Query about aquatuners(along with some steam turbineMaths)

[crypticorb]

1 minute ago, Iriswaters said:

The number of open ports thing is interesting.  It does not seem to impact the amount of power, but it does change the amount of steam cooled.  So if room/materials are the limitation, and you want maximum cooling, opening all 5 jets is great.  If energy efficiency is your interest, you're better off leaving 4 vents closed.

I feel like this will likely get patched sometime, and the only reason it works currently is a developer oversight. The "input blocked" warning is there, but the turbine still works.

 

3 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

I don't really see a lot of difference between steel and thermium construction.

You could delay the startup of the system, and let the heat build up and burn it all at once. With steel aquatuners, you have run the turbine immediatly to keep it from melting, but the turbines might sputter sometimes. With thermium aquatuners, you could hold the heat until it reaches a much higher threshold, and then burn it all at once, increasing efficiency.

[suicide commando]

With Thermium, you can increase the starting temperature of your steam by a lot, thus opening up the path to more than 1 turbine in a row instead of having to pump back the steam to the aqua tuners to reheat it after one or two turbines.

 

[Iriswaters]

Oh, I was managing all that with steel, though admittedly only doing so in sandbox play with exactly controlled temperatures.  I can see how, if your temperature source is uncertain/unreliable/unwieldy(say a volcano) that that is important.  Ironically, I think it becomes less vital as a base goes on, things get more automated and controlled, and temperatures are more predictable.  Which is also when thermium is available.

[Iriswaters]

The difficulty with more than 2 steamers is more about controlling pressure than heat.  It's pretty easy to set up reheat points in a stack to keep temperatures in the wide range of 225-325C.  Tungsten temp shift plates do most of the work on their own.  Having the whole system stay at 300C is fine.

The tricky bit is pressure.  The area above each stack has to have 3kg less pressure than the one below, despite a constant just a little more than 2kg/s/intake trying to equalize them. 

 

It's that little bit more that's the rub.  Or it may be that gas pumps are never going to have exactly 100% 500g/s uptime.  If it were exact, you could just run 4 pumps with glitched valves, vacuum all chambers, pump the bottom chamber up to 300kg, and let it go.  The first steamer would run until the second chamber hit 3kg, then they both would, until eventually you had a flow.  But since the flow is faster than 4, but slower than 5 it feels like it will get jammed somewhere...?

 

Actually, maybe not.  I'll have to experiment with that liquid glitched overflow vent.  Without that, the heavy flow vent still stops at 20kg, which is enough to reliably run 2 but sputters on 3.  Things get herky jerky, as the gas is pulled by the streamer in bursts each second, whereas gas pressure equalizes in smaller increments and so tends to lag behind.  With overflow valves constantly pumped to a full 20kg, the space below the first steamer constantly dives below 14kg, and the space below the second sometimes dips below 7, though it's usually around 9-10.  A third will frequently be below 3, meaning a stall even if the area above is a vacuum.  And if the area above is a vacuum, it's not pressurizing the bottom.

 

With unlimited pressure though, either with funky valves or by cooling the steam to water and then pouring it back in the bottom, along with distributed heat, it should be possible to make the stack infinitely scalable.  Well, not infinite.  It really is more trouble than it is worth getting the thing to go sideways or down.  It's a vertical only structure.  

 

But if you can somehow manage a constant 100kg pressure, or a starting pressure of like 200 that gets repressurized as the system runs, it might be feasible to do a 10 stack.  And if that 10 stack is being heated by tuners, you're already generating a ton of cold, so cooling the final steam down to liquid and using a liquid input to generate the pressure might be viable.  Even without it, a 6 stack should just about break even exactly, power wise. A ten stack might generate a whole 5-800W.  

 

Zero point energy....

[psusi]

3 hours ago, crypticorb said:

I feel like this will likely get patched sometime, and the only reason it works currently is a developer oversight. The "input blocked" warning is there, but the turbine still works.

I hope they just reduce the power output so you can still use it for deleting heat without needing tons and tons of it.

[Iriswaters]

It is a tricky thing, since figuring out how to balance the thing so that it is usable, so that it generates a respectable amount of energy from a heat source, without it instantly turning that heat source into an ice cube, and functional in a basic manner without some elaborate Rube Goldbergian monster ...  But also not a magical infinite energy/heat sink machine for those who can...

Like, I am getting the sneaking feeling that I can make it an infinite power source.  Which is interesting.   But as it currently stands, it is only really useful as a heat sink, NOT as a power source.   At around 2M DTU/s, it is sinking more heat energy than all the geysers on the average map put together are going to make(in total heat over 225C).  A perfectly Max stat Volcano only creates 24 kDTUs(cooling to 226C).  Average is 1/4 that(and they are weighted toward the average in multiple ways)   Most geysers don't emit over 226C, but even considering a temperature target of 30C(80K shift), a max level cool steam vent needs a 600 kDTU/s shift, avg of 130 kDTU(though really most of the water is going to get run through magic shifters like electrolyzers and showers). 

All this on top of the weird finnicky things you have to do to get it to generate any power at all, and also not emit 225C steam into your base, cooking your dupes, which end up eating most of the power you have it produce unless you are using things that might be thought of as exploits, and so really cannot be the intended purpose.

I went into all this trying to figure out how to get the thing to make power from hot things on my map, as an alternative power source.   But by the end I have come to realize they really aren't -for- that, despite all appearances.   They are for cooling.   The energy they put off is a fun side effect.