Why is this steam turbine not turning?

[psusi]

Steam below is 480 F @ ~4000g pressure, above is oxygen @ ~500g, so why isn't it spinning up?

 

[mathmanican]

You need enough oxygen on the top row to so that on the second to top row the oxygen and steam fight for control of the tile.  Your oxygen content is too low.  Since I see you have Sandbox enabled, try putting 10kg of oxygen in 4 of the spots above the turbine.  Then let it run for a bit.  Takes a while to figure out the right ratios, but you will.  Have fun tinkering.

The sensor is the top row of the turbine, not the row above it.  That's why you need more oxygen.

[dallion]

you need at least 3kg pressure difference between top and bottom, and 230C+ temperature steam you can check detail in the steam turbine.

it seems that oxygen is only in the highest layer try to insert more oxygen to fill the second highest layer

[mathmanican]

@psusi, If adding more oxygen to the row above the turbine doesn't fix it, let me know, and post a save.  I'll adjust the gas levels and repost the save.  Wouldn't be bad to have others see how this works as well, if they can't get it to run either. 

[psusi]

Oh, I thought the oxygen was only supposed to be one tile thick.  Do I even need that extra row above the turbine then?

I only have sandbox mode enabled because when I upgraded to RU some random liquids appeared due to a bug with falling drops, so I had to get rid of those.  I put in a gas... err... ok, I planned on putting in a gas vent to add more oxygen if needed, but now I realize I forgot to build it.

 

[Saturnus]

Just now, psusi said:

Oh, I thought the oxygen was only supposed to be one tile thick.  Do I even need that extra row above the turbine then?

Yes. Otherwise it starts to delete steam (for some unknown reason).

[psusi]

I tried adding more oxygen and got it to sputter on and off but never gets fully spun up.

 

The Radioactive Panopticon 3.sav

[mathmanican]

I painted 10kg of oxygen in the 5 tiles above the turbine, and it started spinning up. However, with only 4kg of steam throughout the room, the 5 open ports quickly drop the total steam under them below 3kg (which causes it to stop).  You just need more steam in the room to make sure the bottom ports never get too low.  I painted 15kg on the bottom 3 rows of the picture, and then it started working fine, till the temp dropped below 425K. You can slow down the heat loss by blocking ports, if you want the turbine to run longer.  It didn't last more than 20 seconds of full operation before the whole room dropped too low in temp. 

Are you hoping to use it for cooling, or are you hoping to use it for energy? Your setup will work fine for cooling (with more steam in the room, and enough oxygen to fight for control), but won't run often. A chlorine clamp, or aquatuner inside the room, will be needed for power production.

Here's the new save. I used the heat gun to pump lots of heat on top of the thing, so it will work for a tad longer (but the heat drops REALLY FAST).

 TheRadioactivePanopticon3Fix.sav.   

 

[psusi]

I was wanting to use it for cooling so I can make steel.  I was thinking of adding an aquatuner to help cool the rest of the base too.  It also seems that the extra tile of space above the turbine is a mistake.  The oxygen always eventually settles stably in that top row so the turbine gets underpressure.  I walled down the top row and that helped a lot.  Then I figured out to limit the next row to no wider than the turbine so the pocket of oxygen can only go back and forth and always be trapped in one of those 5 turbine tiles that triggers the pressure check.  That seemed to work well until I ran out of lime shortly after.  Blocking the middle 3 intake ports at the bottom also helped.

 

[psusi]

Aha, I think I finally hit on the magic recipe. I added an SR latch and a second temp sensor to turn on the turbine at 506 F, and off at 450 F, raised the steam to 7.5 kg/tile, and put a single dot of 500g of oxygen above the turbine, and it works like a charm now.

Well, I spoke too soon.  It took a while, but eventually the pressure at the one open intake port gets too low.

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

but eventually the pressure at the one open intake port gets too low.

The actual problem is this:

 

5 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Otherwise it starts to delete steam (for some unknown reason).

You can't use a different type of gas to make a pressure differential, unless you make sure there is one tile of space above the turbine.  If the oxygen eventually stopped fighting with the steam, then you need more oxygen (not a lot, but enough to make sure it never settles). Getting the balance just right every time can be tricky (and I haven't spent enough time to make it happen perfectly every time).  

Because of the above issue, I prefer door pumps.  You don't need the tile above the turbine that way. I modified your save to use a door pump instead, and added chlorie clamp for 100% uptime. Here's the file.

TheRadioactivePanopticon3Fix.sav  (updated - the one I put up a bit ago had a problem).

 

[mathmanican]

I went back to your first save and painted 20kg of oxygen across the entire top, then filled the rest with 15kg of steam.  Because the oxygen content is higher pressure than the steam, it shouldn't ever fully stabilize in the top row. This seemed to fix the issue. I didn't test it over many cycles, but seems to work just fine now.  The problem with my first fix was that the oxygen content was not high enough pressure to always win against the steam.

Have fun. 

[psusi]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

You can't use a different type of gas to make a pressure differential, unless you make sure there is one tile of space above the turbine.  If the oxygen eventually stopped fighting with the steam, then you need more oxygen (not a lot, but enough to make sure it never settles). Getting the balance just right every time can be tricky (and I haven't spent enough time to make it happen perfectly every time).  

Started with 500g of oxygen and it remained exactly that.  The issue is that the steam isn't flowing from the top to the bottom naturally quite as fast as the turbine is consuming it.  I think it ran well for nearly a full cycle but the pressure of steam up high kept going up and the pressure at the intake port kept going down.  Maybe higher pressure steam would help?  I'll have to try that.

 

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

I went back to your first save and painted 20kg of oxygen across the entire top, then filled the rest with 15kg of steam.  Because the oxygen content is higher pressure than the steam, it shouldn't ever fully stabilize in the top row. This seemed to fix the issue. I didn't test it over many cycles, but seems to work just fine now.  The problem with my first fix was that the oxygen content was not high enough pressure to always win against the steam.

That won't work because the whole point of having oxygen up there is for it to be at a lower pressure than the steam so you get the 3000g pressure differential from bottom to top.  When you first paint it the oxygen may be higher in pressure than the steam, but it will even out quickly and it's just a question of how many tiles are steam vs oxygen.  It definitely worked much better without the extra space above the turbine and only a tiny amount of oxygen that stays compressed to a single tile that just moves back and forth on the top row of the turbine, causing it to sense only 500g of pressure.

 

[psusi]

Hrm... so the oxygen is stable, but it does seem to be deleting steam slowly.  It runs quite nicely for the better part of a cycle before the temperature drops enough for my automation to shut it down, then after it heats back up for a while, it starts up again, but each time it does, there seems to be less steam.  I started with 15 kg/tile and after a few cycles it is down to 6.x kg.  But at least the turbine never complains about underpressure.  Another odd bug seems to have cropped up though.  The turbine can only output 2000 W, and conductive wire can carry that much, so I ran a line of conductive wire directly from the turbine to a transformer to transfer it to my main heavy watt wire and battery line, and the conductive wire keeps overloading.

[mathmanican]

Have you enabled debug mode? You can watch the steam deplete quite rapidly with it on.

The sensor for the pressure difference is the top of turbine and not the tile above. If you have 20 kg of oxygen one tile above the turbine but only 15kg steam, then the O2 will fight for control of the sensing tile. That is the key. You want a fight that never settles.

If the O2 settles above the turbine then you need more O2.

If the volume of steam drops too much below the turbine then you need more steam, and also more O2 to keep the fight going.

[psusi]

1 minute ago, mathmanican said:

Have you enabled debug mode? You can watch the steam deplete quite rapidly with it on.

The sensor for the pressure difference is the top of turbine and not the tile above. If you have 20 kg of oxygen one tile above the turbine but only 15kg steam, then the O2 will fight for control of the sensing tile. That is the key. You want a fight that never settles.

If the O2 settles above the turbine then you need more O2.

If the volume of steam drops too much below the turbine then you need more steam, and also more O2 to keep the fight going.

I don't see how this can ever work.  Even if you get just the right ratio where if all of the oxygen is in the top row, the pressure is higher than the steam, and so some oxygen will sometimes poke down into the next row, that may momentarily make the generator see oxygen, but its pressure won't be 3000g below that of the steam.  Even if it is, it won't stay that way for more than a  moment, and if the turbine keeps toggling rapidly back and forth between underpressure and not, it still won't get spun up and keep running reliably.

[mathmanican]

I know it sounds weird but that is exactly how it works. The constant fighting is not the full 20kg rather what happens is a tiny amount of oxygen and steam keep changing places. Make a new game and play with it some.

If you cover the row above the turbine and use the 500g idea then it will work but steam also gets deleted.

47 minutes ago, psusi said:

The turbine can only output 2000 W, and conductive wire can carry that much, so I ran a line of conductive wire directly from the turbine to a transformer to transfer it to my main heavy watt wire and battery line, and the conductive wire keeps overloading

This is a reported bug.

[psusi]

So I finally managed to paint the right amount of steam and oxygen in and it kept fighting and kept the turbine running until it ran out of heat.  It seems it is only monostable though, and as soon as the turbine shuts down, the oxygen all settles into a single layer at the top again.

 

[mathmanican]

More oxygen needed.

[psusi]

15 hours ago, mathmanican said:

More oxygen needed.

You can add as much oxygen as you want and it won't change anything.  As long as the turbine keeps outputting steam it will keep shoving around the oxygen, but in a quiescent, stable environment, oxygen will always settle in a layer on top of steam.

 

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

You can add as much oxygen as you want and it won't change anything.

Here is a simple experiment that anyone can replicate.

1. Start by building a steam turbine, and put walls around it with 2 tiles of space to the left, right, and below. Add one tile of space above. You've got a 9 wide by 7 tall room. 
2. In the top of the room (right above the turbine), paint 25kg of oxygen in each cell. Perfectly stable, no change at all between cells. 
3. In the rest of the room, paint 15kg of steam on each tile. Do all of this on pause, so that the room is perfectly balanced, no difference between any tile of steam. 
4. The room will be in a " quiescent, stable environment".  Make sure you verify this on each cell.
5. Unpause the game - watch magic happen.

Here are some spoilers if you want to watch it, instead of do it. 

Spoiler

Fill with 02 and steam.

Now unpause and watch the O2 and steam fight. 

 

[psusi]

4 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Now unpause and watch the O2 and steam fight. 

Your picture shows the oxygen reaching steady state after a while at a 2 tile thick layer and stops fighting with the steam.

 

OK, I stand corrected.  I tried it and it isn't stabilizing.  Weird.  I tried changing the relative pressures up and down quite a bit and never managed to find this golden ratio.  I wonder what is so special about it, and if you can get it to do that without sandbox mode?

[mathmanican]

@psusi I hope you can get it to work. I've really tried to help here. If you haven't tried this experiment to see for yourself what happens, then I guess I'm at a loss. Clearly it's not stable at 5.3kg while the rest of the room is at 15-25 kg.  The 5.3kg is the current amount in the screen shot. Wait a fraction of a second at it's back to steam. I guess you wanted a .gif, not a screenshot.  I give up.

There is one last option, namely use a mechanized door to force the gas to start moving again. Use automation to cycle it to open/close a few times every time you want to start up the turbine.  This will force the gas to get really high pressure in a couple places, and start making the fight start again (should you not have enough oxygen). The door isn't needed, but would help if you don't have enough oxygen.

 

 

[JukedByLife]

I have messed around with this a bit, although not with oxygen I think it will work the same. Here is a video experimenting with the ratio but TLDR pump gas in until 2kg per tile then add 3x the amount of water. This is the lowest amount of mass (that I know of) that will work efficiently. My first build used a 10k per tile gas at a 1:1 ratio. Saturnus was correct about steam being deleted with no gap above the turbine so don't fill that in.

[LiveYourDreams]

I really wish they would make steam turbine a great deal simpler or something.. not dead easy but not as hard as it is now. To that end I dont even see it as a game option.