(0.15.10+) Water and Steam, what's the plan?

[Taipion]

No one put steam into tube or tank and wait it to condense to liquid. In my opinion it would be wasted developing resources to give such an exotic possibilities with little game value.

Exotic?
Pre-heating heat exchangers with boilers was something that was actually announce as feature in one of the friday facts iirc.
And seamlessly mixing water and steam goes along with that just right.

[DaveMcW]

Pre-heating heat exchangers with boilers was something that was actually announce as feature in one of the friday facts iirc.

Citation needed.

All I could find was pre-cooling with turbines -> steam engines -> cooling towers, but that was scrapped when cooling towers were cancelled.

[PuffTheDragon]

You dont want to put steam directly into water. You will mix the Temperatur but you will produce .. translated it should be "steam punches". Temperature exchangers would have two seperated fluid cycles, they , the fluids,wouldnt have conntact directly.
Steam punches are a bad for the pipes because of the physical weakning. When you transfer, 20bar superheated steam (350 degress Celsius pi*thumb), you lose heat on long pipes which resulted in condensated water. This makes little vaccuums (the steam occuppies more room than fluid) which sounds like a punch and do the same to the pipe.
Seperating steam and normal water is good for turbines. Also you would need only water (H2O), not the dirty seewater, for industriall steam.
Physically i like this change. Sry for the bad translation + smartphone typingproblems.

Steammaschines on the other way, work differently to a turbine. Another Story.

[Distelzombie]

I dont really understand your problem with this too. It is nice having steam as a seperate entity. It is to be expected that your build could not work anymore in the next version.
Having 500°C water is a good enough thing to justify adding a new fluid type.

WTF?! Are you serious about this or just trolling?!
Water IS steam, they are both the same material, indicating "water at 500°" DOES actually mean steam, except you are in factorio where both take the exact same space = steam is pressurized to take the exact same space as the "water" that it "used ot be", therefore it is still water, as you gave it no space to expand... wtf, seriously

...

Bottom line:
- water and steam ARE the same thing, H20
- the game does NOT reflect the MAIN difference between water and steam, that is: the space it occupies
- therefore "water" and ...say "500°" are already all informations that matter, there is no reason to make them separate
- it is not, for any reason, required to have a different signal for steam or water
- it is completely hillarious to prohibit steam and water to mix, by making them different fluids (!) (!) (!)
- this completely breaks the "preheat your heat exchangers with boilers" technique that was proposed by the devs themself (in a friday facts, iirc)

=> There is no reason to have this distinction.
=> Yet there is lot's of reason, mostly through the (bad / restricting) underlying mechanics of "fluids" to NOT have this ..."destinction".

The total lack of devs shedding any light on this, kind of looks like it was a bad, unwarranted decision,
yet, if anyone actually has some info or reason to this, that is not clearly labeled "makeshift" or "far fateched", I'd be really thankful!
For I'd really like to understand why this had to be done.

I was not trolling.
It is important to see all this from an engineering standpoint because it is an engineering game.
And from this standpoint: water != steam
Also water that is 500°C AND extremely pressurized is supercritical. Meaning even more engineering challenges.

The critical point is 21.7 MPa at a temperature of 374 °C, above which water is supercritical rather than superheated. Above about 300 °C, water starts to behave as a near-critical liquid, and physical properties such as density start to change more significantly with pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheated_water

Referering to this as "Water, 500°C" would not give you much points in credibility as an engineer. It would look like you totally underestimate the dangers and or couldnt be trusted to handle the process.
I mean, just imagine what would happen when you have a pipe with supercritical water at 500°C and greater than 22.1 MPa going into a tank with regular 15°C water: Violent explosion.

And ...

- it is completely hillarious to prohibit steam and water to mix, by making them different fluids (!) (!) (!)

... is then actually a hilarious statement of ignorance.
Also, that the game does not reflect the differences between water and steam can be explained by the same type of reasoning you use for water=water500°C: "steam" and "water" are already all informations that matter.

It is a good change. Steam engines are called "steam engines" after all.

[Taipion]

Pre-heating heat exchangers with boilers was something that was actually announce as feature in one of the friday facts iirc.

Citation needed.

All I could find was pre-cooling with turbines -> steam engines -> cooling towers, but that was scrapped when cooling towers were cancelled.

Sorry I have no source, but I read it in some friday facts, I am pretty sure.

I do miss the cooling towers though, it just does not look like a real reactor without those, would have been pretty easy to do actually, if just steam would not be consumed at once and instead, say, a turbine would "produce" equal amounts of steam -200° or -300° (and would only be able to take steam of 480+° or so) and then you'd have to further cool it down a little to enable steam engines to use it, cooling towers outputting nice 165° steam for all 165+° steam they take in,
but then again I'd rather re-use the cooled down steam as input for the heat exchangers, which again would mean you don't need much of a water source after filling it once, for only the cooling towers (if at all) would actually consume steam.

Yea, I'm drifting away here.

But I still say:
- having 2 different fluids for water and steam is wrong
- not being able to properly use all attributes of one fluid (like the heat lvl in recipes) is the actual part that should have been fixed
- not being able to mix steam and water is illogical and destroys some nice feature
- pre-heating heat exchangers with boilers will hopefully be possible again soon

[Taipion]

stuff

I dont really understand your problem with this too. It is nice having steam as a seperate entity. It is to be expected that your build could not work anymore in the next version.
Having 500°C water is a good enough thing to justify adding a new fluid type.

WTF?! Are you serious about this or just trolling?!
Water IS steam, they are both the same material, indicating "water at 500°" DOES actually mean steam, except you are in factorio where both take the exact same space = steam is pressurized to take the exact same space as the "water" that it "used ot be", therefore it is still water, as you gave it no space to expand... wtf, seriously

...

Bottom line:
- water and steam ARE the same thing, H20
- the game does NOT reflect the MAIN difference between water and steam, that is: the space it occupies
- therefore "water" and ...say "500°" are already all informations that matter, there is no reason to make them separate
- it is not, for any reason, required to have a different signal for steam or water
- it is completely hillarious to prohibit steam and water to mix, by making them different fluids (!) (!) (!)
- this completely breaks the "preheat your heat exchangers with boilers" technique that was proposed by the devs themself (in a friday facts, iirc)

=> There is no reason to have this distinction.
=> Yet there is lot's of reason, mostly through the (bad / restricting) underlying mechanics of "fluids" to NOT have this ..."destinction".

The total lack of devs shedding any light on this, kind of looks like it was a bad, unwarranted decision,
yet, if anyone actually has some info or reason to this, that is not clearly labeled "makeshift" or "far fateched", I'd be really thankful!
For I'd really like to understand why this had to be done.

I was not trolling.
It is important to see all this from an engineering standpoint because it is an engineering game.
And from this standpoint: water != steam
Also water that is 500°C AND extremely pressurized is supercritical. Meaning even more engineering challenges.

The critical point is 21.7 MPa at a temperature of 374 °C, above which water is supercritical rather than superheated. Above about 300 °C, water starts to behave as a near-critical liquid, and physical properties such as density start to change more significantly with pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheated_water

Referering to this as "Water, 500°C" would not give you much points in credibility as an engineer. It would look like you totally underestimate the dangers and or couldnt be trusted to handle the process.
I mean, just imagine what would happen when you have a pipe with supercritical water at 500°C and greater than 22.1 MPa going into a tank with regular 15°C water: Violent explosion.

And ...

- it is completely hillarious to prohibit steam and water to mix, by making them different fluids (!) (!) (!)

... is then actually a hilarious statement of ignorance.
Also, that the game does not reflect the differences between water and steam can be explained by the same type of reasoning you use for water=water500°C: "steam" and "water" are already all informations that matter.

It is a good change. Steam engines are called "steam engines" after all.

So you argue with physical properties in a game that totally ignores these? That is actually hillarious!
In Factorio, 500° water/steam takes the same space as 15° water, or any other fluid, go tell the devs how dangerous that is!

[PuffTheDragon]

I dont really understand your problem with this too. It is nice having steam as a seperate entity. It is to be expected that your build could not work anymore in the next version.

It is important to see all this from an engineering standpoint because it is an engineering game.
And from this standpoint: water != steam
Also water that is 500°C AND extremely pressurized is supercritical. Meaning even more engineering challenges.

Jepp, your point it out.

[netmand]

Steam can be used by generators to produce power, water cannot. I'm delivering steam to an outpost to power it, no need to string power lines on remote locations now and no need for the outpost to be really big to accommodate the other ways of producing the equivalent power either.

I'd rather turn on a pump to unload steam specifically instead of some other fluid (including water).
This is a good change, in my opinion.

None of that requires you to have a distinction between water and steam, except you do have a train station that both unloads steam and water in the same place, which would be pretty bad.

I'm not convinced of your argument. I tried to cite an example but you don't try to understand that either. Your criticisms don't have any merit. Since heat pipes work differently (and better in my opinion as well) between 0.15.10 and 0.15.11 now; Can you tell me again why you feel you need to continue to "pre-heat"? Personally I'd rather use boilers for fracking than making my nuclear power generation needlessly complicated and more expensive.

[Taipion]

Steam can be used by generators to produce power, water cannot. I'm delivering steam to an outpost to power it, no need to string power lines on remote locations now and no need for the outpost to be really big to accommodate the other ways of producing the equivalent power either.

I'd rather turn on a pump to unload steam specifically instead of some other fluid (including water).
This is a good change, in my opinion.

None of that requires you to have a distinction between water and steam, except you do have a train station that both unloads steam and water in the same place, which would be pretty bad.

I'm not convinced of your argument. I tried to cite an example but you don't try to understand that either. Your criticisms don't have any merit. Since heat pipes work differently (and better in my opinion as well) between 0.15.10 and 0.15.11 now; Can you tell me again why you feel you need to continue to "pre-heat"? Personally I'd rather use boilers for fracking than making my nuclear power generation needlessly complicated and more expensive.

Insulting me and calling me dumb does not make you look any good, or mature for that part.
Also blatantly ignoring the fact that there could be more than you know, and more use cases than you need, says about the same about you.

Why pre-heating the input for heat exchangers with boilers?
- to use the steam turbines also for that, instead of building another block just for the boilers
- to burn stuff things that you have in excess, or can produce infinitely, for that part oil and its derivatives are actually a "regenerative energy source" (yes I know it's unlikely to run out of uranium)
- fun of designing are more complex reactor setup with more functionality
...just to name a few

[Aeternus]

So you argue with physical properties in a game that totally ignores these? That is actually hillarious!
In Factorio, 500° water/steam takes the same space as 15° water, or any other fluid, go tell the devs how dangerous that is!

Not anymore dangerous then an actual nuclear reactor would be I reckon...

Now cool it you two. With 15dgr water or a cooling tower. Whichever is your preference.

As for the reason for pre-heating or chemical-before-nuclear: Oil is infinite, oilwells do not run out. They reduce yield, but never deplete. So in essence oil, and by proxy, solidfuel or rocketfuel, is infinite. So you'd want to use that to save on nuclear fuel by burning oil to be more fuel-efficient, which means using chemical boilers. But since chem boilers can't fully utilize the capacity of a turbine because the energy in the steam is too low, it makes sense to push some of that steam through heat exchangers. You still use chemical fuel that way, but get the full energy yields of 500dgr steam.

[terror_gnom]

Hey guys, you ignore all the fun we could have with vapor presure, enthropy, phase changing enthalpy and all that other thermodynamics crap you need to consider when discussing the difference between water and steam!
I suggest the devs make factorio a great thermodynamics simulation only engineers understand and needs a serverfarm to run...

[pib]

Ugh this thread....

For what it is worth - steam, and gases ARE BOTH FLUIDS (referring to the first point of the OP (Tapion)). Feel free to check the wikipedia page for fluids if you need a proper definition of a fluid. Next up - Steam and water are not the same thing! One is a GAS and one is a LIQUID. It is easy to tell them apart. Yeah they are both H20, but they are in different phases.

In short, any argument that these two things should both send the signal for water because that is somehow more realistic is completely bogus to me.

Edit: Also because it is relevant - 500 C would be well beyond the critical point for water; under pressure or otherwise. It is still a different phase...

In the vicinity of the critical point, the physical properties of the liquid and the vapor change dramatically, with both phases becoming ever more similar. For instance, liquid water under normal conditions is nearly incompressible, has a low thermal expansion coefficient, has a high dielectric constant, and is an excellent solvent for electrolytes. Near the critical point, all these properties change into the exact opposite: water becomes compressible, expandable, a poor dielectric, a bad solvent for electrolytes, and prefers to mix with nonpolar gases and organic molecules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_ ... odynamics)

Edit2: Read some more comments and see Distelzombie's comment which makes similar and good points.

[Taipion]

So you argue with physical properties in a game that totally ignores these? That is actually hillarious!
In Factorio, 500° water/steam takes the same space as 15° water, or any other fluid, go tell the devs how dangerous that is!

Not anymore dangerous then an actual nuclear reactor would be I reckon...

Now cool it you two. With 15dgr water or a cooling tower. Whichever is your preference.

As for the reason for pre-heating or chemical-before-nuclear: Oil is infinite, oilwells do not run out. They reduce yield, but never deplete. So in essence oil, and by proxy, solidfuel or rocketfuel, is infinite. So you'd want to use that to save on nuclear fuel by burning oil to be more fuel-efficient, which means using chemical boilers. But since chem boilers can't fully utilize the capacity of a turbine because the energy in the steam is too low, it makes sense to push some of that steam through heat exchangers. You still use chemical fuel that way, but get the full energy yields of 500dgr steam.

Yes that puts it nicely, though this design has a major advantage and drawback compared to a separate boiler + steam engine setup.
+ positive: you can use the storage tanks and steam turbines of the reactor setup and save tons of material and space
- negative: you can never produce more than ~31% of your power by oil products

Therefore I think, still hoping for a change though, that I'll just make a separate boiler setup so I got solar first, then boilers with oil products, and nuclear only as a 3rd source if necessary.
Pollution is irrelevant anyways as a proper defense can't even be damaged by fully evolved biters (and spitters)!

[Deadly-Bagel]

Besides, anyone in engineering who treats water and steam the same needs to go back to college. Sure they might be made of the same thing but they have very different properties.

[Aeternus]

Yes that puts it nicely, though this design has a major advantage and drawback compared to a separate boiler + steam engine setup.
+ positive: you can use the storage tanks and steam turbines of the reactor setup and save tons of material and space
- negative: you can never produce more than ~31% of your power by oil products

That negative is only true while the plant is under full load - 1.8MW chemical + 4MW nuclear per turbine. Otherwise you could (in theory, requires some significant combinator magic) divert a portion of your low energy steam through the heat exchangers, mixing that portion with the rest of the low energy steam to create steam at a temperature that gives the turbines enough energy to meet the electrical demand plus a little extra. This configuration, which I still want to make if preheating becomes possible again, would mean the first 30% of the plants full load would always come from chemical, the remainder would be nuclear. But doing that in a tiled design is gonna be a challenge.

[Taipion]

Yes that puts it nicely, though this design has a major advantage and drawback compared to a separate boiler + steam engine setup.
+ positive: you can use the storage tanks and steam turbines of the reactor setup and save tons of material and space
- negative: you can never produce more than ~31% of your power by oil products

That negative is only true while the plant is under full load - 1.8MW chemical + 4MW nuclear per turbine. Otherwise you could (in theory, requires some significant combinator magic) divert a portion of your low energy steam through the heat exchangers, mixing that portion with the rest of the low energy steam to create steam at a temperature that gives the turbines enough energy to meet the electrical demand plus a little extra. This configuration, which I still want to make if preheating becomes possible again, would mean the first 30% of the plants full load would always come from chemical, the remainder would be nuclear. But doing that in a tiled design is gonna be a challenge.

Yes that is possible, but you would always compromise the energy density of your steam storage tanks if you mix it,
so you'd need to have no (or different) storage tanks for the boilers and directly inject it at the steam turbines and cut off the steam from heat exchangers as long as power is sufficient,
and if the load increases you'd need to cut off the direct injection from the boilers and revert them to feeding the heat exchangers as you otherwise cant make full use of your steam turbines as you would have steam below 500°,
yes that sounds like a formidable challenge, so just hope it's coming back.

Besides, anyone in engineering who treats water and steam the same needs to go back to college. Sure they might be made of the same thing but they have very different properties.

Again, this is a game, and any fluid here has only 3 obvious properties, that is, amount, heat, and a name, and therefore with the latest changes, steam (from water) is to water exactly like steam is to oil, which just is not right.

Again, the problem here is, that the game lacks the means to fully utilize the temperature difference as necessary, otherwise you could make a recipe (for oil from coal) that requires water of a certain temperature instead of having to make steam a completely different entity.

[netmand]

Steam can be used by generators to produce power, water cannot. I'm delivering steam to an outpost to power it, no need to string power lines on remote locations now and no need for the outpost to be really big to accommodate the other ways of producing the equivalent power either.

I'd rather turn on a pump to unload steam specifically instead of some other fluid (including water).
This is a good change, in my opinion.

None of that requires you to have a distinction between water and steam, except you do have a train station that both unloads steam and water in the same place, which would be pretty bad.

I'm not convinced of your argument. I tried to cite an example but you don't try to understand that either. Your criticisms don't have any merit. Since heat pipes work differently (and better in my opinion as well) between 0.15.10 and 0.15.11 now; Can you tell me again why you feel you need to continue to "pre-heat"? Personally I'd rather use boilers for fracking than making my nuclear power generation needlessly complicated and more expensive.

Insulting me and calling me dumb does not make you look any good, or mature for that part.
Also blatantly ignoring the fact that there could be more than you know, and more use cases than you need, says about the same about you.

Why pre-heating the input for heat exchangers with boilers?
- to use the steam turbines also for that, instead of building another block just for the boilers
- to burn stuff things that you have in excess, or can produce infinitely, for that part oil and its derivatives are actually a "regenerative energy source" (yes I know it's unlikely to run out of uranium)
- fun of designing are more complex reactor setup with more functionality
...just to name a few

Aw, cheer up. Mind that you set the adversarial tone with your original post. I at the irony that you are taking offense and assigning words I did not write.

That said, I read your points on "pre-heat" and am still unconvinced. What I get from your points is that you like to do things a certain way, and I do agree there's fun to be had in complexity. But I do not agree on making things too complicated, which is a different term and meaning to me. Just a few counter-points:
- While pre-heating might be good, I don't agree that the benefits out-weigh the costs and complexity associated with this. It's a complicated setup that I don't typically want.. and yes, I've tried it. But apparently you want to do this. I'm more than happy to discuss this since I don't want them to change it back so unfortunately you have to contend with the voicing my preference against yours.
- burn stuff you have in excess? You can be using boilers elsewhere and still burn stuff you have in excess so this is neither supports or defeats your argument.
- fun designing? It would be foolish of me to assume what everyone does for fun. I only can say that it's more fun for me to measure steam differently from water.

In this 0.15.11 experimental build, Steam is different from water... vive la difference!

[HurkWurk]

here is all you need to know about the difference between water and steam in factorio:

500c steam will require a hell of a lot stronger pipes to handle than water. so the networks are separate because they would likely be separate. steam acts more as a gas. if you ran water into a steam turbine, you would likely destroy it.

the fact that these both start as water is totally not relevant to the fact that you would do everything possible to keep these systems separate, except at the junctions where you cool steam to collect water. since we arent doing cooling towers, we can just let the steam loose instead, thus no need for steam>water interfaces.

if you really want this to make sense, convert all interfaces for "steam" to "steam heating pipes" and make new pipes for steam only since they would be high pressure pipes, insulated, etc.
sorta like how the nuclear heatpipes are copper, the steam pipes should show as insulated pipes.

[Distelzombie]

500c steam will require a hell of a lot stronger pipes to handle than water.

To make this clearer: 22.1 MPa = 32053.34 psi = 2210 Bar = 2181.1 Athmospheres. Thats crazy!

[Aeternus]

Only if you do not allow it to expand. Which, granted, you'd probably not want to do if you want to retain the energy density of that steam. But heat and pressure are not directly related.