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Steam Turbine - 100% uptime - All ports open - Minimal (if any) heat required


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There have been lots of posts in the last few weeks about the steam turbine. The three key things we need to make sure the turbine run are:

  1. Steam in at least one spot under the turbine. (Why not require all to be steam - I'll force this condition on this build.)
  2. A hot spot under the turbine (500K or higher). This currently can be a solid tile, another gas, or hot steam. Only 1 tile must be hot. 
  3. A pressure difference of 3K (uses MAX pressure of tiles below and MIN pressure of tiles above). Ooooh - fun. So as long as one tile underneath has high pressure, we can do whatever we want with the others. Time to EXPLOIT this MIN/MAX problem.  

I've seen lots of arguments pointing at tile blocking as one of the biggest current exploits. The chlorine clamp design definitely uses it. I wanted to know if I could remove the chlorine clamp, and still obtain a 100% uptime turbine, with minimal to no additional heat needed. I present to you a modification. 

Spoiler
  • All 5 ports are open, and have steam going in (not all have 2kg/s steam going in). 
  • The gas valve is set at .1 g/s (so 100mg/s).  This keeps the area to the right of the turbine from ever becoming a full vacuum. 
  • The petroleum is preheated. It could be delivered from a metal refinery. Alternately, connect any heat source to the petroleum area (magma underneath with a vacuum door separator, a liquid heat loop, a space age aquatuner, you name it). By adjusting the valve, you can control how much heat is used, so you could adjust things to perfectly match the heat generated by an aquatuner.
  • The pressure difference can be maintained with gas conflicts, door pumps, or condensation (your choice, based on which exploit/feature you want to avoid). The picture below shows a gas conflict build. Since the steam on the left can be cool (103C is fine), a condensation loop in the lower left will keep it running, using a gold aquatuner with a pre-space age liquid. 

5be9ecbb0f19c_Screenshotfrom2018-11-1213-48-32.thumb.png.d3b3afb7a7be3209a3fa5a41be99c9dd.png

At .1g/s, the petroleum is loosing about  0.1-0.2 C  per cycle. If we could get the pump to provide less gas, then we could hit below the rounding to zero threshold. The fact that thermal transfer below a specified amount gets rounded to zero is an exploit that will forever remain in the code, as arbitrary precision is not a feasible alternative (unless we want to play with 1 FPS). 

I have not tried to optimize this, rather wanted to see what I could do without a chlorine clamp (not usable if all 5 ports must be steam).  Turns out the clamp isn't needed.  The turbine above will run for a few hundred cycles, without any external heat source. All I need to get it to run forever is to very rarely add some heat, or come up with a better design that takes advantage of fact that any thermal transfer below a specific threshold gets rounded to 0. Here's a couple possible alternatives. 

Spoiler

Place the vent far from the heat source. Let some of the heat transfer occur between the steam tiles, so that very little heat transfer has to occur near the petroleum. 

5be9f96b28e46_Screenshotfrom2018-11-1215-00-02.png.6e26505f5dfa19f82c8c5a0493320e44.png

Add a gas shutoff, attached to a buffer-buffer-not toggle (20 sec off, 1 sec on). Only send 100mg of steam through the vent every 20 seconds (or something similar). 

5be9fb1f3239c_Screenshotfrom2018-11-1215-13-32.thumb.png.5be49b0079c1704ec4e929d6d13695ef.png

Both setups above resulted in a drop of about 0.1C in a cycle and a half.  Because of machine round off error, I'm gonna guess they both drop 0.1C every 1000 seconds.  

If I pumped the steam to a separate room (using a shutoff), then I could use another pump to send back less than 100mg/s (could probably get it down to 50mcg or so, which would be well below the rounding error cutoff - 0 thermal transfer). 

 

Conclusion:  The steam turbine needs more work than just forcing it to run with all ports unblocked. Now, if the rules change and the turbine compares the MIN pressure below the turbine to the MAX pressure above the turbine, then this build is completely destroyed (and it might even ruin any gas conflict builds - might). Currently the turbine looks at MAX pressure below and MIN pressure above (which is where the exploit comes from). 

Happy ONI everyone. I'd love to see a condensation run version of this, but figure I'll leave that fun to someone who found this post interesting. 

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I'm confused.  It sounds like you are saying that you keep 4 of the ports in a near vacuum so they effectively can't consume the 2kg/s.  How is that different than just blocking them?  And it doesn't look like there is anything stopping the steam from moving to the right naturally and being gobbled up by the turbine, so what is keeping the left port sufficiently pressurized?

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2 hours ago, psusi said:

How is that different than just blocking them?

??? Opinion?

2 hours ago, psusi said:

what is keeping the left port sufficiently pressurized?

Gas conflict. 25kg average pressure of O2 in top 5 open spaces. Then 20 kg average pressure in remaining tiles. Apparently the asian community prefers this over door pumps (in a different thread).

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1 hour ago, Nickerooni said:

It’s like you’re prepping for when blocked ports reduces output power and pre-providing a workaround.  Clever. 

Bingo. My real hope is that a redesigned turbine can't be hacked like this. An intake pipe would be hard to hack, though only requiring 1000g of steam would be underwhelming. I'm not sure what the right fix is.

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Got it!  100% uptime, with no heat loss.  All 5 ports are open, taking in steam (albeit mcgs on the two right ports). My previous idea was flawed - filter was sending 100mg/s but backing up behind the shutoff.  Once I added a feedback loop, it worked perfectly.  No heat loss ever.  This thing will run nonstop. The picture, air pipes, and automation are in the spoiler.

Spoiler

Gas conflict run. Uses 25kg in 5 top tiles (125kg total). In the 24 tiles above turbine, left of turbine, and below left most port, the average steam content is 20kg/tile (so 480 kg total steam/ half a tile of water). The petrol starts at almost 500, and after the initial start up of the turbine, it drops to around 400, then stays there permanently. 

5bea74cddea1d_Screenshotfrom2018-11-1223-47-15.png.9a093c904bd3b2cceb8125a700e71a84.png

Make sure you have a feedback loop so stuff doesn't back up at the shutoff. You want 100 mg/s to pass through the shutoff only every once in awhile.

5bea74cea35bf_Screenshotfrom2018-11-1223-47-42.png.963585907b3217569cd92bd5d9438d22.png

Buffers are set at 10s off and 1s on. 

5bea74cf778a9_Screenshotfrom2018-11-1223-48-02.png.c279959ddc75177699f3fab3c5183f96.png

I hope this gets patched out of commission someday.

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3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Bingo. My real hope is that a redesigned turbine can't be hacked like this.

Hope dies last. Aquatuner was hackable similar way, since it exists

3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Bingo. My real hope is that a redesigned turbine can't be hacked like this.

 

dream.jpg.3490d88cc5ad89c0dab6b071988c9dfe.jpg

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Maybe someone here with can help me with some questions after tinkering with the steam turbine a bit more than me^^ :

- If all 5 tiles below my steam turbine are filled with steam, how much steam does a turbine "pump" each second ?

(I want to do the math on how much steam/thermal energy a turbine can process)

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3 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

If all 5 tiles below my steam turbine are filled with steam, how much steam does a turbine "pump" each second ?

On average each open vent sucks up 2kg/s, provided there is 2kg/s to suck up (so a total of 10kg/s). The output temp is always 425K, so the amount of thermal energy that you can process is absurd.  Make the thing out of the most advanced space age material (so it won't melt when placed on magma), and it will process more thermal energy in seconds than all your wheezies combined over all play throughs (I might be exaggerating here, but seriously, it's absurd). 

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9 hours ago, mathmanican said:

Gas conflict. 25kg average pressure of O2 in top 5 open spaces. Then 20 kg average pressure in remaining tiles. Apparently the asian community prefers this over door pumps (in a different thread).

That's how I run my turbine too, but my question was how do you make sure only the left intake port has the 20kg pressure and the other 4 are near vacuum?

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6 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I build it. The turbine takes care of the rest. Give it a try. 

You showed the pressure all the way to the right, but under the second vent there must be a fair amount of steam diffusing over?  I can believe the others eating it all before any can make it to the fifth intake, but the second and third have to be getting a fair amount.

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3 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

Thank you!

Beware the dupes -- they're hungry.

The save file appears to be the first day, before anything was built. 

I did just rebuild it on the day 1 game you sent. The build still works just fine (sandbox mode).  To build it in a survival game is possible, though quite tricky.  You must use Ceramic on any time that touches the petroleum, anything else will eventually fail.

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36 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

I tried ceramic tiles around the petrol.  Still cools to below 240C. 

A couple things.

  1. You forgot to connect the turbine to a wire, so it will never start.  Add a wire. The turbine acting as 5 pumps is crucial to maintain the near vacuum conditions. Once I added a wire (and a little heat to the petro to make sure it wouldn't get too cold through the start up phase), it worked like a charm.
  2. You have too much steam.  You only want 20kg or so pressure to the left and above the turbine. You currently have near 20kg steam pressure everywhere, which means you'll end up with near 40kg pressure left and above the turbine - enough to stop the gas conflict.  Delete all the steam under the turbine and to the right.  If building this in sandbox mode, I'll block the turbine off below the left most port, till I was ready to start it. 

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45 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

Also, we only need the gas pump to come on for 1 second every 33 _cycles_ if I am doing the math right?

I never bothered optimizing this.  I just wanted to see if it could be done, that is building a fully functioning perpetual steam turbine that does not block ports with a solid tile (though some argue that near vacuum conditions with steam is basically the same thing - a valid argument but one I'm exploiting here). 

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hey there!
 

i am still a noob in this game and just today, i produced my first plastic.

since my natgasgeyser is going dormant soon, i thought i´d build my 1st steam turbine. i know from videos, that most people do a magma setup. but since i have a steam vent close to my power plant, i just wanted to build a ST above it. it is located in a former cold biome, but as i just built my polymer press in another cold biome, i witnessed how much things boild up quickly.

 

now when i was all set up and the SV left dormancy, nothing happend. tiles around it barely go above 0 C. the steam vent is supposed to put out 99,9 g/s at 500 C(!). so why won´t it heat up enough to power the turbine?

 

thx in advance for helpful replies!

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26 minutes ago, stasswonk said:

the steam vent is supposed to put out 99,9 g/s at 500 C(!). so why won´t it heat up enough to power the turbine?

The output is so small that the turbine will rarely spin.  Might take a few thousand cycle to get up to temp (someone else could compute the exact figure). Note that the turbine will take 10kg/s of steam from anything over 500K down to 425K (so 10000 g/s dropping >75C). Notice the difference bewteen the 10000g/s and 99,9 g/s  You're missing a few zeros to make this viable.

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Thanks for you help with the save file @mathmanican.  I did have the thing powered at one point I promise.  Too much steam allows the heat to get drawn out of the petrol I get that now - the trick is to get the turbine to spin up before the pressure equalizes.  I might put a mechanical door lock in there to make this "for real."  It will be a fun challenge to make this with dupes; I assume it is possible just fiddly? (I see you did it with dupes before cycle 100 nvm)

In your "Everything about the steam turbine" thread you said "With smart battery switching, I can move power to anywhere on the map with a single simple wire (infinite power can go on one main line - see the power guide in my signature)."  Would you mind linking that?  I must not know how to see the signature and the search feature returned 22 hits with power guide, none of which appear to be about power.  :|

 

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2 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

"With smart battery switching, I can move power to anywhere on the map with a single simple wire (infinite power can go on one main line - see the power guide in my signature)."  Would you mind linking that?

@martosss's guide was my first intro.

He was brutally attacked by several people for it not being an "introductory" guide, but it was precisely what I needed. Thanks a ton for posting that guide @martosss. There is no reason to have any more than one main line using regular cheap wire, with every single power plant connected to that main line.  I like to have each power plant connected to the main line twice, once with an input (via smart battery switching followed by a transformer) to feed power to the plant's main battery (preventing the generators from firing till needed), and a second connection via transformers only that put any excess back on the main line. Then I just set a percentage threshhold at each plant that causes the plant to fire when needed, dumping all power onto one regular wire line.

One key to remember when smart battery switching is that batteries will not supply power to other batteries downline. To force incoming power to fill batteries, you need a transformer after the battery switch. Of course, if there is no reason to have a battery on the consumer side, then don't bother building one after the smart battery switch. (You might want to read this bit again, after you've played with battery switching some). 

Tons of fun stuff in ONI.  The power grid system is quite fun to play with. 

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5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

He was brutally attacked by several people for it not being an "introductory" guide, but it was precisely what I needed. Thanks a ton for posting that guide @martosss.

Ehhh, what ? I remember that thread, and what he actually did was improve his original post massively for the majority of players with the feedback of the community.

"brutally attacked" is probably a little strong no?

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