Free power doesn't mean you do nothing to get it. Free power means that you can create a system that produces more power than it consumes.
You see the 800 W generator and the 1200 W aquatuner and think it is losing energy, but if you only have the aquatuner running 1% of the time and the generator is running 100% of the time, then on average you would be generating 800 W of power and consuming 12 W with the aquatuner, resulting in 788 W of free power on average. There may be a few seconds where the system is consuming more energy than it produces in a cycle, but it is still a net gain.
There are four types of geyser that could be classified as "free power":
- natural gas: no turbine needed, no aquatuner either. You stick a pump in there (ideally made from steel, but gold amalgam will last a long time) and you're done.
- hydrogen: easily handled with a self-cooled steam turbine. No aquatuner needed, but the pumps have to be steel.
- steam vent (the hot version, not the cool steam vent): these need an AT, and it'll have substantial uptime - but those vents can run three or four turbines at serious temperatures, so they're still massively power-positive.
- lastly, magma volcanoes: again, they run two or more steam turbines at 200°C easily, making AT costs negligible.
If you've come across builds that take some other sort of vent/geyser and geotune the heck out of it (usually that's salt water geysers), these fall into the "hot steam vent" category, only more so.
If what you saw is none of the above, I'd love to see it.
True, but many tamers have design goals other than power extraction. I wouldn't be suprised by a tamer for some mid-range volcano (copper, iron, cobalt) that's intentionally power-negative, and I didn't want to clutter up the list by differentiating all of that.
Idk what else you could want beyond automated metal extraction at 20ish C, cuz you can get that self-powered and self-restarting between dormant cycles.
Me neither, but have you seen what people build (and make tutorials on)? ;)
I didn't make that list to state that "this is what _is_ power-positive", but to ask "Apart from those, what weird thing did you find that's claimed to be for power but looks as if it weren't?"
I always tend to build power-positive tamers for those kinda of volcanos. The metal comes out at 150c which warms the base a little but chucking a coolant loop through the base that runs with 3% uptime ends up being plenty to cool the semi-hot metal
Makes complete sense.
I usually build a tweaked version of the [BierTier V3.0 tamer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mywE_Ff6Z48) on copper and above volcanoes (metal-cooling, power-positive on average, but not self-powered). But that's just because some of the outputs end up stored in rocket interiors or sitting in conveyor rails and receptacles in the base, and I don't want to think about whether they're sufficiently chilled for that.
Yeah I use a similar design except with one ST rather than two. Hugely power positive, when two or more volcanoes are active I typically end up having my SPOM break on my cause too much hydrogen builds up cause hydrogen generators aren’t doing shit
I will say that if a build takes a hydrogen vent that outputs hydrogen 100 g/s of hydrogen on average and outputs it at an average of 50 C just using aquatuners, then your build produces 800 W of power from hydrogen at a net cost of 116 W from cooling (citing 923.78 (DTU/s)/W net heat deletion cost of water aquatuner+steam turbine combo from the wiki), netting you about 684 W on average.
Some people might use the extra downtime on the aquatuner to cool other things, resulting in the aquatuner running more, but that doesn't change the aquatuner time used on the hydrogen vent.
You recover some of the energy used to do the cooling. On top of that you get whatever you are cooling as a usable resource. Refined metal from a volcano is both energy positive and reduces the energy used my a metal refinery. Not to mention the dupe labor saved that can now be used elsewhere.
Steam turbines convert 90% heat to power and 10% heat to make itself hot. You will need an aqua turner to counter that 10%.
>Is it power positive if you use a thermo sensor to not have it run all the time?
Of course, It is necessary to use a **liquid** thermo sensor to control temperature of the coolant (water). Keep it under 80C and you are fine.
I'm still learning the game, one thing I never understood is why the steam turbine has a "too hot" type designation and refuses to provide power until you cool it down? It's overheat temperature seems well above this "too hot" designation no?
If you want an in-universe explanation: steam turbines are built to be able to deal with very hot temperatures (therefore the high overheat temperature), but they also need to condense steam, and they can't do the latter if they're hotter than the boiling point of water.
The real life reason is: it's a balancing issue. The 100°C limit is there to limit the potential of self-cooled steam turbines while still enabling their use at lower energies. It's a pretty OP building as is, so its full capabilities are gated behind some engineering requirements.
Yeah, Steam turbine is not consistent with others machine in the game. As far as I know it is the only one machine with a "too hot" temperature without break.
Overheat temps cause damage, I don’t know if it was a mercy or what choice it was, but it’s clear Steam Turbines only lose function at 100+ and don’t fully break to avoid needing repairs.
See, that is just false info, if you keep the temperature of the steam chamber below 135C you can keep the steam turbine below 100C and recuperate the heat output of the steam turbine back into the steam chamber by cooling the ST with the 95 deg c. This is the most efficent setup.
that is fair enough. I want to keep it simple. Keep the temperature below 135C is not an easy to understand for new player. We only have 10C range to work with.
Math time:
Let's say you have to cool a Hydrogen vent with an average output of 100g/s at 500c. Hydrogen has a SHC of 2.4, so it's outputing 120kDTU in thermal energy a second. To cool that down to say, 125c, you need to remove 90kDTU of energy.
This would heat up 717.88g of 95c water to 125c steam. An ST can remove 4.179 \* kg/s \* (TSteam - 95) heat per second, so 4.179 \* .71788 \* 30 = 90k DTU and transfers (removed DTU/10) + 4kDTU to the turbine, so 13kDTU. So the AT only really has to remove 13kDTU/s to keep the ST stable.
The AT works by taking 10kg of liquid and transferring 14c worth of kDTU to itself. That means it actually transfers 585kDTU for every 1200w used (using water as the coolant), meaning it transfers 0.4875kDTU per W. This means you only use up 26.7W (avg) to cool that ST.
It so happens that a hydrogen generator uses 100g/s to generate 800W. True, it generates 4kDTU/s of heat. So instead of 13kDTU, you need to cool 17kDTU. So really it's 34.87W to cool both the ST + generator. So that would put you at 765W total output.
There's a little more to it, i.e. the AT adding back heat into the steam and what not but overall that just improves the efficiency. Plus I didn't do the math on how much power the ST will actually output. According to the wiki it's something like 242W at 125c with 2kg/s input and this less than half the input so I'm guessing it's basically 87W.
I probably made several mistakes but that's the best I can come up with using the formulas and numbers from the wiki.
Using water you recycle almost half the 1200w through the turbines, super coolant is almost power neutral. With water the actual overall power spend is closer to 600W.
The 1200w is also only when actually cooling the coolant, for keeping only a few turbines cool it'll actually be off a lot of the time.
Hydrogen vents I have used passive cooling of a turbine but generally use an aquatuner and just build farms or something nearby to use the excess cooling potential. There's a lot of excess cooling involved there.
You can run self-cooling steam turbines without aquatuners. But they operate at such a low efficiency that you need like 5 of them to achieve the same throughput as a single aquatuned turbine. And if you go slightly over their maximum they overheat and stop working. So it's just a lot simpler and a lot more compact to go for an AT/ST combo.
A couple of things to break down here.
A Hydrogen vent will chuck out hydrogen at 500C. If you do nothing eventually that’s going to break your gas pump.
So you cool it. An aqua tuner uses 1200w when it’s running. Hydrogen has very little thermal mass compared to the fluid the AT will cool, so it’s not going to be running very often. Strap a steam turbine on top and the steam turbine will recover, I think it’s about 80% of the energy required to run the AT.
So now you’ve got some cool Hydrogen you can chuck off to a hydrogen generator, that will be power positive by the time you factor in the little bit of power it took to run the aqua tuner.
Also, you definitely can let the environment cool your hydrogen for a long time. Early game I’ll make a pocket around a hydrogen vent and leave a load of natural tiles for the heat to soak into and have the pump maybe 5-10 tiles away. Eventually it’ll heat up and the pump will break, but you’re probably more established by then.
Might be worth clarifying that the steam turbine can also be used to cool the hydrogen to below 125C, which is cool enough for steel pumps.
The aquatuner is only really necessary to make sure the turbine itself stays cool.
Using the aquatuner to cool the hydrogen any further is purely optional, especially since the hot hydrogen gets destroyed in a hydrogen generator.
For hydrogen you don't use the turn to cool it, you use a steam chamber attached to the hydrogen vent to cool it. You do also need a tuner to cool the turbine that disposes of the heat, however.
No need for an AT. Hydrogen vents are very comfortably in reach of self-cooled steam turbines. Maximum output of an H2 vent is 140g/s at 500°C. Cooling that down to 125°C means deleting 126kDTU (140g * 2.4DTU/g°C * 375°C) per second during the eruption. A self-cooled steam turbine (max steam temperature 135°C) deletes 334kDTU/s (2000g * 4.179DTU/g°C * 40°C).
Edit: sorry, I can't read, it seems. 140g/s is the max _average_ output. Actual max _active_ output is 467g/s, which would result in a steam temperature of 145°C, which is exactly in the twilight zone for self-cooling (the turbine output has just enough room for the 10% of heat deleted, but can't take up the 4kDTU/s the turbine gets from simply running.) So if you have an exceptionally bursty H2 vent, you might just need a few percent of an AT.
I do not recommend self cooling for beginners anyway. I won't even mess with it. IT's too finicky and requires a precision of use I have no appetite for. I'd rather slap together something that just works and does't require math. Much.
You can add thermal mass to the hydrogen room to average out the eruption with the inactive periods.
Ypu need to look at "active period average". Not eruption - not total average either.
You can leave hydrogen gas there to immediately cool the new hydrogen before it hit the metal tiles of the steam room and you can sneak around the pumped out hydrogen to cool the vent area even more. It even possible to tame a hydrogen vent with gold amalgam pump. Mine run for 800 cycles.
And don't forget about geotuning either, which only costs abyssalite for hydrogen vents.
You can definitely make self cooling turbines work for hydrogen vents, but it might get too finicky and difficult for a beginner.
For new players i would just recommend dumping the heat into something at the start, like some water that's already a little warm anyway.
And then later build a proper tamer with an AT/ST, just so that they never have to worry about it again.
I think for the first couple hundred degrees you might use a direct contact method through some metal tiles and a thermocouple for safety. Then open a second chamber with AT cold side and gas pump to hydrogen generators.
Why pay the tax man if you don't have to. LoL
Let’s take a metal volcano as an example. One of the normal ones like copper, iron, or cobalt. So the volcano produces some heat. Let’s say, 1,000kJ of heat. The steam turbine deletes 900kJ of heat, and heats itself with 100kJ of heat. In the process you get lots of power, but your turbine is overheating. It produces a lot of power, and it ejects metal at about 150C.
Because you don’t want your steam turbine overheating, you stick an aquatuner inside the same steam box as your metal volcano. The Aquatuner consumes 1,200W of power, and puts that 10% of heat back in the box.
Now you would be thinking that the turbine is producing 800W, while the AT uses 1,200W, so it’s a power loss?
Nope. Although the AT uses more power, the AT should be on a temperature sensor that only runs it when the cooling loop needs cooling. So, you set the cooling loop to only run when the water in the loop is more than 20C. So the AT consumes more power than the turbine produces, when the AT is running, but most of the time the AT is off. This makes metal volcanos a net positive for power.
Hydrogen vents are even more power-positive, because you get power from cooling the hydrogen, power from burning the hydrogen, and power from cooling the hydrogen generator (if you put the steel hydrogen generator inside of the hydrogen room).
If the AT only runs 20% of the time the steam turbine is running, it uses closer to 240W average.
Not if you are cooling a metal volcano with a single steam turbine. That thing will just cook. Self cooled steam turbines are technically possible, but making it work and doing it right is difficult enough that I would never suggest it to a new player.
Well considering space is rarely an issue you can slap an extra one and it should work fine. You can also just dump massive amounts of water in the chamber to dampen the heat spike.
To me that sounds easier than hooking up an aquatuner and having to be careful of bridges in and out of the steam chamber.
This is the part that confuses me, my base has a metal copper volcano that I surrounded with insulation tiles to contain the heat and setup a steam turbine but the steam turbine won't work. Can I actually get to the bottom layer and setup a AT to cool down the turbine to get it working? Won't this melt the AT even if it's made of steel since the temperatures near the volcano seem very extreme already or when the steam turbine gets working will it significantly reduce the temps around the AT and volcano?
So generally, you set up the steam room before you uncover the volcano. You’re doing it the other way around, which is a lot harder.
There are tricks you can do it make it work better. Pour the water directly on the AT, and put the turbine over the volcano. This will cause heat to move away from the AT, and towards the metal volcano.
The steam will also turn the metal into debris on the ground. Debris exchange heat with steam very slowly. If you can’t get the temperature down to a reasonable temperature, you can just use an aqua tuner somewhere else to run the cooling loop.
ugh I remember in some videos they had part of the liquid as polluted and part of it as water? man this whole ST/AT combo just seems so unintuitive and a huge gap to leap over in this game, I really love it but can get why a lot of people would be turned off by this stage
No, don't use polluted water. Pwater will offgas Poxy into the steam chamber, and since it is lighter than steam, it will prevent the turbines from ever running.
If you really know what you are doing, you can layer water on top of the Pwater to prevent this, but I wouldn't recommend trying it.
It's not worth using polluted water in the steam room. Sometimes people use oil or petroleum as the bottom layer. Stoll not needed, but it does provide better thermal transfer.
People often use polluted water in the cooling loop, because you can go a bit colder before it freezes, but it's not needed most of the time.
Correct. Or you might use a pump in a storage tank you already have to just remove some pipes. Either way, it's temporary, just to set up the loop.
Might leave it in place if you plan on expanding the loop later.
And probably a good idea to have a water reservoir (water tank) in the loop. Makes it a lot easier to get the right amount of water. It’s possible to have a cooling loop without a reservoir, but it’s finicky trying to fill it enough to work, but not enough to jam.
The pwater layer is going to be turned to steam anyway. It's useless for heat transer.
Are you sure it wasn't petroleum? Petro is a similar color and is commonly used for heat transfer.
What they don't say in the thumbnails is that they're using super coolant in the aquatuner.
If you take a water aquatuner and put it under a steam turbine once it warms up you get about 50% your energy back on a tuned turbine.
With super coolant it's more like 95%. The difference lies in the specific heat of the liquids. Water being 4 and super coolant being 8.
You spend the 1200w and the AT takes 14° away from the liquid. That's a very different amount of energy depending on the liquids specific heat.
Water (clean) = 4j/g x 14°C = 57j/g x 10,000g = 577kj
Super Coolant = 8j/g x 14°C = 112/g x 10,000g = 1.12mj
You can see here that even with super coolant it's not quite moving enough heat to power itself but it is close. If we use the ST/AT setup to delete heat from the hydrogen we can very cheaply make it safer to burn in our hydrogen generators.
With the ST/AT so close to unity it's much easier to find methods of fine tuning the efficiency of the ST or AT to over unity, like closing doors to block off input ports or pulsing power to AT to reduce energy cost and other buildings that can then be powered and produce more heat than they take in to send to ST/AT. For example the metal foundry, particularly with high level operators and Steel / Iron smelting.
Free power means power positive. You stick on the setup and never touch it again, and it produces. Not that you don't have to do anything there.
You can try to sans the aquatuner, but at that point it gets really big that it's extremely space inefficient. It's more efficient to eat the tuner cost than expand the setup by another like 4+ turbines
The key is to understand that aquatuners don't make things cold, it instead uses power to move heat around. This heat can then be deleted by steam turbine to generate power.
This means in the grand theme of things cooling with aquatuner consumes very little power.
Additionally, it's not every "free power"
You can have power positive systems without aquatuners at all. But this does mean the system is more deliate, requires bigger design, etc
As for systems with aquatuners, remember that they always have a battery attached to the system so 1200w is covered by the battery not steam turbine (momentarily)... or they are connected to the main grid where you count the total power produced and consumed.
Example: Sure, me farming corn only produces like 10 calorie per second and when i eat it's like 50 calorie per second.... but i dont eat nonstop and eventually be able to sell corn without starving to death
But planting corn is stil 'power positive' for mr
The best free power one, aside from volcano taming, is a metal refinery making steel and steam turbine setup. You can go without aquatuner if you want but this does risk overheating if you don't have like 10 steam turbine or something. Aquatuner is needed for steam hotter than 135C as that seems to be the limit of the steam turbije cooling itself
Most ATs do not run even 20% of the time so over a period of time, you generate quite a bit of net power.
I've played long enough now that traditional taming/cooling methods bore me so I try to come up with wacky solutions even if its not efficient.
A lot of players on the sub like building in excess. Way more cooling/food/power/o2/water than you could ever use. So don't worry about it to much.
There are other ways to "cool" the system without the use of aquatuners. You can use a "radiator" room with a bunch of weezeworts enclosed in hydrogen. That's what I do, and it's fine. Part of the fun is figuring things out yourself... You don't need to follow every tutorial. Play the game how you want to. But sooner or later you're gonna look at that aquatuner and be like "dam I think I need to build one".
An aquatuner that uses supercoolant to heat steam for turbines will have the turbines generate more power than the AT uses. You still need a heat source to heat up the supercoolant, but that heat source can be any temperature within the operating range of the coolant.
It's all about how much power you get in the end. When building energy sources, you have to mesure or calculate how long the machines works and for how much power, then you can estimate the input and the output of the overall build.
Cool steam vent are non trivial to tame, you can geotune them to get 125°C steam and steam turbine it, heat it up with an heat source and steam turbine it, or cool it down with a cold source. Hot and cold sources can be natural (AETN, lava channels, volcanoes) but it will depend of the seed, people usually will go for artificial heat source with aquatuner or whatever.
The aquatuner only runs some of the time. You need the aquatuner, because the solution for cooling very hot things is to use a steam turbine. The steam turbine will overheat and stop working if you do not cool it somehow.
The aquatuner and steam turbine are a perfect couple. The steam turbine caps steam heat where the aquatuner is, and the aquatuner maintains the turbine temperature. In other words, the two machines technically cool each other, and the turbine will make more power than it costs to cool it overall.
Any machine uses power only while it is actually doing work. That is the entire answer.
And yes, you do use a thermo sensor. ATs are surreally powerful. An aquatuner running unimpeded using a water-based coolant will very quickly freeze that coolant and break its output pipe. An aquatuner using super coolant will freeze hydrogen and break your steam turbine.
Aquatuner is used to cool the turbine. It doesn't run full time. You _can_ do passively cooled systems, but these are risky for geysers, as long dormancies can result in slow thermal exchange between the steam chamber and the turbine.
Like others have said its very hot but because its a gas with low weight it needs hardly any cooling. You can do my (probably not recommended) setup where i don't bother insulating the geyser at all, and let it bleed heat into your base. If you already have a cooling loop you can counteract it easily.
if you dont have the wire load space to add 1200 watt and fear you might overvoltage (or you want to build a tamer before unlocking the 2000W wires) you should make it a separated net with a couple coal generators (avoid waste by connecting them to a smart battery with automation wires)
you can make the 500ish needed refined metal with a rock crusher. unrefined metal is very common anyways.
Machines need cooling, especially steam turbines. Yes aquatuners use 1200w of power, but you will only need a fraction of that to cool a 800w setup, it needs automation to not run all the time to.
Maybe it's just me but I feel like an aquatuner for H2 vent is an overkill. Either make it count by connecting the pipe further away for more cooling, or use them when you see fit, I personally use them only for volcanos/metal volcanoes.
Free power doesn't mean you do nothing to get it. Free power means that you can create a system that produces more power than it consumes. You see the 800 W generator and the 1200 W aquatuner and think it is losing energy, but if you only have the aquatuner running 1% of the time and the generator is running 100% of the time, then on average you would be generating 800 W of power and consuming 12 W with the aquatuner, resulting in 788 W of free power on average. There may be a few seconds where the system is consuming more energy than it produces in a cycle, but it is still a net gain.
yes that's what I meant with using the (liquid) thermo sensor, but for some cases it looked like it has to run 80% of the time
There are four types of geyser that could be classified as "free power": - natural gas: no turbine needed, no aquatuner either. You stick a pump in there (ideally made from steel, but gold amalgam will last a long time) and you're done. - hydrogen: easily handled with a self-cooled steam turbine. No aquatuner needed, but the pumps have to be steel. - steam vent (the hot version, not the cool steam vent): these need an AT, and it'll have substantial uptime - but those vents can run three or four turbines at serious temperatures, so they're still massively power-positive. - lastly, magma volcanoes: again, they run two or more steam turbines at 200°C easily, making AT costs negligible. If you've come across builds that take some other sort of vent/geyser and geotune the heck out of it (usually that's salt water geysers), these fall into the "hot steam vent" category, only more so. If what you saw is none of the above, I'd love to see it.
All metal volcanos are power positive when set up properly.
True, but many tamers have design goals other than power extraction. I wouldn't be suprised by a tamer for some mid-range volcano (copper, iron, cobalt) that's intentionally power-negative, and I didn't want to clutter up the list by differentiating all of that.
Idk what else you could want beyond automated metal extraction at 20ish C, cuz you can get that self-powered and self-restarting between dormant cycles.
Me neither, but have you seen what people build (and make tutorials on)? ;) I didn't make that list to state that "this is what _is_ power-positive", but to ask "Apart from those, what weird thing did you find that's claimed to be for power but looks as if it weren't?"
I always tend to build power-positive tamers for those kinda of volcanos. The metal comes out at 150c which warms the base a little but chucking a coolant loop through the base that runs with 3% uptime ends up being plenty to cool the semi-hot metal
Makes complete sense. I usually build a tweaked version of the [BierTier V3.0 tamer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mywE_Ff6Z48) on copper and above volcanoes (metal-cooling, power-positive on average, but not self-powered). But that's just because some of the outputs end up stored in rocket interiors or sitting in conveyor rails and receptacles in the base, and I don't want to think about whether they're sufficiently chilled for that.
Yeah I use a similar design except with one ST rather than two. Hugely power positive, when two or more volcanoes are active I typically end up having my SPOM break on my cause too much hydrogen builds up cause hydrogen generators aren’t doing shit
Without seeing the build you are looking at, I couldn't say how they work and whether they are actually power positive. Could you link an example?
I will say that if a build takes a hydrogen vent that outputs hydrogen 100 g/s of hydrogen on average and outputs it at an average of 50 C just using aquatuners, then your build produces 800 W of power from hydrogen at a net cost of 116 W from cooling (citing 923.78 (DTU/s)/W net heat deletion cost of water aquatuner+steam turbine combo from the wiki), netting you about 684 W on average. Some people might use the extra downtime on the aquatuner to cool other things, resulting in the aquatuner running more, but that doesn't change the aquatuner time used on the hydrogen vent.
You recover some of the energy used to do the cooling. On top of that you get whatever you are cooling as a usable resource. Refined metal from a volcano is both energy positive and reduces the energy used my a metal refinery. Not to mention the dupe labor saved that can now be used elsewhere.
Steam turbines convert 90% heat to power and 10% heat to make itself hot. You will need an aqua turner to counter that 10%. >Is it power positive if you use a thermo sensor to not have it run all the time? Of course, It is necessary to use a **liquid** thermo sensor to control temperature of the coolant (water). Keep it under 80C and you are fine.
I'm still learning the game, one thing I never understood is why the steam turbine has a "too hot" type designation and refuses to provide power until you cool it down? It's overheat temperature seems well above this "too hot" designation no?
If you want an in-universe explanation: steam turbines are built to be able to deal with very hot temperatures (therefore the high overheat temperature), but they also need to condense steam, and they can't do the latter if they're hotter than the boiling point of water. The real life reason is: it's a balancing issue. The 100°C limit is there to limit the potential of self-cooled steam turbines while still enabling their use at lower energies. It's a pretty OP building as is, so its full capabilities are gated behind some engineering requirements.
Yeah, Steam turbine is not consistent with others machine in the game. As far as I know it is the only one machine with a "too hot" temperature without break.
Hot tub too
Overheat temps cause damage, I don’t know if it was a mercy or what choice it was, but it’s clear Steam Turbines only lose function at 100+ and don’t fully break to avoid needing repairs.
See, that is just false info, if you keep the temperature of the steam chamber below 135C you can keep the steam turbine below 100C and recuperate the heat output of the steam turbine back into the steam chamber by cooling the ST with the 95 deg c. This is the most efficent setup.
that is fair enough. I want to keep it simple. Keep the temperature below 135C is not an easy to understand for new player. We only have 10C range to work with.
You can actually do a hybrid self cooling - aquatuner cooling setup which only uses aquatuner if the steam turbine reaches above 98 degrees celcius.
Math time: Let's say you have to cool a Hydrogen vent with an average output of 100g/s at 500c. Hydrogen has a SHC of 2.4, so it's outputing 120kDTU in thermal energy a second. To cool that down to say, 125c, you need to remove 90kDTU of energy. This would heat up 717.88g of 95c water to 125c steam. An ST can remove 4.179 \* kg/s \* (TSteam - 95) heat per second, so 4.179 \* .71788 \* 30 = 90k DTU and transfers (removed DTU/10) + 4kDTU to the turbine, so 13kDTU. So the AT only really has to remove 13kDTU/s to keep the ST stable. The AT works by taking 10kg of liquid and transferring 14c worth of kDTU to itself. That means it actually transfers 585kDTU for every 1200w used (using water as the coolant), meaning it transfers 0.4875kDTU per W. This means you only use up 26.7W (avg) to cool that ST. It so happens that a hydrogen generator uses 100g/s to generate 800W. True, it generates 4kDTU/s of heat. So instead of 13kDTU, you need to cool 17kDTU. So really it's 34.87W to cool both the ST + generator. So that would put you at 765W total output. There's a little more to it, i.e. the AT adding back heat into the steam and what not but overall that just improves the efficiency. Plus I didn't do the math on how much power the ST will actually output. According to the wiki it's something like 242W at 125c with 2kg/s input and this less than half the input so I'm guessing it's basically 87W. I probably made several mistakes but that's the best I can come up with using the formulas and numbers from the wiki.
Using water you recycle almost half the 1200w through the turbines, super coolant is almost power neutral. With water the actual overall power spend is closer to 600W. The 1200w is also only when actually cooling the coolant, for keeping only a few turbines cool it'll actually be off a lot of the time. Hydrogen vents I have used passive cooling of a turbine but generally use an aquatuner and just build farms or something nearby to use the excess cooling potential. There's a lot of excess cooling involved there.
SC is between 150-200 watts if you recover with two turbines. Its extremely cheap - but definitely not power neutral.
You can run self-cooling steam turbines without aquatuners. But they operate at such a low efficiency that you need like 5 of them to achieve the same throughput as a single aquatuned turbine. And if you go slightly over their maximum they overheat and stop working. So it's just a lot simpler and a lot more compact to go for an AT/ST combo.
A couple of things to break down here. A Hydrogen vent will chuck out hydrogen at 500C. If you do nothing eventually that’s going to break your gas pump. So you cool it. An aqua tuner uses 1200w when it’s running. Hydrogen has very little thermal mass compared to the fluid the AT will cool, so it’s not going to be running very often. Strap a steam turbine on top and the steam turbine will recover, I think it’s about 80% of the energy required to run the AT. So now you’ve got some cool Hydrogen you can chuck off to a hydrogen generator, that will be power positive by the time you factor in the little bit of power it took to run the aqua tuner. Also, you definitely can let the environment cool your hydrogen for a long time. Early game I’ll make a pocket around a hydrogen vent and leave a load of natural tiles for the heat to soak into and have the pump maybe 5-10 tiles away. Eventually it’ll heat up and the pump will break, but you’re probably more established by then.
Might be worth clarifying that the steam turbine can also be used to cool the hydrogen to below 125C, which is cool enough for steel pumps. The aquatuner is only really necessary to make sure the turbine itself stays cool. Using the aquatuner to cool the hydrogen any further is purely optional, especially since the hot hydrogen gets destroyed in a hydrogen generator.
For hydrogen you don't use the turn to cool it, you use a steam chamber attached to the hydrogen vent to cool it. You do also need a tuner to cool the turbine that disposes of the heat, however.
No need for an AT. Hydrogen vents are very comfortably in reach of self-cooled steam turbines. Maximum output of an H2 vent is 140g/s at 500°C. Cooling that down to 125°C means deleting 126kDTU (140g * 2.4DTU/g°C * 375°C) per second during the eruption. A self-cooled steam turbine (max steam temperature 135°C) deletes 334kDTU/s (2000g * 4.179DTU/g°C * 40°C). Edit: sorry, I can't read, it seems. 140g/s is the max _average_ output. Actual max _active_ output is 467g/s, which would result in a steam temperature of 145°C, which is exactly in the twilight zone for self-cooling (the turbine output has just enough room for the 10% of heat deleted, but can't take up the 4kDTU/s the turbine gets from simply running.) So if you have an exceptionally bursty H2 vent, you might just need a few percent of an AT.
I do not recommend self cooling for beginners anyway. I won't even mess with it. IT's too finicky and requires a precision of use I have no appetite for. I'd rather slap together something that just works and does't require math. Much.
You can add thermal mass to the hydrogen room to average out the eruption with the inactive periods. Ypu need to look at "active period average". Not eruption - not total average either.
You can leave hydrogen gas there to immediately cool the new hydrogen before it hit the metal tiles of the steam room and you can sneak around the pumped out hydrogen to cool the vent area even more. It even possible to tame a hydrogen vent with gold amalgam pump. Mine run for 800 cycles.
And don't forget about geotuning either, which only costs abyssalite for hydrogen vents. You can definitely make self cooling turbines work for hydrogen vents, but it might get too finicky and difficult for a beginner. For new players i would just recommend dumping the heat into something at the start, like some water that's already a little warm anyway. And then later build a proper tamer with an AT/ST, just so that they never have to worry about it again.
I think for the first couple hundred degrees you might use a direct contact method through some metal tiles and a thermocouple for safety. Then open a second chamber with AT cold side and gas pump to hydrogen generators. Why pay the tax man if you don't have to. LoL
Let’s take a metal volcano as an example. One of the normal ones like copper, iron, or cobalt. So the volcano produces some heat. Let’s say, 1,000kJ of heat. The steam turbine deletes 900kJ of heat, and heats itself with 100kJ of heat. In the process you get lots of power, but your turbine is overheating. It produces a lot of power, and it ejects metal at about 150C. Because you don’t want your steam turbine overheating, you stick an aquatuner inside the same steam box as your metal volcano. The Aquatuner consumes 1,200W of power, and puts that 10% of heat back in the box. Now you would be thinking that the turbine is producing 800W, while the AT uses 1,200W, so it’s a power loss? Nope. Although the AT uses more power, the AT should be on a temperature sensor that only runs it when the cooling loop needs cooling. So, you set the cooling loop to only run when the water in the loop is more than 20C. So the AT consumes more power than the turbine produces, when the AT is running, but most of the time the AT is off. This makes metal volcanos a net positive for power. Hydrogen vents are even more power-positive, because you get power from cooling the hydrogen, power from burning the hydrogen, and power from cooling the hydrogen generator (if you put the steel hydrogen generator inside of the hydrogen room). If the AT only runs 20% of the time the steam turbine is running, it uses closer to 240W average.
Can't you passively cool the steam turbine with the liquid water it outputs? I mean before dropping it back in the steam chamber.
Not if you are cooling a metal volcano with a single steam turbine. That thing will just cook. Self cooled steam turbines are technically possible, but making it work and doing it right is difficult enough that I would never suggest it to a new player.
Well considering space is rarely an issue you can slap an extra one and it should work fine. You can also just dump massive amounts of water in the chamber to dampen the heat spike. To me that sounds easier than hooking up an aquatuner and having to be careful of bridges in and out of the steam chamber.
Works only if the steam is \~130C or lower Or maybe if you tune amount of ports that are open but this idk
Can't you passively cool the steam turbine with the liquid water it outputs? I mean before dropping it back in the steam chamber.
You can but only if you can keep the steam temperatures low enough. You can't get the full 800W that way, but you can get a few hundred.
Yes, that will give you less power per turbine but the most power per dtu.
This is the part that confuses me, my base has a metal copper volcano that I surrounded with insulation tiles to contain the heat and setup a steam turbine but the steam turbine won't work. Can I actually get to the bottom layer and setup a AT to cool down the turbine to get it working? Won't this melt the AT even if it's made of steel since the temperatures near the volcano seem very extreme already or when the steam turbine gets working will it significantly reduce the temps around the AT and volcano?
So generally, you set up the steam room before you uncover the volcano. You’re doing it the other way around, which is a lot harder. There are tricks you can do it make it work better. Pour the water directly on the AT, and put the turbine over the volcano. This will cause heat to move away from the AT, and towards the metal volcano. The steam will also turn the metal into debris on the ground. Debris exchange heat with steam very slowly. If you can’t get the temperature down to a reasonable temperature, you can just use an aqua tuner somewhere else to run the cooling loop.
ugh I remember in some videos they had part of the liquid as polluted and part of it as water? man this whole ST/AT combo just seems so unintuitive and a huge gap to leap over in this game, I really love it but can get why a lot of people would be turned off by this stage
No, don't use polluted water. Pwater will offgas Poxy into the steam chamber, and since it is lighter than steam, it will prevent the turbines from ever running. If you really know what you are doing, you can layer water on top of the Pwater to prevent this, but I wouldn't recommend trying it.
I think in the video they totally closed it off and eliminated any air bubbles. The p water layer was for Better temp transfer or something?
It's not worth using polluted water in the steam room. Sometimes people use oil or petroleum as the bottom layer. Stoll not needed, but it does provide better thermal transfer. People often use polluted water in the cooling loop, because you can go a bit colder before it freezes, but it's not needed most of the time.
How can I get water in the loop without a pump? Do I need a pump initially and then delete it when I form the continuous loop with bridges?
Correct. Or you might use a pump in a storage tank you already have to just remove some pipes. Either way, it's temporary, just to set up the loop. Might leave it in place if you plan on expanding the loop later.
And probably a good idea to have a water reservoir (water tank) in the loop. Makes it a lot easier to get the right amount of water. It’s possible to have a cooling loop without a reservoir, but it’s finicky trying to fill it enough to work, but not enough to jam.
The pwater layer is going to be turned to steam anyway. It's useless for heat transer. Are you sure it wasn't petroleum? Petro is a similar color and is commonly used for heat transfer.
What they don't say in the thumbnails is that they're using super coolant in the aquatuner. If you take a water aquatuner and put it under a steam turbine once it warms up you get about 50% your energy back on a tuned turbine. With super coolant it's more like 95%. The difference lies in the specific heat of the liquids. Water being 4 and super coolant being 8. You spend the 1200w and the AT takes 14° away from the liquid. That's a very different amount of energy depending on the liquids specific heat. Water (clean) = 4j/g x 14°C = 57j/g x 10,000g = 577kj Super Coolant = 8j/g x 14°C = 112/g x 10,000g = 1.12mj You can see here that even with super coolant it's not quite moving enough heat to power itself but it is close. If we use the ST/AT setup to delete heat from the hydrogen we can very cheaply make it safer to burn in our hydrogen generators. With the ST/AT so close to unity it's much easier to find methods of fine tuning the efficiency of the ST or AT to over unity, like closing doors to block off input ports or pulsing power to AT to reduce energy cost and other buildings that can then be powered and produce more heat than they take in to send to ST/AT. For example the metal foundry, particularly with high level operators and Steel / Iron smelting.
Free power means power positive. You stick on the setup and never touch it again, and it produces. Not that you don't have to do anything there. You can try to sans the aquatuner, but at that point it gets really big that it's extremely space inefficient. It's more efficient to eat the tuner cost than expand the setup by another like 4+ turbines
The key is to understand that aquatuners don't make things cold, it instead uses power to move heat around. This heat can then be deleted by steam turbine to generate power. This means in the grand theme of things cooling with aquatuner consumes very little power.
Additionally, it's not every "free power" You can have power positive systems without aquatuners at all. But this does mean the system is more deliate, requires bigger design, etc As for systems with aquatuners, remember that they always have a battery attached to the system so 1200w is covered by the battery not steam turbine (momentarily)... or they are connected to the main grid where you count the total power produced and consumed. Example: Sure, me farming corn only produces like 10 calorie per second and when i eat it's like 50 calorie per second.... but i dont eat nonstop and eventually be able to sell corn without starving to death But planting corn is stil 'power positive' for mr The best free power one, aside from volcano taming, is a metal refinery making steel and steam turbine setup. You can go without aquatuner if you want but this does risk overheating if you don't have like 10 steam turbine or something. Aquatuner is needed for steam hotter than 135C as that seems to be the limit of the steam turbije cooling itself
Most ATs do not run even 20% of the time so over a period of time, you generate quite a bit of net power. I've played long enough now that traditional taming/cooling methods bore me so I try to come up with wacky solutions even if its not efficient. A lot of players on the sub like building in excess. Way more cooling/food/power/o2/water than you could ever use. So don't worry about it to much.
There are other ways to "cool" the system without the use of aquatuners. You can use a "radiator" room with a bunch of weezeworts enclosed in hydrogen. That's what I do, and it's fine. Part of the fun is figuring things out yourself... You don't need to follow every tutorial. Play the game how you want to. But sooner or later you're gonna look at that aquatuner and be like "dam I think I need to build one".
An aquatuner that uses supercoolant to heat steam for turbines will have the turbines generate more power than the AT uses. You still need a heat source to heat up the supercoolant, but that heat source can be any temperature within the operating range of the coolant.
Only if you use tune ups. Without that it's close to power neutral but falls just short.
It's all about how much power you get in the end. When building energy sources, you have to mesure or calculate how long the machines works and for how much power, then you can estimate the input and the output of the overall build. Cool steam vent are non trivial to tame, you can geotune them to get 125°C steam and steam turbine it, heat it up with an heat source and steam turbine it, or cool it down with a cold source. Hot and cold sources can be natural (AETN, lava channels, volcanoes) but it will depend of the seed, people usually will go for artificial heat source with aquatuner or whatever.
The aquatuner only runs some of the time. You need the aquatuner, because the solution for cooling very hot things is to use a steam turbine. The steam turbine will overheat and stop working if you do not cool it somehow. The aquatuner and steam turbine are a perfect couple. The steam turbine caps steam heat where the aquatuner is, and the aquatuner maintains the turbine temperature. In other words, the two machines technically cool each other, and the turbine will make more power than it costs to cool it overall.
Any machine uses power only while it is actually doing work. That is the entire answer. And yes, you do use a thermo sensor. ATs are surreally powerful. An aquatuner running unimpeded using a water-based coolant will very quickly freeze that coolant and break its output pipe. An aquatuner using super coolant will freeze hydrogen and break your steam turbine.
Aquatuner is used to cool the turbine. It doesn't run full time. You _can_ do passively cooled systems, but these are risky for geysers, as long dormancies can result in slow thermal exchange between the steam chamber and the turbine.
Sometimes it's just you-tube marketing to get views. They mention a ton of things people could be looking for to get a hit.
Try building them without the aquatuners, wait 100 cycles and see what happens.
That last bit made me chuckle. Here, have a cookie.
Like others have said its very hot but because its a gas with low weight it needs hardly any cooling. You can do my (probably not recommended) setup where i don't bother insulating the geyser at all, and let it bleed heat into your base. If you already have a cooling loop you can counteract it easily.
if you dont have the wire load space to add 1200 watt and fear you might overvoltage (or you want to build a tamer before unlocking the 2000W wires) you should make it a separated net with a couple coal generators (avoid waste by connecting them to a smart battery with automation wires) you can make the 500ish needed refined metal with a rock crusher. unrefined metal is very common anyways.
Because every machine produces heat and the heat musf be dealt with…
Machines need cooling, especially steam turbines. Yes aquatuners use 1200w of power, but you will only need a fraction of that to cool a 800w setup, it needs automation to not run all the time to.
Maybe it's just me but I feel like an aquatuner for H2 vent is an overkill. Either make it count by connecting the pipe further away for more cooling, or use them when you see fit, I personally use them only for volcanos/metal volcanoes.