Heat power

The furnace is running, the exhaust line is hot – and that heat goes to waste outside. A Stirling engine turns it into power. For that it needs a hot side and a cold side, and both have to be planned.

The Stirling engine#

StructureStirlingEngine (Stirling engine) delivers up to 8,000 W according to its device data. This is how it works:

• Hot side: gas from the input pipe flows through the engine to the output and gives off heat on the way.
• Cold side: exchanges heat with the outside air at its location.
• Working gas: comes from a gas canister in its slot. How good it is shows in WorkingGasEfficiency.

The bigger the difference between hot and cold side, the more output. You can read along PowerGeneration, EnvironmentEfficiency, WorkingGasEfficiency as well as Pressure and Temperature of the working gas.

Planning the cooling#

The cold side needs outside air. Without an atmosphere – on the Moon, on Mimas – it does not cool, the difference shrinks and the output with it. On Vulcan the outside air is hot itself, still around 400 K at night. There the engine only pays off with a very hot source.

Overpressure is the danger#

If the internal pressure is more than 11,000 kPa above or below the outside air, the engine can explode. A chip watches Pressure and switches off before that – with hysteresis, so it does not go on and off every tick:

sgt tmp press PFREE
and alarm alarm tmp
sgt tmp press PMAX
or alarm alarm tmp

During the alarm engine and hot-loop pump stand still. Only when the pressure has dropped clearly does everything start again.

And the gas generator?#

StructureGasGenerator is a heat engine too: it burns fuel and, according to the game code, turns about 17 % of the combustion energy into power. The rest stays in the exhaust as heat – hot exhaust that can drive a Stirling engine in turn.

There is no buildable steam turbine in the base game. There, heat becomes power through the Stirling engine or through combustion in the generator.

seqz tmp ok
or alarm alarm tmp