Thermo sensing above 300C

[wachunga]

With the introduction of volcanoes, being able to use the thermo sensor above 300C would be very helpful. Here's how you can do so.

https://imgur.com/GyVsQdT

"A" is your heat source, magma or molten metals from a volcano. "B" is your cold reference, something relatively stable, the colder it is the higher you can measure. "C" is what you want to measure and control. "D" is obsidian and linked to "C" by a diamond shift plate, it will very nearly be the same temperature. Same goes for "E" and "B". Your thermo sensor sits in a pocket of chlorine and will be about halfway between "D" and "E". Chlorine is used for it's very low conductivity to minimize heat bleeding through to your cold reference. If you want "C" to be 400C and your cold reference is 0C, set the sensor to about 200C. The door at "F" will open and close as needed.

A bit finicky to build, but really not particularly bad, especially for our expert players.

 

 

[Kabrute]

ok so you use averaging to determine a higher temperature limit than your equipment, this is similar to using a liquid sensor on a phosphorite pocket

I like it, much finer sensitivy

by similar I meant using things to do something beyond their normal limits

[wachunga]

Yes, the sensitivity is pretty good. There is a bit of lag, but it's very functional. I'm working on a crude -> petroleum cooker, this is a main element and has caused zero issues.

[Yothiel]

That's what I'm currently trying to use on a crude -> natgas refinery (I'm trying to extract as much heat as possible from the volcano, so I definitely don't intend to wastefuly let the gas cook to 800°C).

 

While intuition dictates that reactivity should be better with the least amount of gas, you need to remember one rule of heat transfer which is that no transfer will occur if the energy is lower than 1E-4.

For chlorine gas, it means that the product between the tile weight (in kg) and the temperature accuracy (in °C or K) should be ~= 2.083E-4. Basically if you use 1g (= 1E-3kg) of chlorine, you'll have an accuracy of 0.2°C, so definitely don't go into the mg / mcg range. The thermo sensor will contribute most of the heat capacity anyway (you need ~1.34kg of chlorine gas to have the same capacity as a 25kg pure gold building).

[JonnyMonroe]

14 minutes ago, Yothiel said:

(I'm trying to extract as much heat as possible from the volcano, so I definitely don't intend to wastefuly let the gas cook to 800°C).

I achieved this by using a mechanical door to control conduction from the volcano to a hot plate and a hydro sensor on the hot plate. When the sensor detected liquid it would close the door (turn the cooker on). Oil pre heated in the incoming pipes, burst out as it converted to petrol then cooked to gas on the hot plate. If the plate got too cold to cook it, petrol would settle on the plate, the sensor would detect it and close the door, drawing in more heat until the petrol cooked. This allowed for a very simple, self regulating cooker that also did a good amount of heat recapture. I can post screenshots when I get home if you like.

[Yothiel]

16 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

I achieved this by using a mechanical door to control conduction from the volcano to a hot plate and a hydro sensor on the hot plate. When the sensor detected liquid it would close the door (turn the cooker on). Oil pre heated in the incoming pipes, burst out as it converted to petrol then cooked to gas on the hot plate. If the plate got too cold to cook it, petrol would settle on the plate, the sensor would detect it and close the door, drawing in more heat until the petrol cooked. This allowed for a very simple, self regulating cooker that also did a good amount of heat recapture. I can post screenshots when I get home if you like.

Nah I'm pretty much fine with that part. The one I'm trying to handle is when the plate is getting too hot (typically occurs when I crack open the shell I built after initially digging out/analyzing the volcano)

Currently, I'm having the freshly cooked natgas being cooled by pH2O (through a metal tile exchanger) and before being extracted by the usual gold amalgam gas pumps. But if I expose 800°C natgas to this pH2O exchanger, I'm losing over 250°C of natgas heat which could have been used to convert (or at least pre-heat) oil instead

[JonnyMonroe]

11 minutes ago, Yothiel said:

But if I expose 800°C natgas to this pH2O exchanger, I'm losing over 250°C of natgas heat which could have been used to convert (or at least pre-heat) oil instead

If you're extracting heat from the volcano efficiently it shouldn't get that hot to start with. It should barely exceed 550°c. I have a few ideas I plan to try for better heat recapture but for the time being I'm getting a good amount by snaking my oil pipe over the heat plate a bit and letting the oil burst out of that as it cooks to petrol.

Also there are methods to pump gas at high temperatures without damaging the pumps.

[Kasuha]

Nice design. Would be nice to have simply bigger range on the temp switch but I guess good enough for the time being.

I guess to further reduce the heat spill, and to increase range, it could be based on measuring time rather than temperature.

Base state: there's a chamber filled with suitable gas and two thermometers - one is to detect base temperature, the other is to detect threshold temperature. 

Phase 1: establish thermal contact with the measured element and measure the time needed to reach threshold temperature in the chamber. Compare that time (coming from the threshold thermo switch) to the reference time (coming from a filter gate) to decide if the element is hot or cold. Then disconnect the thermal contact.

Step 2: establish thermal contact with coolant and cool the chamber until it reaches reference temperature.

It takes perhaps longer to measure, but it only exchanges heat that's needed to warm the chamber up by certain amount of degrees. And you don't even need that to be a big temperature difference, a few degrees could suffice to measure target temperatures in hundreds of degrees.

 

For this purpose, the chamber could probably be filled with small amount of high thermal conductivity, low heat capacity liquid. For example crude oil.

[Oozinator]

Not so easy to setup in survival, but it's a workaround..

[suicide commando]

Nice idea.. still it would be even nicer if they gave us sensors that went over 300.