Is it possible to avoid heat-death of your world after the post-launch update?

[Netherous]

I'm coming up on cycle 900 and it's apparent I have a problem with no solution. The ENTIRE asteroid is getting hot. It's so hot my dupes can't run around the corridors near the printer without scalding damage. It is raining hot sludge in every single biome. This is not because I have been piping in heat, rather I have been using every single wheezewort and every single AETN (3) on the map nonstop since before turn 100 as well as a base-wide cooling system with a hydrogen medium, and several hundred turns moving heat away with thermo regulators.

The problem afaict seems to be that, with the removal of heat deletion from most (all?) machinery/sieving methods, the only way to delete heat is with wheezeworts and AETNs, and both have a fixed DTU/s capacity. With the asteroid being a closed system, one cannot possibly generate more heat than this capacity without eventual doom, and the amount of geysers on the map - not to mention the necessary heat simply generated by dupe living requirements - hugely exceed this capacity. I have steam turbines over every single volcano and hot geyser, but they do not seem to be the solution I hoped they would be.

As an example, there is a corner of my base with a swamp biome with a natural gas geyser and a magma volcano. I have been burning the gas for power and using the magma for steam. I have never done anything else to this biome, but it is now over 105C in all gasses and about 95C in all solids. This is all passive heat from the geysers over 900 cycles.

Googling this is hopeless, as every single discussion is either out-of-date with respect to the launch update, or hopelessly mired in confusion by people who don't understand the problem. I'm not interested in what someone did for cooling before cycle 200. I am trying to understand what must be done to keep a base going for thousands of cycles, or indefinitely.

So, some questions:

Given the heat transfer equations, is heat removal with wheezeworts and AETN an elastic capacity that can be optimized or is it purely fixed? My research suggests wheezewort is elastic (with an optimal 12k DTU/s upper bound) and AETN is fixed (80k DTU/S)

The power requirements of Thermo Regulators are very high, and they can only move heat anyway. Is there any way to utilize them for a net loss of heat? I've tried a dozen setups, but because of the heat generated by their power needs, everything seems to be a net gain in heat.

Gasses expelled from a geyser provide infinite mass. Is it viable to superheat this gas and expel it into space periodically to delete heat?

Are there any remaining "heat deletion" methods besides WW and AETN?

How does one keep a base in thermal equilibrium for thousands of cycles?

 

[greydaze]

The steam turbine... I find it hard to believe that you've not come across such a setup after all that time...

[chasinji]

12 hours ago, Netherous said:

near the printer without scalding damage

kindly post your base. fried base is interesting

[Lafara]

I don't come across any practical solution yet. but I have some point you should configure to your world.

1. at this Launching Moment, Electrolyzer still producing 75 C oxygen&hydrogen whether it eat -10 C or 25 C or 60 C or 90 C water, plus +1.2kDTU/s from machine itself.

I myself consider this Electrolyzer the majority of heat tranfer equation penalizer.

: solution to try #1 : direct hot water into any electrolyzer in bound.

2. Digging a block of 1840 kg 30.0 C igneous rock will result in a lump 920 kg of raw mineral (igneous rock). but I'm not sure if its residual heat worth of 920 kg + 30.0 C will be dump into remaining raw mineral lump OR lost in da void.

I think it lost in da void. hard to proof it. .... i can proof that any digging attempt will waste 50% of mass. just that

: solution no longer try-able #2 : preserve natural blocks

3. whole asteroid has its heat capacity decide by Solid mass. if you dig out too many empty space, lack of solid mass = lack of heat capacity = increasing of temperature inbound.

: solution to try #3 : build lots of thick stacks of TILE (mass : 200 kg) to increase general heat capacity in any zone to want to retain heat away from your colony.

4. using thermo regulator and thermo aquatuner is not recommend. you should try re-design oxygen factory/super hot cauldron/cold liquid reservior in ways that it don't require any thermo aquatuner to function.

at the very least , cold water reservoir need 2-3 thermo aquatuner to create. it doing great rediating cold aura to nearby greenhouses.

: solution to try #4 : make use of natural heat tranfer with 20.0+ thermal conductivity metal tile, tempshift plate.

 

[greydaze]

8 minutes ago, Lafara said:

4. using thermo regulator and thermo aquatuner is not recommend. you should try re-design oxygen factory/super hot cauldron/cold liquid reservior in ways that it don't require any thermo aquatuner to function.

Those are key components for taking advantage of the steam turbines enormous amount of heat deletion. It's what makes creating liquid oxygen and hydrogen simple.

[Lafara]

/flip table

dumping 110 C polluted water into space.

[wd_]

One steam turbine can delete up to 877 590 DTU per second. That's a lot. Pair it with an aquatuner to bring the heat in and disperse the cool around your base. There are a lot of examples lying around.

Here's my setup inspired by @Stabby Joe's recent post (it can house 2 more aquatuners and 1 more turbine in the future but I don't need nearly as much cooling right now):

It keeps a heat sink of 50t of dirt and igneous rock at constant -10C. The liquid pump is for cooling of my refinery (I've heard refining steel this way becomes power-positive, but didn't do the calculations myself, at the very least if deletes heat from my refinery that's in the middle of my base).

[Netherous]

On 8/11/2019 at 5:05 AM, wd_ said:

One steam turbine can delete up to 877 590 DTU per second. That's a lot. Pair it with an aquatuner to bring the heat in and disperse the cool around your base. There are a lot of examples lying around.

Here's my setup inspired by @Stabby Joe's recent post (it can house 2 more aquatuners and 1 more turbine in the future but I don't need nearly as much cooling right now):

It keeps a heat sink of 50t of dirt and igneous rock at constant -10C. The liquid pump is for cooling of my refinery (I've heard refining steel this way becomes power-positive, but didn't do the calculations myself, at the very least if deletes heat from my refinery that's in the middle of my base).

I already have steam turbines over every single volcano and geyser source and some over magma. Some of these are successful setups, some are failures (or run only a small amount of time like for the iron volcano).

 

The problem isn't quite that I can't set up a steam turbine, it's that I can't find an affordable power setup for doing so. Entropy spreads heat out over time, and the game models this faithfully. To concentrate it again in a chamber (without a natural heat source), it takes energy. The creation of energy makes more heat, with the exception of solar. I'm trying to figure out the math of exchange for heat from generating energy versus that sucked up by the turbine, but can't find a positive loop, and lack some of the equations anyway. I don't think steam turbines "delete" heat in the way that term has been used. They convert it back to energy in the form of electricity. But I don't have enough of the formulas to know that for sure.

I've tried dozens of chamber steam turbine setups. I'm on cycle 1300 and have spent hundreds of cycles doing so. The power requirements of the aquatuner are prohibitive. For reference, every single square of coal on my map was burned long ago. I have 3 natural gas geysers, all tapped, going to TONS of tanks, but they are often dormant. Hydrogen gets burned. I have no excess. Oil gets burned. I'm tapping both wells on the map. Those get burned. I'm tapping all the volcanos, but they are often dormant. My stone hatches can only do so much. I don't have a renewable source of dirt (it's all gone) so wood burning is out. I've already cooked vast amounts of slime to dirt. I can't keep it up. Everything is obviously automated so that not a joule of energy gets wasted. Every wheezewort seed on the map is being put to use sucking up the hottest gas I can give it, but even cooling oxygen before dispersal is not helping the overall situation.

So power is at a premium, and I simply do not have it after 1k cycles to spam these big aquatuner setups anymore. I have set them up, of course, and iterated on them over and over. In many of those setups, a single aquatuner would not boil water, even after 300 cycles. I do not know why. I feel like I'm either playing the game wrong, or people are proudly posting setups that only work in the short term. I've watched so many videos and read so many threads and reproduced it all and so much stuff just doesn't seem to work anymore because of changes to the thermodynamics of the game. I might get something short term, but short term is not the problem. Additional problems is that everything is so hot now that I need a cooling system for my steam turbines simply to get them to run, but there is no excess energy and nowhere to dump waste heat anyway, since I am losing the ability to afford aquatuners.

I just built a chamber in space for an experiment to make steam for my rockets, and after 100 cycles of piping hot petroleum through the aquatuners there the water still wouldn't boil reliably. That's a lot of precious energy to keep that thing at 1200w for so long. So I gave up and turned back to natural sources of steam. To utilize steam turbines to harness heat for power, I need the energy to concentrate that heat to get water to the boiling point. I don't have enough energy to do that, because everything is too hot because I can't get rid of heat...it's a circular problem. I've been working on getting every square inch of surface filled with automatically-cleaning solar power based on the theory that the heatless electricity they provide will be my salvation, but it's a long slog.

[greydaze]

20 minutes ago, Netherous said:

it's that I can't find an affordable power setup for doing so

Have you looked into a sour gas boiler setup?

[axxionx12]

Just a small concern, but it could be that your asteroid is about to crash into earth... The heat is the asteroid burning up in the atmosphere.

[Nebbie]

59 minutes ago, Netherous said:

...

The problem isn't quite that I can't set up a steam turbine, it's that I can't find an affordable power setup for doing so. Entropy spreads heat out over time, and the game models this faithfully. To concentrate it again in a chamber (without a natural heat source), it takes energy. The creation of energy makes more heat, with the exception of solar. I'm trying to figure out the math of exchange for heat from generating energy versus that sucked up by the turbine, but can't find a positive loop, and lack some of the equations anyway. I don't think steam turbines "delete" heat in the way that term has been used. They convert it back to energy in the form of electricity. But I don't have enough of the formulas to know that for sure.

I've tried dozens of chamber steam turbine setups. I'm on cycle 1300 and have spent hundreds of cycles doing so. The power requirements of the aquatuner are prohibitive. For reference, every single square of coal on my map was burned long ago. I have 3 natural gas geysers, all tapped, going to TONS of tanks, but they are often dormant. Hydrogen gets burned. I have no excess. Oil gets burned. I'm tapping both wells on the map. Those get burned. I'm tapping all the volcanos, but they are often dormant. My stone hatches can only do so much. I don't have a renewable source of dirt (it's all gone) so wood burning is out. I've already cooked vast amounts of slime to dirt. I can't keep it up. Everything is obviously automated so that not a joule of energy gets wasted. Every wheezewort seed on the map is being put to use sucking up the hottest gas I can give it, but even cooling oxygen before dispersal is not helping the overall situation.

...

I just built a chamber in space for an experiment to make steam for my rockets, and after 100 cycles of piping hot petroleum through the aquatuners there the water still wouldn't boil reliably. That's a lot of precious energy to keep that thing at 1200w for so long. So I gave up and turned back to natural sources of steam. To utilize steam turbines to harness heat for power, I need the energy to concentrate that heat to get water to the boiling point. I don't have enough energy to do that, because everything is too hot because I can't get rid of heat...it's a circular problem. I've been working on getting every square inch of surface filled with automatically-cleaning solar power based on the theory that the heatless electricity they provide will be my salvation, but it's a long slog.

First of all, cooling petroleum with an aquatuner to get steam is kind of a fool's errand. The aquatuner works by spending 1200W to lower the temperature of whatever packet of liquid is fed through it by 14 C. You want to feed it the highest SHC you can, which means [polluted] water, and in 10kg packets. Now, at certain temp ranges, you simply can't use that, but that should be your go-to setup. If you want to cool some other liquid down to a temp where polluted water is liquid, you should exchange heat with adjacent radiant pipes counterflowing in thermally-conductive tiles. Supercoolant by the way is better than [polluted] water, by a longshot, to the point that it can even make cool steam vent steam power-positive to harness (cool steam vents otherwise are kinda trash).

When dealing with sources like volcanoes, you don't want to run any cooling loops, you just want to have the steam chamber control whether it's connected to the heat source or not with some steel doors in three lines (middle opens to sever heat connection), and as good thermal diffusivity as you can get (gold/steel tiles and doors, phosphorus gas in volcano room). Ultimately, these things pale in comparison to a sour gas boiler, but they should be able to provide tons of excess power to run your actual cooling loops in the base and help with overall power problems.

Electrolyze your hot water, by the way, and you'll get massive heat deletion. Yes, the oxygen will be hot, but it's oxygen, it being hot isn't an issue, just dump its heat back into the water you put in, or the hydrogen you're burning in generators. You'll see some decent heat deletion (about a tenth of a steam turbine running good) and your oxygen will be cool.

Wheezeworts by the way also just reduce what goes through by a set temperature amount. They are pitiful, even in hydrogen, and are absolute trash in oxygen. Cooling oxygen directly in this game is like trying to start a fire by hitting propane tanks together, hoping for a spark to light some tinder.

Overall, what I think you've got wrong is that you've massively overexpanded your base with a key misunderstanding of how the heat deletion equipment actually works, so you've got inefficient setups and you're blowing power like crazy. Solar panels will help on power, by the way, but they require tons of batteries (9 smart batteries each to survive worst case meteor storm) that then put out tons of heat.

Also, you're using ceramic on all your insulated tiles for steam chambers etc., right? Cause it's a bit of a big difference. Don't put any bridges across the insulated tiles either, bridges conduct heat at both ends.

[Ambaire]

@NetherousPlease post your save. I'd really like to take a look at it (and so would some other people, I imagine).

[DaveSatx]

A: Yes.   Steam turbine.  true cooling loops.

 I learned a lot from watching Brothgar.    I use a steam turbine in Hydrogen, with a cooling loop powered by an aquatuner made of steel.
the loop is filled with polluted water or my favorite ethanol. ensure the turbine is covered by a few segments of radiant pipe before the loop enters the AT.    the cooling loop should cover things you want to keep reasonable temps.   eventually you'll need to  get fancy to avoid freezing/over cooling.

I'm unsure how you are using your wheezies. guessing you have them scattered arouind in important place, you could put them in hydrogen (preferrably over 2k) and make a cooling loop with them. (thank god for automation)

--
I realize ive not read everyone else's responses.  hope i helped.   also. its ok fail.  analyze and try different things next time.  its al lgood

[Segato]

@Netherous Which Asteroid (Or seed) are you playing? If you are playing in Oasis I completly understand.

[Nitroturtle]

It's been awhile since I've had a base progress past a few hundred cycles, so I don't have any experience with it in the LU.  But in my previous games that made it that far, I always had an absurd amount of power by the time I had to worry about heat management on a large scale.  With that said, I also invest heavily in solar and usually have 75% of the surface covered before 1000 cycles.

I'd be curious to see this save as well.  It sounds like maybe you're having some issues with your steam turbine setup.  Switching to PH2O as mentioned above would be a huge help.  If supercoolant is an option, that would be even better.  

BTW you can make steam for a steam engine easily with water + hot regolith.

[avc15]

I pump heat into exhaust from my powerplant and vent it into space.

I use the resulting cooling to cool the main base, which is the only place my dupes aren't wearing suits.

Everywhere else it doesn't matter much, only need to provide cooling if things get too hot for machinery.

Until you've gained a bit more experience, perhaps consider trying (1) a low tech base (2) a different asteroid to start on edit: also (3) fewer duplicants (this makes a HUGE difference)

[Loscil2]

4 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Cooling oxygen directly in this game is like trying to start a fire by hitting propane tanks together, hoping for a spark to light some tinder.

Hahaha omg. Yeah, Personally I cool Oxygen but as a side benefit of cooling my generators/machinery. Like, why not, -5C oxygen is nice but shouldn't be the main objective of doing a cooling setup.

[avc15]

Regarding this.

On 8/10/2019 at 1:31 PM, Netherous said:

Gasses expelled from a geyser provide infinite mass. Is it viable to superheat this gas and expel it into space periodically to delete heat?

Yes. But it's better to use something you can convey in as a solid (sulphur, phosphorite) or pump in as a liquid (though, I used CO2 in gas form). Also you want that exhaust as hot as possible, so as soon as you have sufficient cooling to refine a few tons of steel, you want your A/Ts built from steel. Only vent the heated material when the chamber reaches a temperature limit on your steel machinery, but just run your A/Ts on standard automation to keep a cooling reservoir cold.

I made a post to demo this concept here, but I never quite finished that build - I'm working on a better one, since that colony died of low FPS, and after some toying that base is just way too power hungry for my taste.

 

[cpy]

900 cycles? Dude have you seen steam turbines?

[OxCD]

7 hours ago, Netherous said:

The problem isn't quite that I can't set up a steam turbine, it's that I can't find an affordable power setup for doing so.

I'm cycle 600, I've 4 turbines, those are taming 3 volcanos, 4 aquatuners, 1 refinery, I'm not even using petrol gen, solar panel, coal gen nor hamster wheel, only NG and H without a single power issue, and the whole map is running green, nearly turquoise, since set t° for my ATs are around 20°.

You should be doing something wrong with your heat management.

[Netherous]

This sparked way more discussion than I expected. Thank you all for the advice. There's quite a lot to go through here. I must not be making myself very clear: I have steam turbines. I am running many steam turbines. I can cool my dupes too, that is not a long-term problem. The long-term problem is the slow, entropic death of my asteroid as every biome approaches 100C from geysers, and my pondering whether this produces an inevitable end to every map.

After getting a better solar setup, I think that the energy injected into this system by the heatless and infinite solar energy is what can provide you the capacity to endlessly relocate heat. Still, waste heat may one day be so high that even the maximum energy that can be extracted from an optimal solar array won't be enough to continue to relocate it (but dupes may all be dead from the temp by that point anyway). I'm still interested in actual heat deletion. @avc15 has a very compelling idea, and I definitely want to tinker with mass expulsion of some kind. Others mention that an electrolyzer can achieve a high degree of actual heat deletion. I had never thought of using the regolith in a boiler, which is a great idea. I'll be trying to go through more of the responses and absorb them tomorrow. I got up to 1242 and things are looking a lot more positive, but I'm still gunning to make it to 10,000 somehow (yeah I know the game will die a ups death eventually - I'm used to it from Factorio).

[I_Link_I]

Well what i normaly do is

1.I vacuum seal my Main base

And build the Maschinen outside.

(I build two walls with an empty corridor in between and pump a vacuum. The only heat transfer with outside is now the door.)

Second i build a box made of metaltiles(best tungsten)around some natural tile ,trow a pip and some wheasworth seeds in it. Then it gets sealed,vacuumpumped and filled by a highpreasure vent with hydrogen.(you can also usw pipes for transfering heat). With this setup i once nearly froze my base to death.

Another time i instaled in of those (about 5 seeds)at the bottom of my ladder to the oilbiom and it Starter liquefing the co2 after some time.

Mybe I dont generate as much heat ,but for me this is fine.

[Nebbie]

32 minutes ago, Netherous said:

This sparked way more discussion than I expected. Thank you all for the advice. There's quite a lot to go through here. I must not be making myself very clear: I have steam turbines. I am running many steam turbines. I can cool my dupes too, that is not a long-term problem. The long-term problem is the slow, entropic death of my asteroid as every biome approaches 100C from geysers, and my pondering whether this produces an inevitable end to every map.

...

All geysers should be sealed in insulation with triple mechanized airlock doors (close then open the middle one to create a perfect seal between the other two doors, since doors otherwise conduct a lot of heat), whether you are using them or not, as a general rule. Cooling the biomes shouldn't be a major problem if the heat sources are kept contained; most native critters will help as they reset temperature on lifecycle change, and they can also delete heat with eating (hot stuff goes in, body temp excretions come out). Now, frozen or rust biomes are just screwed, but you should really be able to keep more temperate biomes under control with a few cooling loops; unfortunately Klei kind of made the starting state of the asteroid completely nonsensical cause it rapidly will change, but there are things you can do in a reasonable timeframe.

[storm6436]

Yeah, my solution to that sort of thing depends is pretty straightforward but also overkill... and completely automated.

 Coolant loop 1. PH2O reservoirs
  a. Primary cold PH2O reservoir fed by every slush geyser I have and then tanked out to increase capacity.  Attached is basically a big fishbowl for gulpfish.  Fishbowl is set up to let the water freeze and once per cycle ship the ice to the chiller.
  b. secondary PH2O reservoirs located as optimally as possible near large heat sources.  Cold PH2O is pumped in insulated pipes to these locations where radiant pipe sections cull the heat.  Generators, my primary battery bank, geysers, and high density machinery spaces get a loop.  Secondary reservoirs are temperature monitored and allowed to get up to 90F before the activating the cycle pump and opening that reservoir's shutoff back at the primary.  The thermal dump continues until the reservoir reaches 70.  This utilizes an SR latch.
  c. Primary hot PH2O reservoir, located under my NG/Petro-generator assembly.  All PH2O ends up here eventually.  One exit pump feeds my lumber farm and however many pinchas etc I need.   The other two pumps are automated via SR latch to set an upper and lower bound for max PH2O in the hot reservoir, as any excess is shunted to sieves that are similarly completely automated.

Coolant loop 2: Steam (design work still in progress and where most of the overkill comes into play)
a. Steam generator facility - The current build has only one active steam generator.  There's a second one, but I don't turn it on as It's sole utility is not day-to-day running, but "Turn on if you need to dump heat even faster."  All ports on both are controlled with automated hatches.  Steam chamber itself is encased in insulated ceramic (I know, I flinched too), properly diamond shift plated, and contains four aquatuners automated to ensure I don't freeze the petroleum with a pretty complex web of piping and cut-outs.    Tuners cut out in sequence: 4->2x2->1x1->1, where high coolant temp runs all 4 until the first temp break is hit, which toggles the first set of cut-offs, splicing the chamber flow and activating a secondary pump, allowing me maximize the number of tuners rolling without bursting pipes.  Next temp break idles the second tuner in both loops -- I could probably run it in a 1x1x1x1 config for the last step as I'm clearly not concerned with being power positive here.   Goal is to get the system to minimum operating temperatures as fast as possible and keep it there...  but the amount of space necessary for properly doing the cut-outs and automation gets excessive and I haven't gotten bored enough to wrestle with that yet. 

b. Central liquid coolant reservoir - Diamond temp shift plated, automated based on temp to pump to the steam.  2 pumps feed my metal refineries, One pump runs my water chiller.Additional space is left open for future expansions -- Under consideration: routing the hot PH2O on its final trip to dump some of its excess heat here.

c. Hot water storage feeds electrolyzers and carbon skimmers via insulated piping.  Fed primarily by desalination this game, but generally includes cool steam geysers if water demand is high enough.  All geysers are sealed and automated to overpressure when my chill-water pipeline is full to capacity.  Salt water geysers turn back on first.Temperature in hot storage is unregulated, so the facility is double-insulated and any access areas are igneous tempshift plated to heck and back.  Automation is based on water level which triggers a wall hatch to open and dump a certain amount over the side into the water chiller.  I've seen temps up to 130F show up here and if it weren't for the fact that my dupes generally don't go near here, I'd consider space-suiting the area, given salt geyser output is 200F.

d. Water chiller is insulated, holds a dozen granite storage boxes for ice, and runs two pumps automated on temp and depth ranges to feed the main water reservoir.  If water level exceeds a certain height it prevents the hot water door from opening.  Similarly, if the water is below a given temperature range but the levels are appropriate, the pumps will not activate.  Currently working on running automation to shut down chiller exit pumps based on main reservoir levels.

Note:  Petrol was chosen for the steam loop based entirely on available temperature range and the fact it doesn't off-gas.  I figured it largely didn't matter since I'd be switching to super coolant regardless of initial choice.

[chemie]

10 hours ago, Netherous said:

This sparked way more discussion than I expected. Thank you all for the advice. There's quite a lot to go through here. I must not be making myself very clear: I have steam turbines. I am running many steam turbines. I can cool my dupes too, that is not a long-term problem. The long-term problem is the slow, entropic death of my asteroid as every biome approaches 100C from geysers, and my pondering whether this produces an inevitable end to every map.

Assuming you blocked in volcanoes, maps should trend to 95c.  Cool steam geysers, water geysers, salt geysers all output at 95c and make sense to harness the water.  But I dont see the asteroid going higher, especially with steam turbines deleting all heat you generate via machines.

I run 100% exosuit outside of air conditioned base so I dont care if the asteroid is at 70c (which is where my current one is)