Source
r/Oxygennotincluded•
Kasuha

Steam turbine works in low steam pressure too.

https://imgur.com/a/xYnqIgZ

When I was opening my natural gas geyser, I did not want to cool everything so instead, I built it in a way that so the generators eventually heat up and will emit steam instead of polluted water, putting steam turbine on top of the generator room.

To my surpsise, when everything finally heated up (with my intermittent use of generators it took over 2000 cycles) the steam turbine now works even if there's way less than 400 g/tile of steam. The turbine's power production is laughable but I believe it scales properly to amount and temperature of steam it is processing.

Of course the turbine can't be self-cooling in this setup, so I'm cooling it with hydrogen coming out of my oxygen production.

Which however gives me an idea. Has anyone ever tried to put a steam turbine over a hot steam geyser just like that, with nothing (except insulation around)? Because if my assumptions and math are correct, it should work even with 500 C steam and all inlets open without wasting heat as long as the geyser doesn't emit more than 518 g/s of steam per turbine.

Posted Sep 21, 2019, 11:24 AM UTC

210
markwhite123456•

Yep easy to tame a hot steam geyser with just a few wheezewort and turbine.

3
DarkenDragon•

so many people seem to have the misconception that the steam turbine is drawing power from the amount of steam. this is completely wrong. its drawing power from the temperature of the steam. its based on the thermal energy of the steam of making the steam go from it's current temp to 95 degrees. each port sucks in 0.4 kg of steam per second and the steam turbine needs 0.8 kg of steam to do the actual conversion of steam to water. so as long as the steam has the thermal energy of 2kg of steam at 125 degrees, it'll work. so I think if its 417kdut it'll work.

so with your steam geyser, you only need 2 inlets but you'll still be wasting energy since it can't handle all that heat. I'm trying to design a system where I can store all that heat and transfer it slowly so that I can get the most energy out of it. but its not easy, all my testing has found that all the metal used to transfer the heat just absorbs it. the heat energy isnt lost, it just takes a very long time to build up enough heat to start transferring, need to test different metals to make it work. and you need at least 800 g/s of steam in order for the steam turbines to work constantly.

2
KasuhaOP•

518 g of steam at 500 C cooled down to 95 C will yield 518 * (500 - 95) * 4.179 = 876712 DTU.

2000 g of 200 C steam cooled down to 95 C will yield 2000 * (200 - 95) * 4.179 = 877590 DTU.

It's about the same number. The turbine should work at nearly 100% performance on it.

Any I believe you don't have to block inlets with low steam pressure. The turbine will just grab whatever it can reach.

2
DarkenDragon•

500 g/s won't work cuz the steam turbine only starts working when it has 800g stored in it, so it'll only work half speed, thus half energy.

1
KasuhaOP•

That's how I expected it to work, too. But it does not work that way. That's the point of my whole post. Check the last screenshot, it's spilling ~100 g water packets into the pipe.

2
XsNR•

If you use a large steam room you can lock the geyser behind a door system that releases steam when the room cools down below say 175 or one of the higher temps if you want to cover. If you don't want so much steam and you would rather compress it you can make a door compression and make the door setup on that.

1
DarkenDragon•

Yeah, that's what I was referring to, the doors and metal was absorbing so much heat that there steam was going down to 200 degrees instantly, and was talking way too long to equalize to keep the heat of the steam in the steam. But this was using iron. Going to experiment with different materials to see if I can make it better. Maybe user aluminum

1
XsNR•

It's likely just due to the low mass of steam you can keep around the geyser before it over pressurises. Most heat exchange systems are using 100+kg per square. That's why I would use a loop exchange to move the heat with minimum 2x the mass of the steam per square, not to mention the mass of the pipes.

1
DarkenDragon•

The heat loss was where the geyser was, and the geyser was fully in cased in insulation tile. The only thing that was thermally conductive that it can touch was the door

1
GrimsPrice•

This is extremely easy to solve. You just have a liquid valve send some of the turbine water back into the steam chamber based on the temp of the chamber rather than sending it away to storage. Meanwhile you run the turbine based on two atmo sensors, a power grid battery and an and gate.

If the pressure of the steam room gets too high, a direct atmo sensor turnes on the turbine so you get the water out of it. If the pressure is above a minimum set by the second atmo sensor, the turbine can run. This keeps the turbine from eating all the steam down to a few grams. This atmo sensor and the grid battery go through the and gate together to run the turbine both, when you need power, and when there is enough steam. The second, direct atmo sensor forces the turbine on to prevent over pressuring the vent.

The valve sends water back into the steam room if the temp is above 195 to reduce the temp. You don’t even have to close inlets to run a steam vent.

0