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Cooling tower (exploit free heat disposal)


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What I've got here is a low-tech cooling solution that removes heat from your asteroid without (a) steam turbines, (b) advanced materials, or (c) any exploits. By the time you have thermium and can heat your exhaust to 1000C, it will only need the exhaust of your power plant as a heat sink.

The concept is straightforward: superheat some kind of gas and exhaust it into space. I'm using CO2 from my generators, and steam when there isn't enough CO2 to use as exhaust. When I'm using water it really doesn't use much at all.

Don't fear the absurd scale, there are reasons. I built this and had it partially running at cycle 150, without atmo suits.

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Okay, first of all. This thing is power hungry, and we want CO2. We need lots of coal. Build yourself a feedlot ranch or two full of hatches. (Summary: get the five times the coal production for the number of creatures you're grooming, plus the same amount of food - just delayed 100 cycles)

Before you get access to petroleum (I don't have petroleum in this picture, just set up a few generators for later) this isn't nearly enough generation to run at full cooling load. You'd need something like twice this much.

Why not put the boiler right at the surface?

It's beneficial to keep the cooling tank in a central location, for a few different reasons. Very long cooling supply & return headers are bad for efficiency and game performance. But huge areas of flowing gas at a temperature gradient are bad for game performance too. Your choice.

If you put it right at the surface you don't need a wide tower like this, though. I've tried both ways now and I prefer this way.

The oil layer is key.

You want to run your automation on a temp sensor immersed in the oil, let more coolant in (CO2/pwater/salt water/sulphur/phosphorite/your choice)  at around 170C for a bank of gold ore A/Ts. If you don't have a pool of liquid at the bottom that's stable (has a high boiling point) and the A/Ts are sitting in a hot vapor atmosphere, they'll overheat more quickly and you'll be more wasteful of your coolant.

Why does it need to be so wide?

Mostly because it's not built on the surface. I tried one on the surface, i'll come back to that later.

This is how wide I think it needs to be to exhaust 4 A/Ts worth of heat and not back up a high pressure vent on over-pressure. I initially tried a setup where the CO2 went in through the doors on the left, but the automation is far too complicated for that. Better to slowly pump full some gas tanks and exhaust them in parallel to the boiler section.

Superheat your exhaust as much as possible.

As you upgrade your A/Ts from gold ore to steel to thermium, you'll generate less and less exhaust. You want that exhaust to be as hot as possible.

Automation

If the oil goes above 165C, choose a coolant and open up the supply until temperature goes back below 165C. (this temperature goes up first with steel and then thermium becoming available)

If the generator room is pressurized above 3000g, our gas reservoirs have filled up. Choose CO2 as the inlet.

Otherwise, choose pwater as the inlet. (the choice is made with an edge triggered latch)

Two pressure sensors in the boiler. If either goes above 19kg of pressure for more than 20s, open the outer doors. When both go below 10kg of pressure at the same time, immediately close outer doors.

Cooling loops

Really the A/Ts work in teams of two. The first pair circulates water from the cold tank then back as long as the tank is above 16C.

Each of the second pair feeds one cooling header. So, as long as we don't overdraw the system, the water going into our cooling headers is between 1C and 3C.

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Use packet stackers everywhere you can.

Looooooooong pipes with partial flow are very bad for game performance. Make sure to stack packets on your return headers, it'll save you some serious frames.

For reference, a packet stacker: (not my design, is this a quasar or a saturnus design?)

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Early duplicant choices

I had a total of 10 dupes in my colony and 4 of them were focused on excavation & construction. Having a dedicated gofer with high carry weight is very good too.

 

 

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10 hours ago, Siromatik said:

'why not using that heat to generate power, keeping mostly the same cooling power on the other side anyway... am I missing a thing ?

Mostly, low tech. A demonstration that you don't *need* a steam turbine.

10 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

What's the point in running coal power while releasing steam to space?

Coal power does not produce quite enough CO2 as a medium for exhaust. You need a 2nd source of exhaust material until you've ramped up petroleum generation & have enough thermium on hand to boost exhaust temps to 1100C. That 2nd exhaust medium can be about anything that vaporizes at a reasonably low temp. Phosphorite, sulphur, water, name it.

The goal is to operate the whole thing on waste materials (CO2 from generators), collecting the water instead of exhausting it, but that's going to need advanced materials first. I'll modify my posts once I reach that stage. I can't emphasize enough just how little pwater this process consumes when supplementing with exhaust from generators.

To cool that bigass cold tank (it's a 100 ton tank) from 85C to 16C I used a small puddle of pwater, about 10 tons. The key here is superheat - this cooling plant reduces its exhaust by heating to higher temps. A steam turbine doesn't benefit at all from heating the working fluid any more than absolutely necessary. But it's hard to compare the two for other reasons.

 

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13 minutes ago, avc15 said:

Mostly, low tech. / I built this and had it partially running at cycle 150

Fair point. You can still add them later on anyway.

7 hours ago, avc15 said:

Don't fear the absurd scale

I think i did ahah.
I prefer to grab a bit of plastic on pets somewhere (still 200kg?) than digging that much.
Maybe I didnt meet an hard map and got stuck on that point to be attracted.
Need to give a try on your way to do for my next run, let it run and end the build later, will see ;)

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After upgrading to steel components: running at 50% load & heating exhaust to 320C, this system would need 5kg/sec of co2 for exhaust. 7 coal generators will run nearly full time but producing only 140g/sec. 3 petrol generators will produce 1.5kg/sec, still not enough.

After upgrading components to thermium, & replacing the oil with something better for high temp operation - heating exhaust to 1100c, we need only 2.6 kg/sec of CO2 for 100% load, but I won't get this to full load. 3 petroleum generators plus whatever natgas I can get on the way should be enough.

Just need to find out if my map has 2 oil wells. Found & set up just one so far.

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5 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

The liquid bead pump can net you this quite easily.

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Here's the archived forum post (see page 2)

 

 

Very cool idea.

In this case since CO2 is actually about the worst specific heat capacity for this purpose, really I'm only using CO2 because it already happens to be a byproduct of the petrol generators I'm planning on building.

 

The second best option is literally any kind of water, because it has such a high specific heat capacity. What's interesting though is that because an oil well gives you 3.3 grams of crude oil at 90 C per gram of water you pump in, by using crude oil from and oil well you end up using about 1/3 less water. so crude oil to superheated sour gas lines up being the most effective choice. That I've found so far, anyway.

 

I'll update this post as the build progresses, but it won't be done really until like maybe cycle 2000.

But the concept was a low-tech industrial cooler without the use of a steam turbine, so its fourth form isn't really the main point. Just added bonus.

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2nd form: steel machinery, more power. Finally made the leap to exosuits so, diamond tempshift plates everywhere. Hotter exhaust - 315C, 60% less total exhaust (70% less water use). No major changes, 3rd form should see something a bit different.

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But now, even with those 10 generators being tuned up constantly - man, I'm burning through coal at breakneck speeds. There's definitely a time limit for the switch to petroleum, as I can see my reserves of hatch feed dwindling a bit too fast. This ranch ain't small scale -

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This is aridio. Things are still hot, we've just made them a bit less hazardous and enabled our machinery to keep running. Comfort is a long way off still.

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Aaaand, this is more what I had in mind, we're getting there:

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Gradually less water in that mix as exhaust temps go up.

And here's the automation I settled on, source of coolant is chosen just using a bistable on generator room pressure. A bit simpler. No clocking or edge triggering.

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