Solar panels are a significant power loss for me

[Gus Smedstad]

8 hours ago, lee1026 said:

Build a steam turbine. Build a cooling loop with petrol where the entire bunker doors gets cooled by the hot chamber of a steam turbine setup. Steam turbines will delete heat anytime where the hot chamber gets above 226c, so the temperature will hit 226c in the surprisingly short run on the bunker doors. Steel autominers can take 275c, so the falling regolith cools the steel autominers.

In general, if you are cooling steel and spending energy in the process, you are doing it wrong - the steam turbine makes any heat source over 500C an asset.

I believe you mean "any heat source over 500 K", not 500 C. Since steel can't deal with 500 C, but the minimum temperature for a steam turbine is 500 K, which is 227 C.

I need to look into this. I've got my heat problem under  control after insulating the tiles around the robo miners, but it'd be good to do something significantly more energy efficient.

I'm currently using a heat exchange loop from the aquatuners to boil water for steam. I've been using it to fuel my steam rocket, or venting it to space at 200 C if I've reached my steam storage limit and still need to cool the aquatuners. The boilers have a temperature control so I can adjust the steam output to any temperature I like (below 275 ish, obviously, since the gas pumps are steel).

In hindsight, I probably should have used the coolant loop from the miners directly in the boiler. I wasn't really thinking about how much heat the steel miners could safely withstand. I've been thinking in terms of my prior cooling systems, where the goal was to keep things at room temperature or below (i.e. sleet wheat).

1 hour ago, Gamma17 said:

 

valves on robo-miners are set to 20g/s, shutoffs only open when bunker doors are closed to avoid interfering with scanners and panels.

I really can't tell what you're doing there from that screen shot, aside from the robo miners being upside down and attached to some airlock doors. How they get cooled isn't clear to me.

[Cookiematico]

44 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I really can't tell what you're doing there from that screen shot, aside from the robo miners being upside down and attached to some airlock doors. How they get cooled isn't clear to me.

He uses radiant pipes to cool them down? Though since its vacuum just a bit of an air vent under the robo miner releasing 40 celcius air is usually enough to reduce the heat of the miner significantly to a steady 80 degrees. Upside down also prevents it from touching any regolith at any time unless you have amassed tons of it (in that case manually mine it)

[Gamma17]

5 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I really can't tell what you're doing there from that screen shot, aside from the robo miners being upside down and attached to some airlock doors. How they get cooled isn't clear to me.

Sorry, it is obviously clear to me, but must be not obvious when you have not built it.

Essentially, robo-miner is built on airlock door upside-down high enough above mesh tile layer to guarantee that when regolith falls it does not touch robo-miner. When bunker doors start to open, airlocks open for long enough time for them to fully open and regolith to fall through on mesh tiles. Then airlocks close, allowing robo-miners to work, then they open to remove scaner/panel interference. For cooling, robo-miners are surrounded by some drywalls to keep gases from immediately disappearing into space and each time bunker doors close 20g/s of oxygen is vented from vents around robo-miners. I used 2 lines simply because they go from different sources and each of them may or may not have spare oxygen to vent at specific moment. Each line is limited by 120g/s valve and closed by shutoff controlled by automation controlling bunker doors. overall amount of gas vented is very small, and it feels like flow rate can be further reduced because temperatures are far too low even for steel. Most of robo-miners here are thermium simply because i used them before i thought about how to cool them for a long time, but 2 of them are steel and there are no issues with that. I suppose they can be built out of iron and still work, since valves are built out of iron ore and never overheated.

I did not bother building any system to pick regolith or iron up, because debris do not cause any issues and if dupes need iron or have spare time they can get it manually.

[WanderingKid]

8 hours ago, lee1026 said:

Our OP is trying to keep the miners cool by using coolant and an aquatuner. He said that it works but just takes too much power.

 

The solution is of course to dump the heat into an steam turbine directly, because now you get power for that, and quite a bit of it if memory serves, even if I am not precisely measuring it.

Please show pics of non-thermite, non-sandbox method of what you're proposing.  What you're explaining, to me, is what to do with the heat AFTER your miners and sweepers are done repairing.

Turbine's are a fine choice for thermite solutions.  They're useless to protect from steel and gold overheating equipment.  Just load hot regolith into a steel loader with its limited processing speed and it should show a pristine example of overheating. 

[Oozinator]

For me all that setup is too much, to get solar running.
I used open ranch with shinebug solar power, but their light is soo bright (still).

 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

IMO, I find it still better to just have duplicants dig out the regolith. It really saves so much trouble and reduces power consumption significantly. Automation is great, but just like in real world you have to put manual labour in comparison and see which solution is more cost effective.

[Mullematsch]

1 hour ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

IMO, I find it still better to just have duplicants dig out the regolith. It really saves so much trouble and reduces power consumption significantly. Automation is great, but just like in real world you have to put manual labour in comparison and see which solution is more cost effective.

I guess you choose to not use doors for automatic regolith destroying because that is easy to set up and takes no power & dupe power. 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

21 minutes ago, Mullematsch said:

I guess you choose to not use doors for automatic regolith destroying because that is easy to set up and takes no power & dupe power. 

10 points for you. Good guess on the resource cost and labour to put in the doors in the first place btw.

[Gus Smedstad]

4 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

Just load hot regolith into a steel loader with its limited processing speed and it should show a pristine example of overheating. 

It's quite possible to handle very hot materials with steel auto sweepers, if you're actively cooling the auto sweeper, because the heat doesn't transfer instantly.

I say this because I've got a copper volcano where the hot copper drips into water, and gets picked up by a steel auto sweeper immediately. The sweeper is partially immersed in 15 C water, and it never heats up appreciably. The water and a metal heat sink below it are cooled by a heat exchanger from an aquatuner.

Now, it's true that I don't know exactly how hot the newly solidified copper is. Maybe it's cooled faster than I think it is, and it's below 275 C when it gets picked up. I wanted to check this before posting, but my volcano is currently dormant so I can't watch it to see.

I'm currently in the process of switching my miner cooling setup to use the coolant to heat steam directly, instead of using a pair of aquatuners. Once I've got that up and running to my satisfaction I'll convert one of the miners to allow direct contact with the falling regolith and see how that works out.

[Mullematsch]

8 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

10 points for you. Good guess on the resource cost and labour to put in the doors in the first place btw.

I mean it takes like 2-3 cycles and costs maybe like 30t of metal to cover the whole map. You can even use steel which is free of space and all the random eggs you get. 

I can understand not wanting to use it because you consider it an exploit but you can't argue that digging up regolith continuously is an efficient way to use dups:

 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

Just now, Mullematsch said:

I mean it takes like 2-3 cycles and costs maybe like 30t of metal to cover the whole map. You can even use steel which is free of space and all the random eggs you get. 

I can understand not wanting to use it because you consider it an exploit but you can't argue that digging up regolith continuously is an efficient way to use dups:

 

It takes a lot longer than just 2-3 cycles. If you have the resources near it and you do optimize pathing, getting  it across the whole width of the map will at the very least, and this an optimistic guess, a dozen cycles.

Aside that, 30 ton of metal ore is actually a lot. I already invest a lot of it in heavi watt wire. Other people have other preferences for it. I wouldn't go so easily over 30 ton.

2 duplicants on the other hand are perfectly able to dig out the regolith within half a cycle, if you have tubular transit and access point near the surface. I solved that by basically turning the gravitas facility in a surface colony base, housing a work crew of duplicants to build the solar panel/bunker door ring. So the duplicants are infact already there! It's a lot more efficient than you perhaps think.

[Mullematsch]

3 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

It takes a lot longer than just 2-3 cycles. If you have the resources near it and you do optimize pathing, getting  it across the whole width of the map will at the very least, and this an optimistic guess, a dozen cycles.

Aside that, 30 ton of metal ore is actually a lot. I already invest a lot of it in heavi watt wire. Other people have other preferences for it. I wouldn't go so easily over 30 ton.

2 duplicants on the other hand are perfectly able to dig out the regolith within half a cycle, if you have tubular transit and access point near the surface. I solved that by basically turning the gravitas facility in a surface colony base, housing a work crew of duplicants to build the solar panel/bunker door ring. So the duplicants are infact already there! It's a lot more efficient than you perhaps think.

Sounds like it might take less time than I thought, especially if you have dups basically living there and optimized their pathing.

I personally just automate everything I can even if it takes more time getting it set up than it would ever save me. Just for fun and personal preference I guess.

In my current world I am also using basically no heavy wire cable at all so metal is not really a concern for me but everyone can play how they want.

Just wanted to point out for other people that you can build a minimalistic automated design for regolith. 

 

[chemie]

On 3/5/2019 at 10:56 AM, Gus Smedstad said:

Steel doesn't work fine. Either you let your robo miners get buried, in which case they heat up to 300 C and take damage, or you give them overhead protection and they overheat because they generate heat and can't shed it.

I guess one approach would be to protect them from regolith, and then live with destroying them and reconstructing them any time they hit 275. 

As I said, you can cool thermium miners by letting them get buried by 300 C regolith, but I'm a long, long way from thermium, and I need to deal with keeping my roof clear with what I have. At this point I'm using steam rockets to do science missions.

 

Why not setup like this? Steel miner, which will gain about 2C each time they run.  This gives you at least 100 cycles, likely more, before needing to either rebuild or replace with thermium.  Regular blast doors above, set at the red line so only 2 tiles worth of regolith drops.  No need to touch the regolith after it is mined.  No cooling of miners.  Little power when they mine for a few seconds.  

(Tempera(Temperature shown there is after ~40 cycles)

 

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

13 hours ago, Mullematsch said:

Sounds like it might take less time than I thought, especially if you have dups basically living there and optimized their pathing.

I personally just automate everything I can even if it takes more time getting it set up than it would ever save me. Just for fun and personal preference I guess.

In my current world I am also using basically no heavy wire cable at all so metal is not really a concern for me but everyone can play how they want.

Just wanted to point out for other people that you can build a minimalistic automated design for regolith. 

 

I get why you want to automate it, don't get me wrong. Once the setup is done, either with doors or with robo miners, and said setup is not too energy hungry, it clearly frees up duplicant worktime. The final product obviously beats duplicant labour. But, for me personally, it's not worth the initial time and resource investment.

I also try to automate stuff. I am coming off the back of a very labour intensive colony which I am looking to automate. For instance, I'm currently looking into automating the whole food supply chain, with the exception of harvesting, cooking and delivery of wild grown sleet wheat. This is very doable because domestic grown plants can be very much centralized so you don't need large contraptions. That's the main issue I have with automated regolith processing: it has be done across the whole width of the map.

One of my friends suggested the developers changed things and have a moveable none-overheatable (or one with a gas intake and a gas release function) robo miner, which could not be burried, on a conveyer belt so that one robo miner would suffice through sliding itself across the width of the map and although I do find that a cool idea, it's again a matter of upfront costs of time and resources which would make me reject the solution. Not the idea, the idea is cool and should be available to people who want to use it if the developers pick up on that.

[tzionut]

Quote

The *easiest* solution I can see being developed is a new part that is simply there to conduct temperature between a machine and whatever it is you connect it to.  Similar to the way wire bridges can transfer heat/cold, something of that nature would help.

I have an easier solution. Put an input and output pipe for cooling for the robo miner, sensor and sweep arm. The coolant goes in, transfer x degrees and goes out. Paired whit am aquatuner.. and zero overheat problem...

[suicide commando]

On ‎05‎/‎03‎/‎2019 at 4:46 PM, chemie said:

I have solar panels in vacuum and no cooling , glass ceiling above and robo miners with no cooling on the ceiling....works fine.  as stated above  start with steel and switch to thermium.  the regolith actually cools the thermium robo miners.  zero cooling needed

Precisely my setup.

[Gus Smedstad]

A coolant loop using the coolant directly to make steam works fine. No need for those power-hungry aquatuners, which was the original point of starting this thread. I'm still venting the hot steam to space rather than trying to power a steam turbine. It's in my plans, but I've got other stuff that's more urgent before I undertake a project like that.

For a while the steam was useful in itself without a turbine, since I was launching steam rockets. I've finally move on to petrol rockets, so now I'm just venting the steam.

However, unprotected steel miners? That doesn't work. I tried putting one out as a test, and when it finally got covered in regolith, it immediately broke from heat damage. Exactly as I expected, but I wanted to verify that it'd heat up and break before the coolant and tempshift tiles could cool the regolith below 275.

Either you provide the miners overheat protection, or you cool the regolith while it's still on the blast doors. I'm exploring the latter.

I'm not sold on the approach of just letting the steel miners near redline and the re-build them. My miners are currently running at about 220 C, and not too long ago they were at 20 C, when was cooling them with an aquatuner rather than just letting the coolant reach high temperatures.

If I had thermium, cooling would be a non issue, but I don't. I'm still in the early stages of petrol rocket exploration, and haven't found anything beyond ingredients for insulation and super coolant. And only trivial amounts of the latter - I sure hope I found a source that gives me more than 1kg of fullerine per cargo bay, which translates to 100kg of super coolant.

[suicide commando]

That is why you put 2 bunker tiles above it, and 2 ceramic tiles for support. This way, it will never get buried, and while eventually it will overheat, it will do so after a long time, and by then you should have thermium to replace them, and you're done.

Oh and no, you'll not find fullerene in large amounts, it only appears in trace amounts, still it's about 150kg of super coolant per trip, if you're lucky and it's on one of your 10km planets, you can use a steam rocket with a solid booster to get there as well, easy trips, and less hassle with heat in your launch bay.
 

Once you've made a few trips, you should have plenty of super coolant to run a pair of steam turbines on 2 aquatuners with super coolant, which then in turn cool your launch bay and/or liquidize some O2 and H2 coming out of some electrolysers.

 

[Gus Smedstad]

RE: unprotected miners, I'm referencing Neotuck's design, which I'd seen before and he linked on the first page of this thread. I just don't see how that could ever work with steel miners. Thermium ones sure, but not steel.

Lee also claimed you could let steel miners get covered with regolith. It's just not true.

Fade and Nakomaru both suggested cooling the regolith while it's still on the bunker doors. I just tried that - while I could get most of it below 275, some of it was well north of 320 when the doors opened and it dropped. It might work if I added a delay so the bunker doors don't open immediately after the meteor shower ends. It was the most recent couple of strikes that were still hot.

The one positive is that regolith does cool relatively quickly, because it has a low specific heat (0.2). It has a moderate thermal conductivity (1.0) but I'm not sure that matters when in contact with radiant gold pipes. I think the way it works is that normal tiles / pipes consider both mediums for thermal conductivity, but insulated ones use the lowest, and radiant pipes use the highest.

[Tonyroid]

EDIT: I see other people have already pointed some of this out...

This is all very clever but don't stress out about it because these solutions are all temporary anyway.

In the late game you get access to thermium. A thermium robominer doesn't overheat until it gets to 1000 degrees and when regolith falls on it it cools it down for you (to 300-ish degrees). I put a row of them across the entire map close enough together that they can dig each other out and never had one overheat for at least 500 cycles.

No need for cooling, no automation, no (extraneous) power use. Everything is 100% transparent to light. Once you can do it, you'll just tear out all your old stuff anyway.

Getting the thermium takes some time, but that's synonymous with what it means to get to the late game.

(BTW: I also put sweepers (made of thermium) across the entire map to pick up the regolith and feed like a million shove voles. I had conveyor loaders overheat a few times, but that was because I had them running non-stop at first to clear 1000's of tons of regolith.)

(ALSO: You guys are leaving a lot of power on the table. A solar panel reaches it's peak output with only 4 tiles width exposed to the light. So you can get tons more power if you arrange them in a pyramid.)

[Cookiematico]

9 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Either you provide the miners overheat protection, or you cool the regolith while it's still on the blast doors. I'm exploring the latter

 

I still dont get it why you have to cool down the regolith if you maximize the range of the robominer. No need to be high near the red line: regolith showers should never reach the height towards the robominer to heat it up, if you properly tune everything up. And with a simple oxygen output vent near the robovent, you prevent it from overheating it in the first place. All you need is steel robominers. (and ive never seen the blast doors reach above 300 after 800 turns)

Unless you let regolith pile up for like, multiple meteor showers, it should never reach the height of 7-8 blocks. The only issue you might have at the start is not sufficient power so the bunker doors opens slowly, but with that amount of solar panels that becomes a nonissue. And since regolith stays on the mesh tile in vacuum, it wont impact anything negatively.

[chemie]

9 hours ago, Cookiematico said:

I still dont get it why you have to cool down the regolith if you maximize the range of the robominer. No need to be high near the red line: regolith showers should never reach the height towards the robominer to heat it up, if you properly tune everything up. And with a simple oxygen output vent near the robovent, you prevent it from overheating it in the first place. All you need is steel robominers. (and ive never seen the blast doors reach above 300 after 800 turns)

Unless you let regolith pile up for like, multiple meteor showers, it should never reach the height of 7-8 blocks. The only issue you might have at the start is not sufficient power so the bunker doors opens slowly, but with that amount of solar panels that becomes a nonissue. And since regolith stays on the mesh tile in vacuum, it wont impact anything negatively.

why put batteries in a vacuum so you then need drywall, h2, weeze cooling?  it is easy to have batteries inside, no cooling and a short heavy watt tie in

[Nitroturtle]

10 hours ago, Tonyroid said:

(ALSO: You guys are leaving a lot of power on the table. A solar panel reaches it's peak output with only 4 tiles width exposed to the light. So you can get tons more power if you arrange them in a pyramid.)

While the point remains valid, I think this is factually incorrect.  Unless something has changed, it takes 9 tiles exposed to max daylight (80k lux max per tile = 720k total) according to this thread: (obviously this means 10 tiles exposed since you can't cover half a layer of the panel)

 

[Cookiematico]

1 hour ago, chemie said:

why put batteries in a vacuum so you then need drywall, h2, weeze cooling?  it is easy to have batteries inside, no cooling and a short heavy watt tie in

Was a leftover really from a previous build, so might as well toss it there

[JohnFrancis]

1 hour ago, Nitroturtle said:

While the point remains valid, I think this is factually incorrect.  Unless something has changed, it takes 9 tiles exposed to max daylight (80k lux max per tile = 720k total) according to this thread: (obviously this means 10 tiles exposed since you can't cover half a layer of the panel)

 

It has been tested pyramid shape is the best. Well before peak lux fully exposed solar panels max out. Solar panels with 5 tiles exposed do not at any point so this allows you to extract more energy. Don't know if solar was buffed but I am using pyramid and it works as advertised.