I got Steam Turbine To Work (But Not For Mass Power Production)

[goatt]

Just wanna see design? Skip this part.

Hi, I was experimenting on how to heat up crude oil using metal refinery. I successfully output crude oil with good temperature, however, it broke the refinery pipe. crude oil turned into petroleum after flooding on the floor lol. I guess this option is off the table.

So i found petroleum a good coolant, higher specific heat than crude oil, and higher max temperature.

I also discovered metal refinery has this insulation property from its content coolant. Its temperature doesn't seem affected by its content liquid, but only by pipe next to it or surrounding air, or production heat. Also pipes can withstand very very very high temperature. It doesn't break unless the liquid it's carrying has chemical change or state change.

I also got inspired by some picture i saw earlier when some genius people in this forum used petroleum to heat steam up. So i got this idea.

 

Design

To put it simple, what the system does is

1. metal refinery heats up petroleum
2. petroleum heats up water / steam
3. door compressor moves steam
4. steam turbine destroys steam's heat and cool down petroleum
5. Go Back to 1.

- ignore pink room, it's just to keep dupes around refinery cool.

- the system is reusable and destroy tons of heat from metal refinery especially when I started to make steel. Steel making produces huge ton of heat in liquid.

- it's not giant, it's practical and affordable, not time consuming.

Detailed Explanation

The idea is simple, metal refinery output "significantly hot liquid", and heats up coolant petroleum, which later gets returned through closed pipe loop back to refinery for further heating. I put 400kg water (which requires dupes to fetch water twice) in that room. After many steel production (probably like 30?), everything in the rooms are heated up, including turbine, doors, walls, water, and debris. The room's temperature will remain around 250C because steam turbine will always destroy heat above that. Subsequently, petroleum's temperature exiting that room will be around there too, which makes the system reusable.

Does it produce a lot of power? Who cares? (Apparently not lol) Great thing is that it turned almost all the excess heat from metal refining process into energy after the system gets up running, otherwise output coolant will dump tons of heat.

Essential Parts / Tricky Parts:

- Closed pipe loop. If you have never done it before like me, you might get the pipe blocked. This happened to me when I let more liquid into the loop after it was maxed out. So I used a pipe element sensor (in plumbing tab) to detect if there is already enough liquid in the loop. (see in picture)

- Why pipe loop? Because liquid pump cannot pump hot liquid. I couldn't let pump touch that, but heat it repeatedly using metal refinery.

- Steam room size. The smaller the better. Small room means the door pump can push more percentage of the room gas, which is equivalent to faster steam pumping speed.

- Heat up the whole room. It doesn't matter if it's below or above steam turbine. What matters is only the air pressures.

- Using hotter water in the beginning can speed up the process

- Having other kinds of gases in the room might block the turbine entirely (or damage it later cuz it's the wrong gases?)

- Don't use liquid bridge because it actually suffered from overheat damage lol. Unbelievable.

 

Some problem I encountered:

- if you run it too too too frequently, like none stop steel making and dupes work over night, petroleum's temperature exiting room will be higher. Solution will be just slow down a bit, let petroleum stay in that room longer so turbine can have time to cool down room.

- metal refinery still gets heated too much if run none-stop. That' why i put a pink room there for convenient cooling. You get the idea.

- about door exploit: Hey in real life, when you close bathroom door, you pump air too, right? What if those dupes make really good doors. I've being trying to avoid door "exploit" for a long time, I despised it. But when I tried to use it, I found it was actually not easy to fiddle these gates. Now I think about it twice, it might not be exploit to me any more. Doors' interaction with gases is quite consistent and sensible.If you have two doors next to each other in real life and you close them one after another, it will push some air in some direction.

[mathmanican]

You can use a temp sensor on the pipes to regulate cooling. See @Aronia's post for more comments. 

Unless a change has been made recently to the steam turbine, remember that you need one tile of open space above the turbine or you loose quite a bit of water.  

[goatt]

@mathmanican

i don’t understand the screenshot in your reply link. It looks like steam turbine is not supposed to run, cuz pressure across the chamber is the same.

And how does the system lose water? Everything seemed working fine to me.

Maybe you are referring to an older ONI? I can’t understand this.

[AndreyKl]

29 minutes ago, goatt said:

@mathmanican

i don’t understand the screenshot in your reply link. It looks like steam turbine is not supposed to run, cuz pressure across the chamber is the same.

Since there is a layer of oxygen above turbine, pressures below and above turbine are different.

30 minutes ago, goatt said:

And how does the system lose water? Everything seemed working fine to me

+1

[goatt]

21 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

Since there is a layer of oxygen above turbine, pressures below and above turbine are different.

that's actually quite genius. That crossed my mind but i didn't know other gases can be recognized by steam turbine too. But there is another question, will O2 eventually get compressed under this high pressure? like 10 tiles turning 8, 8 turn into 6, with increased pressure which gets closer to steam pressure.

[KittenIsAGeek]

3 hours ago, goatt said:

- Don't use liquid bridge because it actually suffered from overheat damage lol. Unbelievable.

It looks like bridges were broken recently.  Here's the tooltip for the bridges that previously survived those temperatures:

Spoiler

That's the tooltip for both ceramic and abyssalite.  Obsidian ought to survive as well, but it only gets a +15c to the overheat temperature.  Anyway, as you can see, something isn't right.  The base value is 348.2C, abyssalite adds +200C, so if the tooltip is right, the value should be 548.2C.  Instead, it is 275C.  However, the base value in the tooltip is supposed to be 348.2K, in which case it adds up to 275.05C.

In previous builds, bridges could sustain temperatures up to the melting point of their materials.  I'm not sure when this change went in, but it definitely makes things more difficult.

[mathmanican]

Just finished testing to see if steam gets deleted anymore if the top row is blocked. The result is "Not in the build below". (it did loose steam in the previous update.)

Spoiler

This means your build shouldn't delete any steam either.  Not sure if this means the pressure trick with O2 can be moved down a row. 

I did decide to see if I can use liquid to trick the generator into working.

Spoiler

There is 1kg crude, followed by 1kg naptha, topped off by 1 kg petro. Works great to trick the generator into working.  However, this setup does eat steam. You can even simplify the setup to have just a single column of liquid, as shown below, but it still eats steam.

Spoiler

Once you delete the top layer (the petro), the turbine powers off. I wonder if it eats steam more slowly than the space turbines....

Figured I'd test if you can use a gas in the top layer instead of a 3 high column of water.  Yep, you can. However, the turbine still deletes steam over time with this build.

Spoiler

 

[NanoD]

Here is a piping so that they never get stuck. bridge to the piping you want to fill.

Bridges only overheat if the environment is hot. not what is in the pipes. So if you have the bridge inside the steam chamber it can overheat. 

[goatt]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Figured I'd test if you can use a gas in the top layer instead of a 3 high column of water.

Great tests you’ve done. I have question, will steam compress O2 until it has same pressure eventually?

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, goatt said:

Great tests you’ve done. I have question, will steam compress O2 until it has same pressure eventually?

If the steam pressure is high, it will compress the O2 until it becomes just 1 tile.  I'm guessing if the amount of 02 is really small, it will eventually just disappear. The pressure differential builds have a large quantity of 02 that fights with the steam, so neither gas is the small one. Someone who uses those often could comment better (I like door compressors). 

[Mariilyn]

I've made one using liquid reservoirs to help with pipe loop efficiency. That way, the refinery is being refilled faster. The second reservoir might be unnecessary as I don't really expect steel production to keep up with the steam turbine..

(Edit : Engie's tune-up doesn't work with the steam turbine so I removed it and rearranged the thing slightly).

(Edit2 : added the automation layer).

[goatt]

3 hours ago, Mariilyn said:

I've made one using liquid reservoirs to help with pipe loop efficiency.

that's smart!

[psusi]

On 9/14/2018 at 4:11 PM, Mariilyn said:

I've made one using liquid reservoirs to help with pipe loop efficiency. That way, the refinery is being refilled faster. The second reservoir might be unnecessary as I don't really expect steel production to keep up with the steam turbine..

I'm confused.  What are all of the doors for on the left?  What is the logic for?  What opens the valve to dump the coolant out of the radiator loop?  Why did you not block some of the input ports of the turbine like others seem to do to reduce the amount of steam it eats ( yet it still produces the same power? ).  Why is there a door next to the bottom reservoir?  Isn't the whole area between the two water locks a vacuum to prevent the reservoir from overheating?  Can the shutoff valve not overheat?  Why two tiles above the turbine instead of only one, to be filled with a little bit of oxygen or hydrogen?

[Djoums]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

I'm confused.  What are all of the doors for on the left?  What is the logic for?  What opens the valve to dump the coolant out of the radiator loop?  Why did you not block some of the input ports of the turbine like others seem to do to reduce the amount of steam it eats ( yet it still produces the same power? ).  Why is there a door next to the bottom reservoir?  Isn't the whole area between the two water locks a vacuum to prevent the reservoir from overheating?  Can the shutoff valve not overheat?  Why two tiles above the turbine instead of only one, to be filled with a little bit of oxygen or hydrogen?

Doors + automation are a door pump, one of the ways to bring back the steam from top to bottom.

It's a closed loop system with cooling provided by the turbine, so the coolant never has to leave the system.

Blocking the input ports of the turbine reduces the amount of heat deleted per second and maximizes the power you get out of it, but it will also reduce the cooling speed of the system. That's a tradeoff and in this case it makes sense to maximize the cooling potential.

[Mariilyn]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

I'm confused.  What are all of the doors for on the left?  What is the logic for?  What opens the valve to dump the coolant out of the radiator loop?  Why did you not block some of the input ports of the turbine like others seem to do to reduce the amount of steam it eats ( yet it still produces the same power? ).  Why is there a door next to the bottom reservoir?  Isn't the whole area between the two water locks a vacuum to prevent the reservoir from overheating?  Can the shutoff valve not overheat?

I added the automation layer in my previous post. The clock sensors can turn off the steam turbine and door pumps, and the other one is a temperature sensor that controls the shutoff valve (set to activate when the petroleum have been cooled under a certain temperature, in this case 300C). Good point concerning the valve, however it currently does not use energy and consequently does not overheat.

The vacuum area isolate the steam turbine room while still allowing dupe access. If you don't want to do this you can simply seal off the room to prevent the water lock from transfering heat to the outside.

For the rest it is as Djoums said.

I didn't actively tried to maximize the steam turbine energy production and haven't look into the blocking inputs / using a different layer of gas thing, for no specific reason. Relying on exploits or unbalanced aspects of the game in survival mode means you're ready to start over or modify your systems once they get fixed, so I usually intentionally use them if they address a specific need.

[Yoma_Nosme]

On 11.9.2018 at 4:35 PM, goatt said:

that's actually quite genius. That crossed my mind but i didn't know other gases can be recognized by steam turbine too. But there is another question, will O2 eventually get compressed under this high pressure? like 10 tiles turning 8, 8 turn into 6, with increased pressure which gets closer to steam pressure.

 Don't worry. You only need 1 row. It doesn't get smaller than 1 

[Site]

While playing around with your design i Found a way to make it run without the door pump, will attach a few screen shots with what i did notice door auto wiring still in pieces in photos what is weird is it works like this as long as the temp on the inlet line is around 600 degrees doesnt matter about pressure as you can see in photos

[Site]

Must have been a bug that I was experiencing as it ran fine for about 30 turns then stopped, sorry for the confusion I may have caused

[goatt]

@SiteNah, it’s cool. The working one looked great

[Site]

Lol, thank you for the idea about this, I have been playing around with it some today and have built a system based on yours that runs solid (well thru enough time so far for them to make like 87 tons of steel will make a thread about that and link credit to your idea there

[crypticorb]

On 9/11/2018 at 7:43 AM, goatt said:

Design

To put it simple, what the system does is

1. metal refinery heats up petroleum
2. petroleum heats up water / steam
3. door compressor moves steam
4. steam turbine destroys steam's heat and cool down petroleum
5. Go Back to 1.

 

Can you post an automation overlay? I've been tinkering with as many door pump designs, trying to find optimal ones for speed, absolute reliability, and simplicity, and I'd like to see yours.

[goatt]

@crypticorb No problem xD. I have an improved version that I used in real game. It processes heat nearly twice as fast. I was using 2 columns of doors, and I allowed doors to have more time to tuck in steam. Automation is in third picture.

I added 2 thermo sensors, one to pause the doors when the steam temperature is too cold (below 220C), one to disable metal refinery when petroleum still need more time to cool down. When refinery is disabled, petroleum is in steam room and heating up stuff continuously until next refinement job is assigned & allowed.

(In case you are curious, the drop of petroleum on the door is to prevent steam leak. Cuz I'm a bit obsessed with open rooms, I had to design a door to let dupes in that room lmao.)

[crypticorb]

10 hours ago, goatt said:

Now that is a work of art, truly well done good sir. Your time spent editing and explaining is much appreciated. Is there an optimal reason not to power the doors? I did a bunch of tests on your 3-door compressor, and with timer the settings at 1/3 your configurations, and when powered here were the results, compared to one of the most compact and simple 4-door configurations, designed by @Soulwind:

Spoiler

4-door compressor by Soulwind

 

The test results for power consumption:

Spoiler

 

Soulwind compressor (4-door)
43.8kJ
41.4kJ
40.5kJ

Total Wattage consumption for continuous use: 71.5W

goatt compressor (dual 3-door)
51.8
51.2
52.4
Total Watt consumption for continuous use: 86.3W

 

I stress tested both systems, and when powered, neither has any backflow leaks while powered, but Soulwinds design breaks sequence sync when unpowered. Powered settings is 1 sec, unpowered is 3 sec to prevent sequence break.

Does your dual 3-door compressor completely satisfy the needs of the steam turbine while unpowered? Have you tested it with the single 3-door configuration while powered?

[goatt]

@crypticorb thank you xD. The reason I didn’t power them was that I’m usually extremely stingy in survival mode......couldn’t even spend power on them lmao.

You know one tricky thing that I discovered by accident was that usually gas flowed into the open doors quite slowly even under extremely high pressure (like under 20kg pressure, only 1kg got in 1 door in 3 sec). But the little gap between first 2 open doors stored quite a bit of steam by nature, when doors open steam from that part can fill up the doors in a faster rate because it’s very close to them.