Carry on. 

[Saturnus]

Would a bubble pump be considered cheating?

[Pyrrus]

26 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Would a bubble pump be considered cheating?

Oo, nice! I haven't seen this pump variant before. I'm also curious about the seeming reluctance to use door pumps for steam turbines. Doesn't seem like an exploit to me, just normal physics.

[neoazureus]

46 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Would a bubble pump be considered cheating?

 

And blocking the steam input be considered a cheat ? 

[mathmanican]

Shift+X is your hotkey to swap to destroy mode.

Many people have worked on this idea. I've spent several days doing so myself, with no success (the steam behemoth is my exploit-full version).  One of the most comprehensive posts on making an exploit-free build is here:

I've been contemplating starting a new thread "Steam turbines : Everything you need to know about it" that takes the same approach as @SamLogan did with Morbs (see this). I'll do my best to combine all the posts over the last few months into one place.

Here are few specific comments about your build.

1. Your setup will never work with all 5 tiles open unless you can get 10kg/s of gas under the turbine.  That means you need 10 high pressure vents, each dumping 1kg/s, under the turbine (so 20 gas pumps - not practical).  To get it to work with only 1 vent open requires 2kg/s, so you need another gas vent and more pumps. You'll need 4 gas pumps working full time to keep up the volume (so there goes 960W - half the power). If you have 2 vents open, then say good bye to 1920W just on pumps - the generator is worthless if you try to power it with pumps this way.
2. Using Wheezeworts to cool your steam costs you power (as you need to reheat the petroleum to keep the generator running).
3. Every time the turbine starts to spin up (while in the red zone), the turbine eats steam (2kg/s for each open port) and doesn't eject the steam anywhere. This means you are eating water every time the turbine drops too low. This is often what causes gas deletion in steam turbine builds.

Possible fixes to the above. 

1. Instead of using a gas pump, use a liquid pump. But then you'll need a hot plate under the turbine to boil 100C water into 230+Steam. Something like the hot plate @Sevio uses in the following would work, provided you are OK with using doors in a vacuum to connect/disconnect your steam from the heat source. If you don't disconnect from the heat source, then the turbine will cool everything down super fast (as it will take 1000C steam and drop it to 151.9C steam (425K). Say goodbye to your lava if you don't disconnect the heat source. It's not a door pump, so hopefully it's not considered "exploity", but that all depends on you.
2. Aquatuners will allow you to move the the heat, rather than loose the heat. See @wachunga's post above for more details on this. 
3. Just remember that every time you have to start the turbine back up, you will loose water. If it starts to sputter in on/off mode, then you are loosing water (10kg/s if all 5 ports are open). You can loose a lot of water if you're not careful.

 

[wachunga]

For anyone playing with the build @mathmanicanlinked, do note that a bit of rework with the aquatuners is needed due to the pwater SHC change. That save will eventually fail but you can still look at it for the principles involved. Also debug mop those bits of phosphorus, an artifact of the new update.

And @mathmanican, good post. Helpful, well researched and written. A good deal of time spent in making it. We should all strive to do the same.

[Djoums]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Just remember that every time you have to start the turbine back up, you will loose water. If it starts to sputter in on/off mode, then you are loosing water (10kg/s if all 5 ports are open). You can loose a lot of water if you're not careful.

Are you sure about this ? I'm using turbines to cool metal from volcanoes and there's no steam deletion, yet the turbines keeps turning on and off due to the nature of the volcanoes.

[KittenIsAGeek]

17 hours ago, Djoums said:

Just a random thought, what if you put a layer of heavier gas on top of the turbine, ideally with low thermal conductivity (chlorine ?). Would that force the steam upwards and protect your turbine from cooling ?

The issue isn't the wheezewarts cooling the turbine.  The turbine itself outputs steam at a fixed temperature that is too low for the generator to run.

18 hours ago, blash365 said:

• • the main problem is that the steam above the turbine seems to cool down the turbine too far, stopping its operation as soon as it reaches a full green bar. To improve the uptime of the turbine, the input temperature needs to be increased.

There are several reasons why your turbine is failing as soon as the bar turns green.  The one that is the most likely culprit is the quantity of steam in your build.  Each open vent can pass upwards of 2kg/s of steam.  Since your vent can output a maximum of 10kg/s, the generator is passing it ALL to the other side as soon as it starts to run.  This is a LOT of steam for the wheezewarts to deal with and they won't condense the steam fast enough.  The pressure needs to be at least 3kg/square higher below the turbine, and this isn't going to happen with your setup.  A much better solution would be to have the wheezewarts in a hydrogen atmosphere cooling a pool of water, then use the water with radiant pipes to condense the steam.

Spoiler

You will need to chose a flow rate and pipe length such that the water in the pipe does NOT hit the boiling point.  

As for the temperature, the turbine senses the temperature of whatever is immediately below it, and not the temperature of the actual turbine itself.  For example, here we have an "exploited" turbine, where there is one tile under it that is at 300c.  The steam and the turbine itself is at 145c -- far too low for it to normally run.

Spoiler

However, it has functioned for about 90 cycles, continually.  So, I believe that the problem with your setup isn't the temperature of the steam input -- it is the pressure differential.

[Djoums]

8 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

The issue isn't the wheezewarts cooling the turbine.  The turbine itself outputs steam at a fixed temperature that is too low for the generator to run.

Yes that's how I understood it. I was wondering if a layer of chlorine on top of the turbine would make the cold steam move upwards fast enough to insulate the turbine and prevent heat loss by contact. Granted I haven't tested any of that, that was just a random thought, deemed exploity anyway

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

I don't think door pumps would be considered exploity, right? Then all you have to do at that point is getting the heat of the steam well over the minimum needed temperature, to compensate for the cooling factor of the steam turbine output temperature.

[babba]

I would call all this messing around on builds with doors exploity, but thats my opinion

[blash365]

Thanks for all your replies guys. My main idea behind the OP was to split the steam turbine problem into controllable sub-problems, for which we then can find optimal solutions.

The power-negativity when using 10kg/s is certainly an inconvenience. But let's assume that we either block 4 turbine tiles (resulting in the exploit-free requirement no longer being completely covered), simply using it as a cooling mechanism (ideally without mass loss) or simply for the sake of having yet another green bar in our base (#OCD).

The sub-problems:

1. mass intake into vent (more or less trivial)
2. heating to operating temperature (what's the optimal method, what's the optimal temperature)
3. designing the turbine room
4. moving the exhaust

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

Well, I have run a turbine exploit free using the magma at the bottom of the base to flash-heat water to 300c, letting me pump water in using a single liquid pump instead of multiple gas pumps.  Even if you warm the water to 99c before pumping it in, it still takes a LOT of heat out of your magma.  The optimal temperature would be about 230c, but because of the heat loss during the transition from water to steam, my hot plate really needed to be around 300c to keep it reliable. 

Moving the steam away from the generator is easy.   Simply build a side-wall out of gas-permeable tiles then put a condenser on the other side.  The semi-vacuum state on the condenser side of the gas tiles will force the steam to continually move away from the generator.  However, this requires that you condense the steam back into water.

I used polluted water from a slush geyser to do this, but during dormancy the pool I had was too small and it warmed up too much.  

So, really, what we need is a reliable renewable heat source to create the steam  I've seen some regolith oven builds that might actually do the trick, but I haven't tried yet.

[mathmanican]

12 hours ago, Djoums said:

Are you sure about this ? I'm using turbines to cool metal from volcanoes and there's no steam deletion, yet the turbines keeps turning on and off due to the nature of the volcanoes.

I believe you are correct. I cannot replicate what I observed yesterday while playing with a new build (once I can replicate it, I'll post about it). It appears that the generator keeps some steam inside when it powers off (though the steam does not appear in the contents). That steam comes back when the turbine turns back on.  Here is my current test.

Start with 100kg of steam under the generator, with a vacuum above. Let it run till it stops.  There are 93.3kg of steam appearing. Looks like steam got lost.  However, I then added another 100kg of steam underneath and let it run.  There are now 197.3kg of steam appearing. Best guess is the steam is still in the turbine - despite it having empty contents.  So I did one more test.  Then removed the existing steam, without touching the turbine, and then added 100kg steam underneath.  Sure enough, the total shown steam hits above 100kg many times while running (reached 102.5 at least once).  Basically, the turbine holds steam that it doesn't show, so it's hidden in the code somewhere. 

Here are some pics, if you want to see the test in action. 

Spoiler

The initial setup with 100kg under the generator.

Let it run till it stops. 

Now paint 100kg more steam underneath, and let it run till it stops. Either 4kg of steam was magically created, or the turbine holds hidden steam inside. 

Remove the steam by painting a vacuum over everything, and then add 100kg under the turbine. As the turbine runs, you can watch the total steam count rise above and below 100kg. I screen captured 102.3 in the picture below.

 

 

Followup:  I finally got the generator to replicate my experiment. Steam was eaten, without ejecting. However the steam eventually did eject out of the turbine. Painting 4kg of steam repeatedly under the turbine resulted in steam disappearing but vacuum above. Eventually, after enough paintings, the steam ejected.  I'm not sure if it was a buildup of steam inside that caused it, or if the green bar must go far enough right to eject steam. 

 

 

[blash365]

4 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

So, really, what we need is a reliable renewable heat source to create the steam

Rockets?

[KittenIsAGeek]

Hmmm. How often are we sending them into space?

[mathmanican]

5 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

So, really, what we need is a reliable renewable heat source to create the steam  I've seen some regolith oven builds that might actually do the trick, but I haven't tried yet.

Space is the best one I've seen. And turning the turbine on/off to conserve heat energy is probably the right way to deal with this. 

Fun fact, if you use the turbine to wall off the meteors, then the heat will pass from above the turbine to underneath it. However, if you use solar panels to do the same, then the heat won't pass through the vacuum layer base of the solar panel. To see this, just build some turbines in the sky with sandbox and next to them build some solar panels.  Then put metal tiles underneath them, touching them.  The solar panel won't heat the metal tiles , but the steam turbine will.  The turbine clearly interacts differently with the environment than any other building.

[KittenIsAGeek]

@mathmanican That's really interesting.  Perhaps that's why the 'vent to space' steam turbine works so reliably.

[kuroko0820]

Hello, just a idea, i recently dont have time to play and try to practice this.

when meteor or regolioth drop to bunker tiles, can we make the heat transfer to steam turbine operate? cos meteor is renewable heat 

Hope u guy understand what i drawing XD
 

[tzionut]

Quote

when meteor or regolioth drop to bunker tiles, can we make the heat transfer to steam turbine operate?

Yes it can be done, but i prefer to melt the excess regolith to improve my late game performance. After you cool the regolith you will have lots of tones of regolith. This will slow down you game until you will wish to start another one.

I find a solution to this problem and is preferred to do it in the early stage of the game.