Steam Vent
Steam Vent is a Geyser which provides a renewable supply of high-temperature Steam (and thus Water). Like all gas vents, it will overpressurise and stop producing if the surrounding pressure reaches 5kg.
Heat Economy
Steam Vents produce an enormous amount of Heat due to their high output temperature (500 °C) and the high specific heat of Steam - an average Steam Vent will produce a whole-period average of 750g/s of steam, which works out to a little over 1567kDTU/s. This is the second-greatest heat output of all base game geysers, rivalled only by a full-size Volcano's average output of ~1900kDTU/s.
The simplest way to handle this is to directly feed the output to a Steam Turbine, each of which can convert 2kg/s of steam directly to 95 °C Water, deleting most of the heat in the process. However, this also reduces the potential energy generation - the turbine will produce the same amount of power if feed 200 °C steam, so cooling the output is necessary to maximise returns from a geyser.
History
- TU-210162: Introduced.