Broad cooling concepts

[dupeMatt]

Long time lurker, first time poster  I'm looking for some advice - not specific solutions to specific problems as such but more a general approach to cooling.

Fundamentally, do you:

• take a cold thing and run it into multiple hot things
• run a coolant between the cold thing and multiple hot things
• run separate loops of coolant/cold things through/into separate hot things

Example - I have a cool slush geyser, and an AETN. I need to condense a cool steam geyser that feeds electrolyzers, cool a metal refinery, cool a plastic polymer press room, and occasionally top up with cold pwater the bath an aquatuner sits in which sporadically cools my bristle blossom water supplies.

Further I can make use of about a kilo/s of hot pwater in a pincha peppernut farm, the rest can go to a water sieve, once through the aquatuner, and then into the bristle blossom fresh water tank.

 

Currently I'm building toward a solution which sees a tank of cool pwater built around the cool slush geyser. This can be further cooled by putting a loop between the AETN and the cool pwater tank. When this cool tank heats to over 60c the contents are pumped to a "hot" pwater tank and onward to peppernuts/water sieve - the slush geyser then topping back up with fresh sub-zero pwater.

A coolant loop of crude oil runs between the cold pwater tank and the cool steam geyser to condense that, and I'm now looking to extend that crude oil loop to cool a metal refinery too - though I'm unsure of the "lumpy" usage of coolant typified by the metal refinery, perhaps I should use a separate loop? Perhaps I should also use this loop to cool the aquatuner bath rather than topping up that bath with cool pwater as I pump the hot stuff out? I'd quite like to use this loop to cool a plastic press room too, though the coolant might be dangerously close in temperature to the melting point of plastic.

 

Do people end up designing individual cooling solutions for each area or is a grand unified cooling solution possible? How would you condense a cool steam geyser, cool a metal refinery & a plastic press with a slush geyser, an aetn, and a small use for hot pwater?

[wimpb]

Coming up with new approaches is part of the fun in ONI, but to the specific problem of feeding electrolyzers from a cool steam vent, I use the output of the electrolyzer to condense the steam. In my case, I built the electrolyzers and pump room underneath the geyser with some conductive tiles in-between. Since the output temp of the electrolyzer gases is 70C, the conductive tiles are cooled enough to condense the steam.

[Craigjw]

I typically place 5 vats and a pump around a slush geyser and seal it up with insulated tiles, this way, there is ample storage for the geyser to output at it's average output constantly.  I take this output and run it through a heat exchange made from gold tiles and pipes.  The heat exchange cools water to about 20c.  Exiting the heat exchange, the Polluted water is now around ~40-50c.  I send this warm PW to a couple of refineries, which make steel (outputs hot PW at 85-95c) The hot PW is sent to seives which output clean water to be cooled by the heat exchange.

The heat exchange has grown larger over time to the point that it's too efficient.  I have a cool steam vent, which outputs 95c water.  I mix this into the heat exchange also.

The total output is about 4kg/s of cold water, which feeds everything.  Any excess water I produce gets sent to the surface and electrolyzed into Hydrogen used for extra power gen.

[fishoutofwater]

16 hours ago, dupeMatt said:

How would you condense a cool steam geyser, cool a metal refinery & a plastic press with a slush geyser, an aetn, and a small use for hot pwater?

My approach is going to be, sealed off cool slush geyser and provide a big tank with pump for cold pw, then

1. to condense cool steam geyser, run the cold pw from slush geyser through radiant pipe with combination of liquid pipe thermo sensor set to above 80C and liquid shutoff, then sent the 80C pw to water sieve

2. to cool a metal refinery, same like above but in a loop, or instead I could run the cold PO2 in my pw tank

3. to cool plastic press, sealed off the press room, run the petro in radiant pipe through the room before it enter the press, that way I destroy the heat from the press

I hope you understand my poor english.

[Craigjw]

4 wheezes will suffice to cool a steam geyser.   You can cool what ever you like with the PW after the coldness has been used for water, so you can still use it for the steam geyser.  I'm just saying that there is a more practical use for the coldness.

From 1 slush geyser, if I provide only water at 40c, I can get up to 7kg/s of water at 20c.  This is a massive power saving over using aquatuners.

There really isn't much point in running a loop on the refinery, you can do that, but the gain is small.  The loop works well if you are using the refinery for non-steel recipes, but soon as you switch to steel, the output is too high temperature to do anything reasonable with.

Because of the rate at which lime can be made, the rate at which steel can be made isn't that limited by the rate of refill from the slush PW.

I've spent quite a lot of time working out a system for my refinery running on PW.  It has a buffer storage, so that when it's not in use, it fills up storage ready for refinery use.  It also has a buffer storage for refinery output to the seive.  both are necessary for optimal performance.

It has input from other sources of PW that are clean, such as Nat gas generator/petrol generator.  I have another slush geyser which I use for cooling a gold volcano, the PW output from this is sent around my base to a pepper farm and a fertilizer plant, any excess is sent to the refinery and used for generally cooling the refinery on it's way.

 

[Angpaur]

1 hour ago, Craigjw said:

4 wheezes will suffice to cool a steam geyser.

Yeah but only up to ~0.5kg/s of avarage steam production if you want its temperature to be cooled to 90^oC.

For geysers with higher output you need more wheezes.

[Craigjw]

I should have added, in most cases.

As long as the geyser isn't going over pressure, the output will be inline with the calculated average.  The geyser I have outputs at 3.8kg/s of steam,  I'm using 5 wheezes.  Admittedly it's starting to break near the end of it's active cyce, but it was made in a rush at cycle 70, but it's never gone over pressure and has lasted 800 cycles.  I never got round to fixing it as it never broke.

[Angpaur]

Number of wheezworts needed to cool down a steam vent is strictly related with the vent avarage output and target temperature you want the steam coold down to.

You cannot just pluck this number out of the air. It will vary depending on steam vent so even if you added "in most cases" you are still wrong, because how you will know what are vent properties in most cases? You just assume that everybody has same vent like you have?

You should provide people with some math calculations to show how to determine the wheezworts number.

[Craigjw]

You don't need calculations, it's called trial and error.

I just add a liquid lock, preferably out of oil.  I fill it with hydrogen and weezes, if it breaks I add more weezes.

It's a simple process and requires a lot less brain power, which I conserve for more important things.

[Angpaur]

Ok. So you go waste time on trial and error.

I would rather spend a short time doing some math, so I already know how many wheezworts I need.

[Nitroturtle]

Condensing cool steam with wheezeworts always seemed like a waste of wheezeworts to me.  I just use any of the random pools of ~30C pwater found on the map, and pump them into a cooling loop.  Once it reaches ~95C it goes into a sieve and then dumped into the geyser chamber for additional cooling.  I've found that this consumes the pwater very slowly and I've never had an issue keeping it supplied with coolant.

Spoiler

 

[Craigjw]

That's the point of the liquid lock, I don't waste time.  The lock is there from construction, I don't dismantle it, so the only extra time I spend is removing the sealing tile, placing a wheeze and replacing the seal tile.  I don't need to think about this, it's really easy and a lot easier than doing the math, which in my, I have a major case of CBA with.

I sometimes also have a backup cooling pipe in the steam chamber, just to take the load off the weezes.

End of the day, it's down to personal preference.  If you enjoy doing the math, then good for you.

[Lurve]

On 12/16/2018 at 7:23 AM, dupeMatt said:

Long time lurker, first time poster  I'm looking for some advice - not specific solutions to specific problems as such but more a general approach to cooling.

[...]

Do people end up designing individual cooling solutions for each area or is a grand unified cooling solution possible? How would you condense a cool steam geyser, cool a metal refinery & a plastic press with a slush geyser, an aetn, and a small use for hot pwater?

I prefer lots of local cooling systems, with different cooling mechanisms depending on what resources are nearby. 

My current game has an open bathroom loop - the pwater dumps into a small cistern with an aquatuner cooling my bristle blossoms.  It fills faster than it heats, so I pump the excess at ~90C to be sieved and dumped into the clean water tank.  I don't bother cooling the clean water or heating the pwater further, as the efficiency wouldn't be worth the complication.

My refinery system uses multiple chained refineries with oil as their coolant and heat dump.  Uses more space, but so much simpler!  Oil (100C) -> refinery (hot) -> refinery (Hot!) -> oil refinery (75C) -> refinery (hot) -> refinery (Hot!) -> Petroleum gen (deleted).  I'm using dreckos for plastic this game, but if I wanted some polymer presses, I'd cool them with a loop just after the oil refinery step and feed them with Hot! petroleum.

I have a slush geyser that I'm just starting to make use of for pepperbread.  I was hoping to warm the peppers enough with the sieve and fertilizer maker but they don't quite get there, so I tossed out a pwater loop to a nearby gold volcano that I'd left exposed all game so far.  The coolant seems to be making a difference; we'll see in a couple hundred cycles who wins.

[beowulf2010]

6 hours ago, Craigjw said:

End of the day, it's down to personal preference.  If you enjoy doing the math, then good for you.

Yep. And I like playing with Excel so I made a spreadsheet to do the math for me. 

In my experience, 4 to 5 Wheezeworts are just about perfect. 

This all being said, I've been using Nitroturtle'system the past few games due to low Wheezewort counts on my more recent maps. 

Works really well with the only downside being having to run a couple of weird and occasionally long pipe/wire runs to get the polluted water to the steam vent. 

[dupeMatt]

Thank you folks! This has been really instructional, given me lots of new ideas, and - key - shown that everyone else goes through the same thing of trying multiple different solutions & finding multiple different solutions have multiple different pros & cons.

This base I have continued the crude oil loop and it's been working really well so far. Which is what I always think just before it starts really not working well at all. One ring to cool them all

Cool slush tank:

Spoiler

Coolant loop on the right, as yet uncompleted infrastructure for further AETN cooling loop on the left, automation pumps out if temp > 50c and level over the hydro sensor

First stop - condensing cool steam:

Spoiler

This seems to add 5-10c to the coolant when the geyser is active

Next stop is the plastic press:

Spoiler

Having been burnt(!) by polymer press heat before I threw a couple of wheezeworts in the room, overall coolant seems to gain another 5c on a continually running press

Finally the metal refinery:

Spoiler

Steel adds ~140c to the coolant, the bridge priorities ensure that filling the refinery takes priority over continuing on the loop and then the exit buffer tank gets priority access back onto the ring. As of QoL1 release this seems to run happily without further sensors necessary, coping with 20+ queues of steel/iron/gold.

Coolant now heads back into the cool slush tank, worst case it's now at ~210c