boiler Boiling with Thermo Regulators

[vonVile]

Brothgar discovered a different and super easy way to create steam using Heaters and Chlorine.

 

[Sevio]

Interesting discovery about getting the space heater to make steam! Power wise it's not going to be as efficient as the tepidizer method I'm using though, which works pretty reliable already.

[Kasuha]

48 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Can you separate the two flows again?

Yes, you can.

[Sevio]

@Kasuha

That is excellent news, and so simple, too! The equalization seems to be very powerful with just a couple tiles of exchanger space too.

Edit: Fortunately I don't have to be the dupe that drinks this or showers under it. Actually, dupes don't seem to need any water for consumption anymore once you get to Sleet Wheat...

[Kasuha]

1 hour ago, vonVile said:

Brothgar discovered a different and super easy way to create steam using Heaters and Chlorine.

That's very interesting find. I know his channel and I love his enthusiasm. Though I think it would help him to get more up to date about how thermal stuff works. I guess he'll get there eventually...

And he reads my nick wrong 

19 minutes ago, Sevio said:

with just a couple tiles of exchanger space too.

More can give you better temperature difference. Though not too much it seems. For even better results I think it would require multiple stages.

[The Flying Fox]

2 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

So it seems that heat transfer depends on heat capacity, which would explain your results, as iron has the highest specific heat, then copper, then wolframite, then gold.

This would mean that sandstone and iron ore are the best materials for radiators and heaters, not granite and wolframite. Needs proper experimentation, though.

 

Alright, so I tested this myself.  Apparently, a sandstone bridge of some type is even better then an iron wire bridge.. 

 

 

You can even stack the bridges for even faster transfer.  It was pretty quick with a tile plus the three bridges stacked together.

 

Edit:  I also found it amusing that the same trick I used for the liquid tepidizer and fooling it with liquid Chlorine also works with the space heat 

[Whispershade]

I guess this means I should stop feeding the remaining sandstone to my hatches?

[The Flying Fox]

32 minutes ago, Whispershade said:

I guess this means I should stop feeding the remaining sandstone to my hatches?

Well, I did test the difference between a granite and a sandstone tile.  I found basically no difference in the speed of transfer between them.  Which makes sense in this case because their thermal capacity difference is only .01   I'd assume a pipe bridge of granite would perform just about the same as well.  So either sandstone or granite.

 

I also tried a test between a tile of hydrogen touching an oxygen tile, and using a pipe bridge to transfer heat from one to the other.  The pipe bridge handily won.

[Sevio]

I've been working on The First Law Mk3 based on the recent findings above, using a heat exchanger design that flows polluted and clean water over each other to maximize heat transfer. A preview:

I added some iron wire bridges for good measure to help it along. The heat transfer works amazingly quickly, however the sandstone tiles in the exchanger and the two full squares of polluted water the pump sits in make for a huge heat capacity, so it heats up very slowly. I tried to speed it up by editing in some hotter polluted water but it's still in the process of evening out. The layout is a bit odd due to the space from the previous design I had to work with and the polluted water seems to be going through some cooling phases at certain points as well but that is probably due to opposite flows and the lower tiles of the exchanger still heating up.

Even now, it's already processing 1023 g/s of polluted water at 2 kW of thermoregulator power and heating that up to a little over 100C. It might be able to go up a little higher when the exchanger evens out.

Edit: The highlighted pipe doesn't contain the full 1023 g/s but that's because the second valve is set one notch higher than the input valve, and it happens to be the last packet in a batch from the exchanger pump.

I'll likely redo the exchanger with a bit less sandstone tiles and without the polluted water pool that the pump sits in so it reacts quicker - At this size it's probably quite overkill for the throughput it's handling.

[Sevio]

More strangeness after testing a second exchanger layout that was also multi-layered. I noticed that the polluted water coming into the lower layers was actually getting cooled down by the clean water as it flowed towards the pump that would take it to the thermoregulators. So I examined the first layer and here's what you see:

The water flows from left to right, and the polluted water in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, the water coming out of that first layer is actually cooler than the polluted water! So the other layers are only doing harm by equalizing them back up again somewhat. It looks like a single layer wide heat exchanger may be the best way to optimize heat transfer and even transfer a little bit more than you would normally expect to be able to.

[Kasuha]

3 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Surprisingly, the water coming out of that first layer is actually cooler than the polluted water!

When you make the exchanger long enough (and assuming no heat exchange bugs are involved), the two waters should almost switch their temperatures. It's fine example of countercurrent heat exchange.

 

[Sevio]

I'm surprised this is actually a real thing, I thought the maximum possible transfer would be an equalization of temperature. But apparently a proper length countercurrent exchange according to this article can transfer nearly all heat! The question for me right now is, why did the second layer end up being counterproductive?

[Kasuha]

10 minutes ago, Sevio said:

why did the second layer end up being counterproductive?

Because it was fed hot polluted water and cold clean water and they exchanged heat again, but in undesired direction.

[Sevio]

I see, so to do a multi layer version properly you would have to use pumps for each layer where hot water migrates down each layer and cold polluted water migrates up each layer...

[Trego]

Countercurrent heat exchange is pretty amazing.  A great research area would be heat exchangers.  After researching it you could build wrapped pipes for 400 kg per tile, if you pumped fluids in the same direction they'd equalize heat, if you go crosscurrent they'd exchange heat (if the pipes were long enough of course).  Then you'd have converter pieces on the end to go between the wrapped pipes and 2 normal pipes.  Kinda a small research area, perhaps mix it in with an improved air conditioning unit, an upgrade from the hydrofan.

[Sevio]

A little bit of rebuilding and I now have a 31-tile countercurrent exchanger running. It's working quite amazingly, clean water exits at ~33 C and polluted water (starting at 26.9C) exits at ~66 C. Running it at lower speed than 1000 g/s I think it could exceed 70 C.

Hasn't had much time to run but it reacts reasonably quickly. I had to increase throughput from 1000 g/s to about 1200 g/s to avoid regulator overheating. The bottleneck right now is actually the steam cooling zone, because the output polluted water (and recently-cooled water) are so hot the steam is building up to ridiculous concentrations, 30+ kg. I might have to route steam to several parallel countercurrent exchangers to handle this kind of throughput.

[Kasuha]

8 minutes ago, Sevio said:

I might have to route steam to several parallel countercurrent exchangers to handle this kind of throughput.

Or just give it greater area of contact with the polluted water layer. Two tiles aren't much and in gases, heat doesn't like to propagate down. 

[bopeep8hersheep]

i only tested this out in debug mode.  i know it's using the tepidzer bug.  the hydrogen is heated by the tepidizer.  the temp switches are set so that the tepidizer activates if below 130C or so.  The pump that drips in the pol water at about 600g/s activates if the temp is above 131C or so. the tepidizer doesn't entomb itself because i decided to put lotsa dirt down before buillding the tepidizer.  this effect can be recreated in game by building 4 compactors, setting them for dirt only,  using priority stuff to spread the dirt around, then deconstruct them.  each tile has several hundred kilos dirt.  no sand in the time i tested it.

The steam is heavier than the hydrogen but lighter than the CO2.  the CO2 was heated to above boiling point for normal water so it doesn't cause the steam to condense.  the middle section is cooler tho and also has lower CO2 concentration with piped cold dirty water cooling. 

i haven't bothered trying to build this in a normal game.  i'd prolly just use the dirty water for fertilizer makers.

[mr pink]

The ice machine

 

Hi guys,

 

I'd like to show you this.

Since this thread isn't really about the thermo regulators anymore, I'd like to get back to it and explain why this works or at least why I think it works. It is not a perfect system, needs improvement but I leave that to all you „Debug guys“. I play the game ;-).

0. Definitions:

Thermo regulator cycle (tr-cycle): A packet of gas enters the thermo regulator, it's proccessed (gas is cooled), packet leaves the regulator (regulator heats up), regulator shuts down 'till the next packet enters (I will refer to that as shut down phase).

 

1. Physics:

I was a little bit surprised no one mentioned this before or maybe I was too stupid to find it.

The actual temp where water becomes steam is not 119.4 (polluted water) or 99.4 (water) as it says in the tooltip. It is around 121.4 or 101.4 plus/minus 0.3 not so sure but you can see in the pic below what i mean.

I don't think it is a mistake because when you look at the temp/energy diagramm of water (in the real world) you see that when you hit the vaporisation point you need to invest more energy where the temp stays the same till it actually changes from liquid to gas and then the gas temp rises. I guess this mechanic was a little bit difficult to put in code.

 

2. Build up:

What I have done is mostly the same as all you guys already did. It looks a little bit funny because lot of the stuff in it was from the trial and error phase and I did corrections on the fly.

Steam room (top):

- Hydro switch for the polluted water intake

- Thermo switch at below 121.4 (dont even think i need that)

- Pumps and filter to pump the steam and create vacuum in the initial phase

- Water trap (Great invention, my thanks to the inventer) to collect the dirt and make repairs (Wait, you said it works – I did but I also said it is not perfect)

Ice room (bottom):

- Pumps for the hydrogen

- Gas vent for the steam and the looped hydrogen

- Forget all the rest

 

The tr-cycle is worth taking a look. Lets assume the hydrogen is piped in a straight line from one regulator to the next and so on. What happens is what all you guys know the regulator will overheat and get damaged because the shut down phase of the tr-cycle is nearly zero. What you want is to extend that shut down phase so the regulator has the time to transfer the heat to the water and since its not wolframite the transfer rate with gold is slower. This is easily done by splitting the pipe so the next packet of gas will enter later. You all know that but thats it. This is also important when you think of the overheat spikes. When you get near the point of 121.4 the regulator „overheats“ every time it cooles a packet of gas. My observation in this build up is that this is ok as long it has the chance to cool down under 125 in the shut down phase so it wont get damaged.

Fun fact: Steam has more heat capacity and thermal conductivity then hydrogen so after the steam is created it prevents the regulators from overheating.

3. Prospects:

The right regulator gets damaged from time to time but I think its just a design issue (needs better pipe splitting). My design is rubbish.

I think you can build this in a very large scale with much more regulators.

In my estimation a 4-way split of the hydrogen pipe is the right amount to extend the shut down phase of the tr-cycle long enough to have overheat buffer.

Building a water trap next to the ice room so you can collect the ice and dont loose hydrogen.

Preheat the polluted water but then you wont get the ice I guess.

 

Thank you for your time