Self-cooling NG generators?

[Kasuha]

I tried to make a self-cooling natural gas generator power plant. Each generator produces "20 W" of heat, which after adding proper scaling translates to 4 kW. It also produces 67.5 g/s of polluted water. Adding that 4 kW into the 67.5 g should warm it up by approximately 10 C so assuming the water is produced at constant temperature, the generator should be able to cool itself with its own water production.

So I built (and ran) this.

So far I consider it a failure, even though nothing overheats - it's just too chaotic and I don't trust it. There are things in the play that I don't understand yet.

The top right generator is overheating the most. It certainly doesn't manage to cool itself with its polluted water but when it reached ~123 C for the first time, it changed the water to steam and that somehow cooled it down. Since then there's a mix of polluted water, water, steam, and carbon dioxide I originally filled the room with. Oh and a few tiles of vacuum that formed somehow.

Nothing is overheating or breaking but I'm not sure why does it heat up that much, and what does cool it down once it reaches the temperature needed to produce steam from the water.

So here you are, have a bit from my experience too. I'll probably try running it for a few more cycles, then I'll decide what I'll do with it.

 

[Coolthulhu]

Steam cooling things down suggests that your just don't have enough heat exchange from gases. As far as I recall, steam has pretty good conductivity, plus there is that extra layer of clean water to take heat off the generator and share it with the pwater and tiles below it.

I wouldn't be too sure about that constant temperature of outputs. My quick peek at the disassembled code seems to indicate that all energy generator outputs are generated using the same code and you can clearly see CO2 being generated at temperature of the generator. Compare to air scrubber, which explicitly sets output temperature at 40C.

You could try some aggressive cooling with the input natural gas, but that would more engineering for engineering's sake when you can just use the output of one air scrubber to cool down the entire installation (plus the scrubber), possibly without additional energy costs if you don't drip it but just pipe it in wolframite.

[Kasuha]

It did not occur to me that the NG generator may be producing water and CO2 at its own temperature but that's what really happens. In that case the chamber is doomed to fail eventually as there's nothing carrying the heat out but its own exhaust. I'm actually surprised it lasted that long and seems to have even stabilized, it does not make sense to me.

Funny thing, when hot enough, the generator produces polluted water that instantly changes to steam when it touches something.

[Sevio]

I was actually working on setting up my first fertilizer maker/Natural Gas array today. For cooling, the idea was to send polluted water in a radiator loop around the room to cool it. Some of it would be drawn into the fertilizer makers, some could be siphoned off as output to a polluted water boiler when it reached a sufficient temperature. The loop worked, although since it needs priority flow using bridges, it suffers from the temperature averaging bug that makes me wonder if it will ever reach a high temperature.

Then it turned out the carbon dioxide dump I thought I had, didn't actually work as well as I thought:

This one spawned naturally in the cave where I caged it and it ate all of the chlorine and hydrogen in there as I was building up. I thought that would make it a great carbon dioxide dump, but it's either not eating the carbon dioxide or do I just have more than it can chew?

[Coolthulhu]

Pretty sure the point was to cool the generator chamber using only its own inputs/outputs and nothing else.

You can easily cool down a gas setup by dripping water from scrubber on things. With input of (any temperature) polluted water and (any temperature) clean water you can destroy a ton of heat in a gas/fertilizer/scrubber loop.

[Kasuha]

Yep it works fine with scrubber water. Polluted water from them has constant 40 C so it can easily keep generators around 42 C.

Though I can't help but it feels as yet another exploit. I feed scrubbers 95 C geyser water and 42 C CO2 and they produce 40 C exhaust.

[Kermack]

I think that a level of exploitative component will need to exist so long as the the environment lacks a geothermal constant.  Perhaps their original intention to control heat was the voids, but since they've abandoned it they may be relying on artificial heat dumps that exist during points of transfer between buildings.

I wish the devs would add descriptions to all the items that destroy heat.

[Risu]

26 minutes ago, Kermack said:

Perhaps their original intention to control heat was the voids

Yeah, no.
 

[Kermack]

4 minutes ago, Risu said:

 

Yeah, no.
 

If I understand correctly the void was only meant to be small holes like geysers that you had to find.

[Risu]

1 minute ago, Kermack said:

If I understand correctly the void was only meant to be small holes like geysers that you had to find.

In worldgen\defaults.yaml change DrawWorldBorderTop to false. Generate a world and move upwards.
 

[Executive_Lurker]

27 minutes ago, Risu said:

Yeah, no.
 

Is this the beginning of a surface biome?

[Risu]

12 minutes ago, Executive_Lurker said:

Is this the beginning of a surface biome?

That's what the world gen would suggest. There is always a single area of the map where it extends high enough to meet the surface. Normally they place Neutronium there instead of the void. You can see this by the border being thicker at the top.

The clouds however are not functional without some patching, but that above is what happens when it's turned on.

Edit: You might have seen such surface entrances in vanilla worlds.

 

[Kermack]

Something about water serves as a heat sink I think, I saw a video where someone was trying to heat a small pool of water with batteries in a insulated room but the water never went above 30C while everything else went to scorching red.

Scratch that, it's not a sink if the objects around it just continue to heat up.  Some odd things to learn about I suppose.

[rezecib]

On 6/24/2017 at 6:06 AM, Sevio said:

This one spawned naturally in the cave where I caged it and it ate all of the chlorine and hydrogen in there as I was building up. I thought that would make it a great carbon dioxide dump, but it's either not eating the carbon dioxide or do I just have more than it can chew?

I see no evidence in the code that morbs consume anything, unless there is a bug in ElementEmitter.ForceEmit that causes it to replace the existing gas with the emitted one or something.

[Sevio]

Perhaps it did so with the chlorine (or there was just much less there than I thought), but I've come to realize that it's not eating the carbon dioxide. Guess there's no way around using water to get rid of it then.

[The Flying Fox]

7 hours ago, rezecib said:

I see no evidence in the code that morbs consume anything, unless there is a bug in ElementEmitter.ForceEmit that causes it to replace the existing gas with the emitted one or something.

This is what I've more or less found in my experiments.  Lock a morb into a small room with chlorine and all that happens is it gets compressed as the morb produces P-O2.  Same amount of chlorine you start with.  Morbs even produce P-O2 when you toss them into a vacuum and continue to do so until the room is 1000g.

 

The interesting thing is that I've seen cases where chlorine does disappear in the general area where I've kept morbs locked up in survival mode.  Like from a sealed room with no place for the chlorine to go.  It's.. odd to say the least.  I haven't figured out what's happening to it yet.  But yeah, maybe its getting destroyed due to the interactions between the three gases of P-O2, CO2, and Chlorine that tend to be in the same area.

 

Edit:  Speaking of the void, when you start to mess with the map gen, it literally takes over the map when you do something wrong. 

[bountygiver]

On ‎2017‎-‎06‎-‎24 at 0:09 PM, Kermack said:

If I understand correctly the void was only meant to be small holes like geysers that you had to find.

and that thing is actually possible to be used to control heat, just put your regulator array there and pump unwanted gas through it, and the gas should carry the excess heat with it into the void.

[Trego]

1 hour ago, bountygiver said:

and that thing is actually possible to be used to control heat, just put your regulator array there and pump unwanted gas through it, and the gas should carry the excess heat with it into the void.

He already said it was possible to use them to control heat.  I think his point was that voids wouldn't even be in the final release, supposedly.

[Whispershade]

I wonder pondering the Natural Gas Generators today and their propensity to produce polluted water and CO2 and their temperature. It occurred to me about the possibility of cooling the generator to produce coolant from the CO2 and polluted water. Because the heat it generates is not just in its own waste heat, but the temperature of its products?

[Trego]

1 hour ago, Whispershade said:

I wonder pondering the Natural Gas Generators today and their propensity to produce polluted water and CO2 and their temperature. It occurred to me about the possibility of cooling the generator to produce coolant from the CO2 and polluted water. Because the heat it generates is not just in its own waste heat, but the temperature of its products?

I tried cooling a NGG to around -200 Celsius and it appeared that the polluted water was still coming out at only -22 C.  It was too hard to figure out what was happening with the exhausted Co2. I feel ripped off.

[Coolthulhu]

5 hours ago, Whispershade said:

I wonder pondering the Natural Gas Generators today and their propensity to produce polluted water and CO2 and their temperature. It occurred to me about the possibility of cooling the generator to produce coolant from the CO2 and polluted water. Because the heat it generates is not just in its own waste heat, but the temperature of its products?

Polluted water has the highest heat capacity out of all common materials: 6 (J/g)/K. NG generator produces 67.5 g/s of it, so 67.5 g/s * 6 (J/g)/K = 405 (J/s)/K.

If I recall correctly, the heat produced by buildings is actually 20 times higher than shown. EDIT: It's 200. This would mean NGG produces 20W*200 = 4000W = 4 kJ/s.

So by dropping the temperature of the generator by 10K, you should make it produce polluted water cold enough to offset heat generated by another generator. Plus tip (CO2).

Now, it's not comparable to air scrubber deleting up to 250kJ of heat per second (if my math is correct), but it's pretty much free if one generator cools down the others.

4 hours ago, Trego said:

I tried cooling a NGG to around -200 Celsius and it appeared that the polluted water was still coming out at only -22 C.  It was too hard to figure out what was happening with the exhausted Co2. I feel ripped off.

Looks like it won't force it to change phase. I'd assume same happens to polluted water on the upper end of the temperature range. Could explain Kasuha's design stabilizing - if the temperature is clamped to something below 125C, the polluted water generated by 124.99C generators and dripping on them could be able to (unreliably) cool them down and keep them from overheating.

[Kasuha]

50 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

If I recall correctly, the heat produced by buildings is actually 20 times higher than shown.

Make that 200. Value is accurate internally but it is in kW while displayed as W, and divided by mass coefficient of buildings (5).

[Coolthulhu]

My bad, corrected

[Whispershade]

Would that mean that if you worked to cool one down to say -10C and used the result to cool another it would stick around 0C? And then you have double the output of polluted water at 0C to cool another generator, reducing how much that one was heating up compared to the previous in the chain, and so on? Sounds like a worthy use of a wheezewort to me.  I think I'll try this when I start relocating my power generation.