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How do you guys cool your metal down?


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So, you can see my power plant on the copper volcano.  It works great to get my temps down to about 300ish.  But after that, I grab all the copper and store it in a container in cold water to cool.  I have come to find that takes FOREVER!  Mostly because it is in 25 ton hunks.  I built out a conveyor system in my bristle farm and killed it all off with high heat as all the copper was still at 250.   So, what do you guys do?

I wanted to build a conveyor system that ran it through cooled water until the temp was right, but I do not know of a way with current automation to monitor the item in transit of a conveyor for heat.

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3 hours ago, smithdl said:

But after that, I grab all the copper and store it in a container in cold water to cool.  I have come to find that takes FOREVER! 

Storage compactors exchange temperature with the surroundings way too slow for this.

3 hours ago, smithdl said:

I wanted to build a conveyor system that ran it through cooled water until the temp was right, but I do not know of a way with current automation to monitor the item in transit of a conveyor for heat.

Sensory Overload adds sensors for conveyor rails, including temperature sensor.

Another approach is to drop the copper on a metal tile and let the heat go to the tile. This can be under water as well for extra cooling. The time to move the copper to the next cooling stage or to storage could be controlled with an item temperature sensor, another sensor for Sensory Overload. You can set it to turn the output signal on when the hottest item in the cell is below whatever value you put in. Useful for say turning a transfer arm on.

As for how to deal with this unmodded... well there is a reason why I decided to make a mod with sensors. I still haven't figured out how to deal with this task without my mod.

EDIT: to clarify, I know how to cool unmodded. I just haven't figured out how to make sure all the metal is cooled enough before entering the main storage.

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35 minutes ago, smithdl said:

I wanted to build a conveyor system that ran it through cooled water until the temp was right, but I do not know of a way with current automation to monitor the item in transit of a conveyor for heat.

Run the rails through metal tiles under a water source. Use tempshift plates to transfer heat between water and tiles. With a little experimentation you can get the right number of tiles to reach your desired temp. For getting heat out of or into debris, nothing works anywhere near the speed of conveyor rails in solid tiles. There is a recent thread about this.

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Interesting issue. What i would do is to buold one metal tile below copper - above this ketal tile change one insulated to normal made out of obsidian and build chlorine room below ( or any other gas you can get rid of) to suck heat from copper. Gas will need to be replaced from time to time. Also it will try to find some debris which loose heat in process and worst case scenario get ogneus rock to be transport thrpugh chlorine room to cool it down - got igneus can be drop on magma. One you get rid of this big heatbomb and copper will start to get solid it will get easier. Good luck 

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I use a simple setup. Chamber around the volcano, steam turbine above. A pipe shutoff drips water into the chamber until sensor a) says >5kg or sensor b) says > 8kg of steam. (8 to have a save value with airlock system pumping escaping steam back into the chamber)

The door gets only unlocked <125°C (thats when the steam engine stops because steam is too cold)

That way, the metal is at 125°C or below when it can be retrieved. If its hotter, no access is possible. 

125°C is still hot, but not hot enough to damage dupes in exo-suits, and it will cool down in seconds when extracted from the chamber.

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I build a steam turbine beside my volcano.  The volcano sits in a vacuum while I have a small room of steam and hydrogen for the turbine.  The metal drips onto a steel door just below the volcano.  The door transfers the heat into the steam room which runs the steam turbine.  Once the steam is cold enough to not run the turbine any more, I open the doors and drop the metal down.

So far that has been my process for cooling my metal down a bit.  It isn't 5C cool, but it's pretty good since it costs no power to do it.  From there you could probably run it through metal tiles under some cold liquid to get it lower, but I haven't bothered with that yet.

 

As others have said, running conveyor rails through cold tiles seems to be the best method.  The rails ensure they are small chunks so you can cool them much faster than dumping it all in a pile.  If you have enough power you can use an aquatuner to cool some liquid to absorb the heat, possibly put the aquatuner under it's own steam turbine to reduce the power cost of running it or use it to warm up the water for your pincha peppers.

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[edit] Compact rebuild:

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Original example:

Spoiler

 

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Metal comes out at -9C. Dupes have full access. The system is perfectly insulated to the outside.

Aquatuners cool the thermal capacitor at the bottom. Metal is shipped via rails through the steam room and capacitor. (Also, pretty much all the cooling in that region of the map is provided by that capacitor. Below it is my oxygen production, and several radiator systems run through it.)

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7 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Of course!

Heh. Cool. Somehow I never considered putting buildings in front of the tempshift plates when using a liquid based heat stabilizer/capacitor.

I usually use diamond window tiles for capacitors but the ability to use both tempshift plates and buildings as well as not needing to use the liquid pipes for cooling/heating the capacitor is awfully tempting... I think I need to redesign some of my old STCs... (Standard Template Constructs for those that don't read Warhammer 40k stuff) 

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Depending on your temp range, ice or dirt give you the highest capacitance with tempshift plates. These are dirt.

Well, plastic would be better than dirt but it is so insulated i'm not sure it's worth it.

Diamond is a great middle ground for both capacity and transfer. I switched to diamond tiles now.

I do use liquid pipes of course for all the cooling/radiating in this. The center is chilled by tuners and the outside is tapped by the radiators until the desired temp is reached.

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5 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Depending on your temp range, ice or dirt give you the highest capacitance with tempshift plates. These are dirt.

Yeah. Dirt tempshift plates are definitely under appreciated in terms of a thermal "battery". 

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5 hours ago, DemainaNyx said:

I build a steam turbine beside my volcano.  The volcano sits in a vacuum while I have a small room of steam and hydrogen for the turbine.  The metal drips onto a steel door just below the volcano.  The door transfers the heat into the steam room which runs the steam turbine.  Once the steam is cold enough to not run the turbine any more, I open the doors and drop the metal down.

So far that has been my process for cooling my metal down a bit.  It isn't 5C cool, but it's pretty good since it costs no power to do it.  From there you could probably run it through metal tiles under some cold liquid to get it lower, but I haven't bothered with that yet.

I use a variation of this, I think it's a Brothgar setup, using gold tiles to help transfer the heat a little faster. When the recovery metal drops to around 220F, the steel door opens and drops it into a petroleum water lock (which also allows the dupes access to the vacuum area if you need to). The dupes manually retrieve the cooled metal. Almost no power usage.

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If I have enough steel, I build these little modules on top of my metal volcanoes as combination volcano-tamers/heat sinks. The gas pump vacuum's the place while the volcano is dormant, then I plumb some water in (~100kg for each tile) and never open it up again.

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If I don't have enough steel, the same thing can be built without the aquatuner (which is the most expensive item here by far).

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6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

You'll have to dig them up to check. But you can't beat 800kg in a 2x1 building. Or if you can let me know.

I try to prevent duplicant deaths and I always considered having a duplicant die as failing my colony.

=> I never messed with graves, but it seems they have some good use cases afterall.

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My gold is on rails through steam below a steam turbine. Then heating up a caustic biome before dumping the rest in my base.

My iron is on rails heat exchanging with sour gas, then going through a pool of water before entering my base at a temperate temperature.

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Uhm, I guess I take the more slow and easy route

Spoiler

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Spoiler

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I just wait for it to go dormant, when it is, I just remove the insulation to access doors and get dupes to pick all gold up and and store it above the volcano.
Have enough Gold to not have anything to do with it lol.

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Spoiler
5 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

If I have enough steel, I build these little modules on top of my metal volcanoes as combination volcano-tamers/heat sinks. The gas pump vacuum's the place while the volcano is dormant, then I plumb some water in (~100kg for each tile) and never open it up again.

BC9Yof4.png

If I don't have enough steel, the same thing can be built without the aquatuner (which is the most expensive item here by far).

 

Do you mind posting a few of the overlays for this one. Looks like a great design.

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13 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Aquatuners cool the thermal capacitor at the bottom. Metal is shipped via rails through the steam room and capacitor and comes out at -9C. (Also, pretty much all the cooling in that region of the map is provided by that capacitor. Below it is my oxygen production, and several radiator systems run through it.)

@nakomaru  what is the liquid in the capacitor?  What liquid are you using in aquatuner system?  If you get a moment would you post liquid/gas/shipping overlay screenshots?  That's a really interesting use of gravestones, I haven't seen those used since @Saturnus 's old design from way back and I'm really intrigued by this.  What did you build the gravestones from?

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