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Fluids [ edit page ]
General
- Gasses and Liquids have different behaviors. Liquids will naturally flow towards the lowest point in a fluid system, but gasses will stay in their container unless they are moved by a pump. Additionally, gasses are prohibited from entering a custom fluid tank, and are able to clog up networks due to this.
- Air can be pumped from the atmosphere into a tank, and later used in an engine. Different types of engines may require different amounts of air for the same power generation.
Piping
- Pipes in Stormworks do not store any fluid. They simply serve as connections for components to exchange fluids.
- All components have a small buffer, which often gives the illusion of fluid being stored in a pipe. This buffer can be seen with detailed tooltips: Every fluid component has one "Stored Fluid" label for each connection, which lists the current flowrate through that connection in L/s, aswell as the current amount of fluid stored in the buffer, measured in L. This buffer also exists for tanks, allowing them to store slightly more fluid.
Tanks
- Fluids can be mixed in any tank. This is not recommended, as seperating them afterwards can be difficult.
- Oil can be refined into Diesel and Jet fuel at high temperatures. At low temperatures, this can happen in reverse: Diesel and Jet fuel combine into oil when stored in the same tank.
- Custom fluid tanks: it is a container made out of blocks/components. Not every block is waterproof (e.g. jet turbines) so try to use the more basic blocks to create your tanks (cubes, wedges). By using wedges instead of blocks you can add more fuel capacity. Reason: the wedge is only half a cube so it can give you 8 liters fuel while a cube gives you 0. Just place the wedge so the flat part is the outside of the tank and the sharp corner is the inside of the tank. Similarly, using micro controllers, windows, or any other seal-able blocks that take up less than an entire block's worth of volume will increase the capacity of a tank without increasing its size. Micro controllers and windows will increase the capacity the greatest amount.
- Finding a leak in your tank: When you are missing a block and the hull of your fluid tank has a hole it is not a tank. Just put a fluid meter into the tank and connect its capacity output to a digital display. If the display says 0 you have a leak. Now you can add walls to divide your tank into two parts. Give every part its own fluid meter + digital display to see which part has the leak. If one side is still displaying 0 divide that tank again with a wall and so on...
- Small Fluid Tanks take up a 1x1x2 space and have a set capacity (currently) of 31.25 (15.625 per 'block'). Medium Fluid Tanks take up 2x2x3 space and have a set capacity of 187.50 (15.625 per 'block'.) However, Large Fluid Tanks take 3x3x5 space and have a capacity of ~705 (~15.667 per 'block'.) [Large Fluid Tanks have a better space to capacity ratio out of all preset fluid storage solutions.]
Pressure
- Stormworks simulates fluid pressure based on altitude. For example, Water pressure can get high enough for a submarine to be unable to pump out any fluid.
- A fluid port trying to pump fuel into a tank from the bottom will have a lesser flowrate. It is possible to pump fluid out of a tank from the top, even if the fill level is way below the the port. They will just encounter a flowrate reduction due to the greater pressure required to pump upwards.
- Gasses cannot be compressed with high pressures.
Pumping
- All components have limits to how fast fluids can be exchanged. It is not possible to make a hose, or any other component that transfers fluid from one vehicle to the other, have a flowrate higher than 75 L/s. Adding multiple hoses in is the only method of bypassing this limitation.
- Pipes have a limit of 180 L/s across the entire network.
- If you connect more than one pump to a tank the fluid flow will increase not like you would expect. When using two pumps instead of one your flow will be 1.5 x the flow of a single pump. So every additional pump you will add has less efficiency than the one before. Use multiple tanks with dedicated pumps to have maximum flow.
- A custom tank can have one pump for each port. This only works if there is no other bottleneck.