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High performance boiler design


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So after sifting through a few designs and extensive testing I've come up with this contraption.
It produces around >1000kg of fresh water at around 30-40 degrees per cycle, and best of all it is theoretically doable without debug (although you'll have a tough time hunting for enough wheezeworts for it)

The challenge of the design wasn't so much boiling the polluted water reliably. Its pretty easy to do one you fine tune the flow valve and keep the tepedizer above boiling temp. but below overheat temp.

Cooling thus far has been the most difficult part. requiring alot of energy and a ton of wheezeworts and even then the output water is still too hot to use comfortably.

I've also discovered a few neat facts:

1: a thin film of water makes for an excellent coolant for thermoregulators.

2: thermo regulators don't dump their heat into adjacent tiles directly but have to go through a medium like liquid or gas (tested by running one in a vacuum and it didn't conduct heat onto the floor it was mounted on)

3: background objects like pipes, wires and even debris can act as thermal mass to soak up heat from a tepedizer allowing it to 'stablise' around operating temperature much easier.

4: tepedizers seem to only dump their exhaust heat into the tiles they are directly situated on. So the more tiles that have a little bit (around 5kg) of water the more efficient it is at converting water to steam

5: to trick a tepedizer into thinking it's submerged you only need One tile of liquid at below 85C adjacent to it.

6: "preload" the tepedizer with cultivated soil to prevent the tiny amount you create right at the start turning into sand and gunking up the whole system.

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1 hour ago, Artizan said:

2: thermo regulators don't dump their heat into adjacent tiles directly but have to go through a medium like liquid or gas (tested by running one in a vacuum and it didn't conduct heat onto the floor it was mounted on)

If I'm not mistaken, I think all buildings act like this, included the liquid tepidizer.

1 hour ago, Artizan said:

1: a thin film of water makes for an excellent coolant for thermoregulators.

This is because water has a large specific heat capacity and can hold a lot of energy.

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The liquid tepidizer is an amazing machine :D  I hope they don't fix it's buggy-ness until they replace it with something better.  Abusing it is kinda fun although not really practical in the base game just yet.

 

I too found out that you can trick the tepidizer into running non-stop with a single tile of some other liquid.  It can be any liquid in fact.  It's best to use something that's 'heavier' then the liquid you're trying to pour onto the machine and trying to find out what's the heaviest takes a little trial and error.  Cold liquid chlorine is apparently useful for this particular situation as it has a thermal conductivity of basically nothing.  If you haven't already, check out this thread where I pour liquid phosphorus on tepidizers and burn them out to produce magma!  :p 

 

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On 6/22/2017 at 1:10 AM, Sevio said:

What is the purpose of the thermoregulators here? Seems to be supplemental cooling to the wheezeworts, but how are you cooling the regulators in the long term?

I had to put the thermoregulators in to cool the water down to acceptable temperatures, Without them the wheezeworts could only get it down to around 60 degrees which is far too hot to use comfortably.

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Okay I did a little tweaking and using knowledge from this thread.

 

and I've created a Much more efficient system that produces around 1600kg/cycle of clean water at around 25-30C with about 1/2 the energy needed.

As shown. the boiler Mk2 design take advantage of bridges to the extreme by layering water, gas and wire bridges as well as conductivity through the gas perm tiles. The system is passively cooled using feed water as the coolant (although the second stage uses an actively cooled system to bring water temperature down even further)

Better yet the system is much more compact than the previous design, All in all, a smashing success. It may even be possible to scale up operations and include a Second tepedizer to double output as the heat barely makes it 1/3 of the way past the cooling baffles.

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That's definitely an interesting design! Clever building to ensure heat transfer from steam that needs cooling to input water. How hot can you get the polluted input water in a steady state using this method?

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@Artizan

That is a really neat design, I like it!  A few thoughts though.

 

Connected wires/pipes (oddly) do not transfer heat among them themselves.  In ONI, only liquid or gases can transfer heat.  Even buildings sitting on tiles don't directly transfer heat to the tiles.  The heat as to go through either a gas or liquid first before moving into a tile.  Tiles, however, do share and transfer heat among themselves.   So, all that heavy watt wire and empty gas pipes in the middle don't really do anything.  Even the wire/pipe bridges don't transfer heat to the wires and pipes they're connected too, but the bridges themselves do move heat across the tiles they're going over which is why they're useful for moving heat.

 

Another thing to note.  Wheezeworts are most effective when processing a gas with high thermal capacity, much like with the regulators.  So, having them cool hydrogen instead of the normal air, should make each wheezewort destroy 2.4 times more heat.  My thought would be to put them inside a sealed hydrogen box with granite tiles for the ceiling and wire bridges and let the water flow over the top of it.  Something like that.

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10 hours ago, The Flying Fox said:

@Artizan

That is a really neat design, I like it!  A few thoughts though.

 

Connected wires/pipes (oddly) do not transfer heat among them themselves.  In ONI, only liquid or gases can transfer heat.  Even buildings sitting on tiles don't directly transfer heat to the tiles.  The heat as to go through either a gas or liquid first before moving into a tile.  Tiles, however, do share and transfer heat among themselves.   So, all that heavy watt wire and empty gas pipes in the middle don't really do anything.  Even the wire/pipe bridges don't transfer heat to the wires and pipes they're connected too, but the bridges themselves do move heat across the tiles they're going over which is why they're useful for moving heat.

 

Another thing to note.  Wheezeworts are most effective when processing a gas with high thermal capacity, much like with the regulators.  So, having them cool hydrogen instead of the normal air, should make each wheezewort destroy 2.4 times more heat.  My thought would be to put them inside a sealed hydrogen box with granite tiles for the ceiling and wire bridges and let the water flow over the top of it.  Something like that.

 

Interesting idea, I'll give it a shot. This design is limited by how hot the inlet water is and since most polluted water you find is >30 degrees the output water can't be any cooler than it. Your idea works, I can probably do away with the active cooling section and save even more power.

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Okay, I've further refined the design by adding a second tepedizer which allows the pump to run at full capacity creating 10kg/s of steam and producing around 2400kg/cycle of water. The wheezewort/hydrogen/bridge cooling system in combination with feedwater cooling drops the end product down to just under 30 degrees which is almost perfect. If the wheezewort cooling track was to be extended it probably could get it down to the ideal 20 degrees no problems.

 

While designing this I also stumbled onto the wonderful use of wheezeworts as a dedicated base cooling mechanism when set up in an enclosed space with bridges leading out.

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Impressive! 10 kg/s of steam is no small throughput. What is the temperature of your input water and output water at the beginning and end of your radiator?

I've been working on my thermoregulator boiler design as well to increase throughput. It will never reach the throughput of a pure tepidizer-only design, but adding a heat exchanger between input water and outgoing steam as in your build has helped a lot. I'm sending 26.9C polluted water into the heat exchanger and it comes out at ~59 C, the clean water leaves at 65 C.

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2 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Impressive! 10 kg/s of steam is no small throughput. What is the temperature of your input water and output water at the beginning and end of your radiator?

I've been working on my thermoregulator boiler design as well to increase throughput. It will never reach the throughput of a pure tepidizer-only design, but adding a heat exchanger between input water and outgoing steam as in your build has helped a lot. I'm sending 26.9C polluted water into the heat exchanger and it comes out at ~59 C, the clean water leaves at 65 C.

The input water is around 30 degrees. and the output water is just below that, but after running it a few cycles the temperature was creeping up so I think it will probably stabilise at around 35 degrees. the trick I use to keep the inlet water from overheating is just to have alot of it really.

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54 minutes ago, Artizan said:

10kg/s of steam and producing around 2400kg/cycle of water

Well the tepidizer on its own is an exploit, and 2400 kg/cycle of water at 30 C from steam requires 1.17 MW of heat removed continuously. That would be almost 38 kW per wheezewort, and that's more than twice their best performance in hydrogen - so I assume cooling runs on some kind of exploit too, even if unintentionally.

And if we're ok with using exploits, then it can be made much smaller.

Also, the wires in your design do nothing. There's no heat conducted along wires or pipes, except heat carried by contents or surrounding gases/liquids/solids. The wire/pipe bridges do help, though, as they are in contact with environment in all three tiles they cover.

 

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47 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

Well the tepidizer on its own is an exploit, and 2400 kg/cycle of water at 30 C from steam requires 1.17 MW of heat removed continuously. That would be almost 38 kW per wheezewort, and that's more than twice their best performance in hydrogen - so I assume cooling runs on some kind of exploit too, even if unintentionally.

And if we're ok with using exploits, then it can be made much smaller.

Also, the wires in your design do nothing. There's no heat conducted along wires or pipes, except heat carried by contents or surrounding gases/liquids/solids. The wire/pipe bridges do help, though, as they are in contact with environment in all three tiles they cover.

 

Yeah I tried earlier with a purely wheezewort design and it was being overwhelmed by the heat which is why I only use it as a second stage cooler to get the temperature down further. The bulk of the cooling is done by feeding dirty water into the system.

Interesting point about the wires and pipes though, I guess they are superfluous. Although they Do act as thermal mass that can delay overheating to an extent.

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52 minutes ago, Artizan said:

Interesting point about the wires and pipes though, I guess they are superfluous. Although they Do act as thermal mass that can delay overheating to an extent.

Thermal mass has only effect while the temperature is changing. After some time running the machine, things will have constant temperature at each point and the thermal mass will have no effect.

56 minutes ago, Artizan said:

The bulk of the cooling is done by feeding dirty water into the system.

Okay, I neglected that. You may be right about it, there doesn't have to be an exploit in your cooler. Though the first stage of cooling then depends a lot on temperature of the polluted water you send in. I'm a bit confused by your pipe radiator though, you seem to be sending already heated water back at the end of first cooling stage where the water is already relatively cold and should be colder than the water in the radiator.

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One more comment to your design: mesh and gas permeable tiles don't conduct heat between neighboring tiles. They're only in contact with the "ambient medium" in them, i.e. the gas or liquid. A gas permeable tile containing vacuum is perfect heat insulator, better than abyssalite. The heat transfer between polluted water and the cooled water in your design is going only through the bridges and whatever gas is left there in the permeable tiles, the material of the tile only acts as thermal mass again.

Here's a small experiment I ran, there's vacuum in that permeable tile and the temperatures of water on the left and right didn't change at all. Below is a granite tile separating the two waters and it has already transferred measurable heat between the two. Water on the left had 6.9 C and water on the right had 96.9 C initially. 

Granite has greater conductivity than any gas you may fill your permeable tile with, so granite tiles are your best choice.

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Edit: I compared granite tile to gas permeable containing 2 kg of hydrogen and the granite tile won.

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32 minutes ago, Sevio said:

How about a mesh tile filled with water? Does the granite tile win?

You cannot separate polluted water and clean water pools with a mesh tile filled with either type of water. If you can prevent the two waters to mix, you don't have to use the mesh tile, just put water on water.

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Ah, it wasn't so much for separating water/polluted water but more wondering if granite could transfer heat faster from one tile of water to another, or if just another tile of water would do better.

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19 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Ah, it wasn't so much for separating water/polluted water but more wondering if granite could transfer heat faster from one tile of water to another, or if just another tile of water would do better.

Since you're essentially moving the heat from one water body to another, putting them right side by side is definitely the best approach as there's no mediator slowing the heat transfer down.

In general, though, either type of water has worse thermal conductivity than granite. Water: 0.609 W/m/K, Polluted water: 0.58 W/m/K, granite: 3.39 W/m/K. So using water filled mesh tile to conduct heat from e.g. one gas on one side to other gas on the other side is worse than using granite tiles.

I'm however not very sure about what exact formulas does the game use when calculating heat transfer. The measure of distance in these constants has no clear sense in context of ONI.

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While it would result in needing a different arrangement of space wheezeworts work SIGNIFICANTLY better when chained in a staircase fashion so that the output gas from the top of one wheezewort is absorbed immediately into the input of the next wheezewort's bottom tile.

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Okay, so it sounds like my initial thought was correct. When building a pipe system to heat up polluted water, it's best to have the pipes running through as many granite tiles as possible.

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