Cool Steam Vents Too Cool for Steam Turbines

[Orlendis]

How do you heat up the area for cool steam vents to make it 125+ degrees to work for a steam turbine? I have several things in the room with it to heat the air and it just won't go much over 100 degrees. I have thermo regulators and thermo tuners to let off lots of heat.

[gimmethegepgun]

Thermo regulators are really bad at transferring heat, they should only be used when you have no other choice (like trying to cool things down really cold using Hydrogen because you don't have Super Coolant).

Both of them reduce the temperature of their contents, whatever those contents may be, by 15C, and then apply the amount of heat that doing that would require to themselves. So, things with a higher SHC will make the aquatuner better at moving heat.

However, if your purpose is to generate power with the steam turbine rather than using it to destroy heat, the aquatuner will never be power-positive. Cool steam vents are dead ends for power production purposes. Instead, they're your primary source of sustainable water (and thus oxygen).

[Xilo The Odd]

one thing i typically do to equalize what the vent puts out, is i'll dump my ice into the chamber with the vent, the thermal transfer from that usually brings it down enough that it becomes usable water, and since its melting the ice as well you get steam into water and ice into water. also gives my art guy something to do, build ice sculpture next to steam vent, melt, build new one, repeat lol.

[Hedning]

You must insulate the room well, run water or better through the aquatuner, have something to dump the cold generated by the tuner, and not return the water from the steam turbine.

[Strygald]

Noone mentioned it so far..

You don't use cool steam vents to power steam turbines, you use magma volcanoes.. or maybe creative use of meteors on the surface.

Most players use steam turbines as part of a cooling system, ie* use thermal aquatuners to cool something down and then use a steam turbine to cool down the thermal aquatuner.

[Angpaur]

You can use a split steam turbine. It is a kind of exploit that allows to use steam colder than 125C.

You split area below turbine into 2 chambers:

First one is the cool steam vent chamber and 3 turbine intakes are exposed to this chamber.

Second chamber is where you generate heat to make the turbine work. Only one tile of the turbine intakes is exposed to this chamber.

There is an insulated wall separating the cambers, that also covers one of the turbine intakes.

In the hot chamber you can use machinery to increase steam temperature, for example petroleum generators. Or you can use some other heat source like magma or hot coolant from metal refinery. Point is to make the hot chamber at least 125C to trick the turbine to work. Then it will suck steam from both chambers.

This trick is usefull to change steam from vent into water, not to generate a lot of electricity. But it is power positive and you don't need to spend power on trying to cool down 110C steam from the vent to condensate it into water.

Problem is vent output rate during eruptions - 3 turbines intakes allow 1200g/s to be sucked. Vents can produce more than 4000g/s during eruptions so the vant can quickly overpressurize and stop emiting more steam. To prevent this you can make the chamber big enough to store all produced steam below 5kg per tile. Or you can invent some way to move the steam to keep vent under 5kg pressure.