Steam Turbine Puns

the output water for a steam turbine, from what I have observed, is at a constant 95⁰C. since turbines will overheat at 100⁰C, is it possible for the output water to cool the turbine just enough? I really don't want to put in an aquatuner, they eat up so much power. or is a regulator already enough to cool 3 turbines from a geothermal plant?

Q2, does gas pressure affect the rate of heat transfer? logically it does, but it's a video game

Good Day Everyone,

I'm sure by now everyone has built something where they hit the point that they realize the build they have done has no point in being that elaborate, well, this is mine.

This monstrosity is a 7 stage lead-lag geothermal boiler.

Back story on this puppy, I used to be am HVAC controls tech, meaning the AC/heating in a big commercial building, well I was the guy who made the program to make it work, I did the automation logic and the graphics, troubleshooting, all that jazz. I no longer do this but automation is still something that interests me so I decided to make something that a real world engineer would spec out, and this is what I made.

Lead lag is typically defined as "You fail, I take over", but in this case it's "you can't keep up, I take over" but generally also alternates which leads and which lags for equal wear on the pump/fan/whatever piece of equipment we're playing with, turbines in this case.

So how does it all work, well there were 7 smart batteries acting as the demand, power levels drop turn on 3 turbines, system still can't catch up, turn on 3 more and so on until all 21 were on (spoiler, they never all turned on at one time).

Initially I wanted 8 stages, 3 signal distributors per stage but I didn't plan ahead and had vacuumed out the space LONG before I was ready to start building this monstrosity, it took several hundred cycles to complete (diamond shortage didn't help), so after I already had the water locks in place I counted and found I had enough room for 21, so I cut out 1 stage (thankfully).

Now I know what you're thinking "this is exactly what debug/sandbox mode is for, figuring out stuff like this", NOPE! All in survival. The automation took between 200 and 300 cycles to figure out the little nuances, like each logic gate adding a very slight delay to the signal, causing stages to get skipped, or not change properly, or count in a weird way (jump from stage 4 to 7 to 5 to 6 to 1....no bueno)

This is an abandoned colony (stopped playing it about 2 weeks before the DLC launch back in December, this was done on a early access DLC map). I just checked on the age of the steam turbines to see how long this has been up and running and it's somewhere around 650-800 cycles, the colony is at cycle 2450, so it was already well established long before this started. The lower chamber has a atmo sensor to close a door to seal the bottom incase of a steam/petroleum/anything that could vaporize to continue to have s

As it says on the tin. Steam tech is my go-to answer for energy needs most of the time. So assuming I've made the steam part as efficient as possible: Which method gives me the most energy per resource burned? A fully realized steam piston engine or an electric engine kept charged with a steam turbine?

I've been trying to build my first geothermal plant and I'm having trouble that I can't figure out.

My heat spike seems to be working perfectly, my temperature control seems to be working perfectly, but too much heat is getting into my turbine room, overheating the steam turbines.

I think the culprit is the insulated tiles the turbines are sitting on, as they are sitting at like 140°, but I'm not sure why it's getting so hot. Should I run the cooling loop through those tiles?

I've actually got a cooling loop using petroleum and TWO aquatuners, but they can't seem to drop the temperature enough to get the turbines working.

I've tried demoing, and rebuilding the insulated tiles, and that will work for a bit, but not for long as the temperature climbs out of control again.

I'm really at a loss as to what I've done wrong.

Sorry to not have any pics to show my setup.

Edit: oh, and to add, the entry into the turbine room is just a mech door, but outside of that is vacuum, so no heat should be coming in that way.

Edit: /u/destinyos10 correctly determined my issue was that bridges transfer tons of heat.

I've been having trouble especially running the refinery to get past the early-mid game without access to the steam turbine. It's like either I have top notch cooling or none. How do you guys go about it?

While on Cycle 100, got 300,000, almost 400k calories of food, a SPOM runnning and my whole base set up. I started to search for a water source, I found a Cool Steam Vent. I was running out of water, so I tried to use it. Though I made a costly mistake : I forgot to insulate the pipes while running through my airflow tiles. So now a partial part of my base was 40C hot. I tried ice, but I was too slow it basically didn't make a difference. So I ask, how can I easily cool it down? I don't have plastics, so Steam Turbine would not work.

I’m sure this topic has been beaten to death multiple times, but I decided to see just how efficient I can get my steam turbine heat deletion.

The wiki provides some good numbers and equations to start off with. Looking at an aquatuner with supercoolant running 100%, we get 1181.6 kDTU/s moved, at a cost of 1200W. Steam turbines unfortunately (and perhaps by design) do not match up evenly with aquatuners, deleting a maximum of 877.59 kDTU/s at 200C, 2kg/s, requiring 1.346 turbines per aquatuner to delete the heat (1.346 = 1181.6 / 877.59).

To design my coolers, I've set up an excel sheet that calculates the number of turbines per aquatuner (basically just divide moved heat by deleted heat, then round up).

https://preview.redd.it/c82e5mrxgs881.png?width=1373&format=png&auto=webp&s=1da4cd8febd56ac12fd6e0900a051777764d7af7

The "Power produced" line uses the ratio from the wiki, which says roughly 96.9% of heat becomes electricity.

We see that for a single aquatuner running supercoolant, two turbines are required, and 55.55 W of extra power needed when running at maximum load. Interestingly, the turbines skip over 4 and 8.

Dividing the power produced by power consumed, we get just over 95% efficiency.

Out of curiosity, I added the line for "max steam temp" or the steam temperature at full operation. I was somewhat surprised to see that even though the power efficiency stays the same, the steam temperature varies with the number of machines. I'm guessing this is due to how much each turbine is utilized - higher utilization will result in a higher steam temperature, up to the 200C max, beyond which my calculator will add another turbine and the temperature drops.

Just for the heck of it, I ran the numbers for water as a coolant too.

https://preview.redd.it/n3hb3q1eis881.png?width=1387&format=png&auto=webp&s=35b17f2f429d7c64a7eff292d7156b2498966ed1

As you can see, we lose over half of our efficiency by changing coolants, and our energy cost goes up (SC to water) by 22.8 times. It costs about 1266W to delete 1170 kDTU/s with water coolant, versus 55.55W to delete slightly more with super coolant. In other words, where ordinary cooling loops in early-mid game would need a generator to keep them running, a super coolant loop could probably be kept going with just a dupe on a wheel.

I had fun working this problem out, and I hope the numbers help anyone who's not math savvy but wants to build these complicated loops.

I'm also open

Right now I have a few ice biomes available, one that I am currently actively melting down to try and secure a nearby iron volcano (since I've mined most of the copper and iron in my immediate vicinity).

However, the heat in my base is getting to the point where I cannor grow crops, hovering around 86-90f.

I was thinking of using the chilled water from the ice biome to cool a pool of poluted water via radiant pipes, or simply snake pipes across my base and loop it back around to the ice biome when the water gets too warm?

This sounds very inefficient I know, aquatuners perhaps in a lower unused room thar have those same cooling pipes are another option.

I have access to a bit of iron and gold amalgam at the moment, haven't dug deep enough to get oil just yet.

A system like electric propulsion but instead of diesel engines/generators with steam turbine (for electricity only)

https://gyazo.com/8078a0e6435b4b4af4bdf4ec44209b31.png

In the image there's two theoretical steam turbines.

Both of them have identical temperature input. The difference being that turbine A exhausts steam into the atmosphere with no extra steps, while turbine B would have a supply of cold air being supplied at the start of the turbine's exhaust and then exhaust it into atmosphere.

Am I correct in assuming this would increase efficiency over turbine A?

My thinking is that steam contracts when cooled so this would create a low pressure zone right at the exit of the turbine and in turn create a sort of pulling force for the subsequent steam to come? Gaining us efficiency through dumping of built up temperature?

It's always labeled fluid in fluid out, so maybe it could work?

Hey,

My coal/steam turbine will sometimes create RPS and sometimes not. Regardless of how much pressure is in the boiler for whatever reason it will not get to the turbine (sometimes). I'm not sure what to do to fix this. I tried a fluid pump but the pressure should excuse the need for one. Everything is connect and looks correct, and sometimes my train starts moving. Not really sure what to do, though.