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

[Nitroturtle]

11 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.

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).

If you share the save, I'm sure we can offer additional tips.  I'd like to see how you are using all of the power you say, as it seems pretty extreme based on my experience.  

[Hellshound38]

I like building full vacuum seals around everything including the whole starting area, and using exosuits to leave the base only.

Makes it easier to build and plan for designs that last thousands of cycles in a stable manner. Without having to design dynamic cooling systems. It also means the materials you use to border things are less relevant as nothing transfers through the vacuums.

The trickiest part is the main base entrance/exist, until you can afford the energy for transit tubes. Dupes tend to like to drop things that off-gas even if the gap is only 1 space wide, seemingly just to annoy me. Water pits in the vacuum matching the travel length solve this, but they ruin the aesthetics.

 

[mathmanican]

7 minutes ago, Hellshound38 said:

The trickiest part is the main base entrance/exist,

If you make sure they have to "jump" that 1 tile gap, I believe they cannot drop anything there.  They can still fart there though (iirc)....

12 hours ago, Netherous said:

I must not be making myself very clear:.... The long-term problem is the slow, entropic death of my asteroid ....

You definitely made the problem clear. The replies throughout the thread, I believe, fully understand the problem, and are providing solutions.  It looks like you are not isolating your geysers fully. It also looks like your steam turbine setups are not working as needed.  It's possible to freeze your asteroid, despite the extra heat being added constantly from geysers, without burning through all electricity.  

If you share your save, you'll get quite a lot of feedback. 

[DaveSatx]

51 minutes ago, Nitroturtle said:

If you share the save, I'm sure we can offer additional tips.  I'd like to see how you are using all of the power you say, as it seems pretty extreme based on my experience.  

Consider this echoed

[lee1026]

The story of the energy shortage doesn't smell right to me.

 

Steam turbine gets you 1 Joule per Kilo DTU. Moving that much heat via aquatuner running on pWater would cost 2 Joules per KDTU. So you have to spend 1 joule to get rid of each kDTU. With super coolant, it becomes energy neutral, so heat deletion just becomes trivial.

The Petroleum Generator produces 2K for 20k DTU. In other words, 1% of its power output should be suffice to pay for deleting the heat that it generates. The natural gas generator produces even less heat relative to its power output.

If you capped every single geyser on the map with steam turbines, they should all be net power producers. Yes, the turbine will only cool them down to 125C, but all the geysers produce stuff way hotter than that, and the DTUs that you delete will pay for you to aquatuner delete on the rest to get it down to a reasonable temperature.

 

Of course, wood->ethanol->Petroleum Generator is dirt positive, so I don't know why you are trying to cook dirt.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 8/13/2019 at 4:08 PM, 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.

Aquatuners are great at moving heat, but there are some caveats: 1) They cost energy to run, and 2) They ADD heat because of the work they're doing.  Which Nebbie addresses below:

On 8/13/2019 at 5:06 PM, Nebbie said:

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).

So, the way I read your post, Netherous, you've a compound problem: You're spending a lot of power to remove heat, which in itself is creating more heat -- and you're running out of fuel for your power supplies.

I can't actually see your base, so I can't address the particulars of your problem, so instead I'll talk about the problems I've encountered and how I solved them.

Problem #1: It takes a LOT of power to move heat around.  This is especially true of aquatuners.  On the one hand, they can move heat quickly.  On the other hand, they take 1200 watts of power which can be expensive, especially if you have a tuner running continually. 

The solution then is to develop low-power methods of moving heat around.  One method I've used is counter-current heat exchange systems, trading spatial area for power consumption.  This is especially useful when you have a cool liquid that you want heated and a hot liquid that you want cooled.  For example, I have  a water geyser that puts out 95c water and a slush geyser that puts out polluted water at -10c.  I want my clean water to be cold, so I run the two past each other to trade their heat.  As long as I maintain a constant flow, I'm good.  Generally I set them up with sensors so that if something happens with one flow, the other stops so that things don't break.  Another solution is to use a pool of liquid as a heat sink: Fill an area with, say, water.  Put a pump at the bottom and a drain valve at the top.  Use temp shift plates to even out the temperature distribution and put a themo sensor to control the pump.  When the pool gets too hot, pump out the hot liquid and let cold liquid in.  Then run radiant pipe through the pool to off-load heat from another area.  The advantage here is that spikes in the hot liquid in the radiant pipes aren't going to break your system because of the thermal inertia of the pool.  The disadvantage is that you must continually add cold liquid to your pool and remove the hot liquid.  If your cold source dries up, you run into trouble. 

The point in the above paragraph is: If aquatuners are too expensive  to run in your base, find an alternative.  The aquatuner is easy, but a closed-loop radiator can move heat for "free."  

Problem #2:  Heat continually increases.  Generating power creates heat.  Smelting metals produces heat.  A geyser adds heat as well as mass to your asteroid.   Running your fridge produces heat.  Basically anything that does work creates heat.  Using the stuff above, you can move this heat around, but.. you still have to get rid of the heat.  There are many solutions to this particular problem that still work.

The most economical is, of course, the steam turbine.  If you pipe the condensed steam (aka water) back into the steam chamber, you're going to destroy a phenominal amount of heat.   In fact, its sometimes difficult to get a steam turbine to run continually  because of how much heat it needs to operate.  In an ideal circumstance, you can use a series of counter-current heat exchangers to eventually add heat to your turbine's steam chamber.  Get enough heat from enough sources and your turbine will run continually without any power drain.  Of course, this is not an easy task, so generally an aquatuner (or four) are used.  Which can be problematic from both fuel use and the heat created by running generators. 

An alternative is to use map features for cooling.  The AETN and Wheezewarts can do some -- which is definitely useful, but it often isn't enough.  A cool slush geyser can be used for a huge amount of cooling -- but a CO2 geyser (-50c) can not.  These solutions pretty much all rely on the map generator, so they're not really ideal.  But if you're lucky, they can solve your problem. 

Another alternative is to use the heat for work.  Pipe 99c water into your oil wells.  Use the heat from your volcanoes to boil oil into petrol.  Then the petrol to heat steam for your turbines before running it to your gas generators.  You're using the heat to do work (boiling oil, boiling water, running a turbine) which results in a huge loss of thermal energy.  Aside from the steam turbine, phase transitions themselves result in a loss of thermal energy.  There's a post from maybe six months ago where I detailed how the simple act of boiling water can be used to cool your base.  No turbine required.  But, this can be tricky to set up.

So feed your heat into a material that gets consumed.  Feed hot polluted water to pincha peppers (easy), thimble reed (fairly easy), or trees (difficult) to remove a lot of heat from your system.  In the case of trees, you'll have to counter the heat that bleeds through the hydroponic tiles, but otherwise its fairly straight forward.  You can also feed hot water to electrolyzers (easy), bristle blooms (more difficult), or sleet wheat (hard).  As above, you'll have to deal with the heat that bleeds out of the hydroponics, but otherwise the process isn't a problem.  Or you can go the insane route and feed hot rock to hatches to get coal to burn.  Just be careful to not cook your hatches.

Finally, you can vent your hot materials to space.  This is generally not a method that I would recommend, as it results in a loss of some useful material, BUT it can work in a pinch and will definitely remove a lot of heat.  The Saturn IV rockets that took our astronauts to the moon used this method to cool the guidance computers.  Granted, capillary sublimation is orders of magnitude more material efficient than using a pipe in ONI to vent into space, but its the same concept.  Get something hot, make it disappear.

Problem #3:  I don't have materials to deal with Really Hot Things ^(tm).  Steel isn't hard to get, but niobium and thermium can be difficult or impossible until you start getting to space.  This makes it difficult to use buildings to do work.  For example, you can't use a steel aquatuner to boil oil into petrol.  In this case, you need to set up a more complicated method.  In a base a while back, I used the natural "density" difference between petrol and crude to create a counter-flow heat exchanger using tiles, doors, and tempshift plates.  Basically I had a pipe that emptied crude onto a floor that ran for quite a distance.  At a key point, a door sandwhiched between metal tiles would open or close to add heat from magma to the crude, giving it that last little push to phase change.  The petrol would then flow back along the crude, exchanging temperatures before flowing into a small room with a pump where it would then be sent to my petrol generators.  In this way, I was able to boil crude into petrol before I had produced steel.  Another way to deal with this is to isolate really hot things with insulated tiles (or a vacuum) until you get to the point where you can deal with them.  More than once I've added insulated tiles around a mechanized airlock to seal off a chamber for a couple (or couple-hundred) cycles until I could deal with it. 

Efficiency:  Basically, the solution to your asteroid heat death is primarily efficiency.  The best coolant to use in your aquatuners is supercoolant and makes a HUGE difference in their efficiency.  If you're removing 14C from water, you get 585k DTU for 1200 watts.  On the other hand, if you're using supercoolant, you remove 1181k DTU for the same power.  So if you're using a steam turbine to remove heat, an aquatuner with supercoolant will run the turbine twice as frequently.  Petrol, on the other hand, will only move 246k DTU -- which will not be able to boil the water feeding back into the steam chamber from the turbine. 

Lets assume you're running an aquatuner continually.  Along with this assumption, lets assume that your coolant is always within its operating range (i.e. water doesn't freeze or turn to steam), and that the coolant is always losing 14c every time it goes through the aquatuner (so your supercoolant isn't at -270c).  Finally, lets assume that as long as the aquatuner is running, each going through the tuner is completely full.  Thus we have a continual draw of 1200 watts of power.  With petrol, we'll be moving 246k DTU of thermal energy per second.  Water will move 585k DTU, and super coolant 1.18m DTU.  1kg of water at 95c will need roughly 40k DTU to boil into steam.  So an aquatuner with petrol (or crude) in the pipes can potentially boil 6kg/s of water while a tuner with water can boil 14kg/s and a tuner with super coolant can boil almost 30kg/s. This means that an aquatuner with petrol will not produce enough heat to run a steam turbine.  As soon as a turbine starts to run, 95c water will feed back into the steam chamber at a rate of 10kg/s -- 4kg/s more than the aquatuner can boil.  You may get intermittent periods where the turbine will run, but they'll be short and far between.  An aquatuner with water can run a turbine fairly consistently -- but the turbine will still remove more heat than the tuner can produce.  This is why many builds will have two or three aquatuners per turbine.  

However, with super coolant in your aquatuner pipes, you can run a turbine continually.  In my experience, the ideal setup is a steam turbine with a steam chamber beneath it, and an aquatuner in the steam chamber.  Super coolant in the turbine runs a very short distance to a pool (preferably right below the steam chamber) so that only a small amount of super coolant is needed.  The pool has multiple sections of radiant pipe that exchanges heat into it, and the section of radiant pipe from the aquatuner cools it.  A larger pool is a larger "heat battery."  The tuner and turbine are connected to a thermo sensor in the pool and both shut off before the water freezes.  Thus once the system gets up to operating temperatures, any time the aquatuner is running, so is the turbine.  Its incredible the amount of cooling you can do with this sort of setup. 

Side note: You'll want your super coolant on a bypass so that it continues circulating even when the aquatuner isn't running.  Alternatively, you can use a reservoir to average your coolants temperature -- but this requires more super coolant.  Anyway, the idea is that you don't want packets of -270c coolant going through the aquatuner, burning power for no reason.

 

** EDIT #2:  I noticed a bit of a maths error.  A turbine running at full steam condenses 2kg/s of water, not 10kg/s.  However the rest of the paragraph is mostly just fine.  The water feeding back into the steam chamber will require too much heat energy to boil _and_ raise the steam to operating temperature if your aquatuner has petrol or crude in the pipes.

[mathmanican]

24 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Edited 13 minutes ago by KittenIsAGeek
I always see typoes AFTER I hit submit.

Great post. The quoted part was my favorite. The rest is great too.

[Bluefoxfire]

Quote

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

Odd, they're working just fine for me. Does help that I have them in hydrofarm tiles.

[lee1026]

Wheezeworts in Oxygen are about the half of the power of Wheezeworts in Hydrogen.

 

With enough trips to the ice planet, you can have quite a bit of cooling out of them.