Is cooling supposed to be this easy?

[Kermack]

So I'm getting back into the game from days long before quality of life and when hats weren't just cosmetic.  So I watched Brothgar make a cooling system and made a copy of it to help me understand some of the piping mechanics better, thing's like proper looping without backing up and bridge priority.  I had no idea the power of the radiant pipes until I dove into this.  Is this a "legit" setup?  I'm not running into some bug like the old drip cooling am I?  Save file included.

 

Just noticed that the element sensors sometimes let the wrong gas through.  But they cost way less energy than the original non-automation filters.  The oxygen output has become over pressured seems to be why.

 

Updated the design slightly and the temps have settled as the water if fully primed.

The Ultra Colony.sav

[Nebbie]

The heat deletion in Brothgar's build is based around electrolysis and hydrogen consumption, which are nothing new and unlikely to be fixed to not delete heat anytime soon.

As for actually building this in a real base, you'll find it's pretty difficult to get all the research done and all the refined metals for the smart batteries and automation. I strongly recommend using the one tile gap trick with the hydrogen area for the electrolyzers as well.

Also, you do want ethanol in the hot room. As a gas, its got much better thermal diffusivity than steam, and it flashes into a gas at a temp that's fairly reasonable for builds without access to gold amalgam. It's not too hard to set up, either, cause you can leave an airflow tile up top and turn everything on, then let the ethanol push out lighter gases like carbon dioxide, then replace the airflow tile; if you need to change the hot room, just put the airflow tile back and turn all the equipment off and the ethanol will rapidly condense back down so it won't leak all over your base, although some may leak out from replacing the airflow tile each time.

[Nitroturtle]

34 minutes ago, Kermack said:

Just noticed that the element sensors sometimes let the wrong gas through.  But they cost way less energy than the original non-automation filters.  The oxygen output has become over pressured seems to be why.

Thanks for including the save, pretty cool setup.  You can fix the wrong gas by adding pipes as shown.  It will allow the non-hydrogen gas to always flow into the bypass and block new gas from entering the loop.  It won't protect from hydrogen going the wrong way, should the line on that side back up, but that is unlikely anyways.

[nakomaru]

35 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

As a gas, [ethanol has] much better thermal diffusivity than steam

35 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

then let the ethanol push out lighter gases like carbon dioxide

Awesome, never knew ethanol gas had such high molar mass (184 vs CO2's 44). Looks like it's intended to be 46.

[Nebbie]

1 minute ago, nakomaru said:

You want the math?

Steam thermal diffusivity: .184/4.179 = ~.044

Ethanol gas thermal diffusivity: .167/2.148 = ~.078

Ethanol gas thermal diffusivity in proportion to steam's: ~.078/~.044 = ~1.77

I'd add units, but they get really gnarly (and density is involved, but in ONI it doesn't really exist so it just messes with the units more).

[Kermack]

I was going for more early day resources so I opted for water and polluted water as my thermal transfers.  The biggest obstacle for this is indeed the refined metals for automation, but should not be too hard.  But what I really want to know, is where the heat deletion is taking place and if it's considered to be "cheating".  From what I can tell, this is just like using the steam turbines and aquatuners(which I haven't done yet), but in place of the turbine you delete heat with the hydrogen generator.  I read that people tend to think Klei's intention for the steam turbine to be a legit way to delete heat.

Something about this just seems unbalanced.  I mean if the hydrogen generator is eating all the heat then that's ok, but I get this odd feeling like something else here is deleting the heat before it reaches the generator.

[Nebbie]

19 minutes ago, Kermack said:

I was going for more early day resources so I opted for water and polluted water as my thermal transfers.  The biggest obstacle for this is indeed the refined metals for automation, but should be too hard.  But what I really want to know, is where the heat deletion is taking place and if it's considered to be "cheating".  From what I can tell, this is just like using the steam turbines and aquatuners(which I haven't done yet), but in place of the turbine you delete heat with the hydrogen generator.  I read that people tend to think Klei's intention for the steam turbine to be a legit way to delete heat.

Something about this just seems unbalanced.  I mean if the hydrogen generator is eating all the heat then that's ok, but I get this odd feeling like something else here is deleting the heat before it reaches the generator.

It is true ethanol isn't easy at first to get on Terra, as you need either a rust biome or trees (which only spawn in the forest biome). On other asteroids, ethanol is sometimes more common than water, and certainly far easier to produce.

The main heat deletion happens in electrolysis. Water's SHC is 4.179, hydrogen's 2.4, and oxygen's 1.005. Since 8/9th of the water becomes oxygen, you're looking at a quartering of the amount of heat energy, provided output temperature is the same as input (so, input over 70 C). This is huge.
To actually make the system break even on heat in vs. heat out (by virtue of it having a minimum output temp of 70 C), you'd have to cool the water several degrees below the minimum temp of an AETN, which I think causes cold damage to the electrolyzer when put in (it won't break the actual pipe if it's in 1kg packets, despite being 177 C below freezing). It used to be able to delete more, cause the outputs would always be 70 C even if the input was higher, but this was changed recently.
Oh, and when you send hydrogen to the hydrogen generator, all the heat bound in it just dies. So, transfer heat to water, electrolyze water (massive heat deletion), transfer heat to and burn the hydrogen (extra heat deletion, and allowing for cool oxygen out).

[nakomaru]

35 minutes ago, Kermack said:

cheating, legit, unbalanced

Whose metrics are you going to use for these things in a single player sandbox game? If you are having fun, use it. If it doesn't feel right, don't.

You are currently using two methods of heat deletion: hydrogen deletion and conversion of 70C H2O to H+O2. (H2O contains more heat than equivalent temperature H+O2.)

You could increase the effect of the second by preheating the electrolyzer water to ~98C. If you are planning to get the water from a geyser this will be the same thing.

@Nebbie I'm not sure it is correct to use real world diffusivity in a game that doesn't really model density or pressure. A proxy for density is mass per tile which you can control.

In ONI, as long as you are not clamped by heat capacity at low mass, diffusivity should be proportional to conductivity. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Nebbie]

23 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Whose metrics are you going to use for these things in a single player sandbox game? If you are having fun, use it. If it doesn't feel right, don't.

You are currently using two methods of heat deletion: hydrogen deletion and conversion of 70C H2O to H+O2. (H2O contains more heat than equivalent temperature H+O2.)

You could increase the effect of the second by preheating the electrolyzer water to ~98C. If you are planning to get the water from a geyser this will be the same thing.

@Nebbie I'm not sure it is correct to use real world diffusivity in a game that doesn't really model density or pressure. A proxy for density is mass per tile which you can control.

In ONI, as long as you are not clamped by heat capacity at low mass, diffusivity should be equal to conductivity. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Not correct, ONI just makes density arbitrary (up until you start busting tiles with simulated pressure). Gram for gram, ethanol gives you better diffusivity than steam, making it superior for spreading the heat, especially since it's also easier to produce the same amount of it. And if you do run up against busting tiles, then you'll have gotten further at spreading heat around well with ethanol.
Of course, if you create walls 3 tiles wide, that stops being an issue, and you can cram in as much of anything as you want, but this tends to not be very practical, and you'd still probably be able to produce ethanol faster than water, especially now that trees regularly give acorns. In fact, if you can pollute that water, you can turn it into much more ethanol with domestic trees.

You may note further that steam has a higher thermal conductivity than hydrogen gas, yet even in rooms that never cool to liquid water range and don't use wheezeworts to cool, you'll see people put hydrogen in. That's because hydrogen has similar thermal diffusivity to ethanol (slightly worse, ethanol is preferable at temperature ranges up until phosphorus gas is an option).

[nakomaru]

11 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Not correct

That's a nice theory you've got there. It'd be a shame if anyone were to test it.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

[Nebbie]

17 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

That's a nice theory you've got there. I'd be a shame if anyone were to test it.

...

Are you sure this test is actually disproving that SHC matters? I'd expect if it doesn't for hydrogen to beat ethanol, since it has a slightly higher thermal conductivity, but here ethanol is beating hydrogen by quite a bit.
I suspect the reason steam is beating gaseous ethanol here is that you used a temperature range where steam and ethanol gas will condense into water and liquid ethanol (water's thermal diffusivity is three times steam's, while liquid ethanol's thermal diffusivity is slightly lower than gaseous ethanol's). I recommend retesting with the cold end being 101 C and the hot end like 300+ C.

[nakomaru]

I was modeling the range we were working in. The reason ethanol beats hydrogen above is because of condensation teleporting the coldest liquid to the bottom. It loses as a pure gas. And steam beats everything, as expected of the highest conductivity.

Spoiler

[Argelle]

5 hours ago, Nebbie said:

As for actually building this in a real base, you'll find it's pretty difficult to get all the research done and all the refined metals for the smart batteries and automation. I strongly recommend using the one tile gap trick with the hydrogen area for the electrolyzers as well.

@Nebbie

Remind me... this (white arrow) is the one gap trick?

So here (to my defence I was using it to ranch glossy dreckos) I'm doing it wrong (less efficient)?

[Nebbie]

2 minutes ago, Argelle said:

@Nebbie

Remind me... this (white arrow) is the one gap trick?

So here (to my defence I was using it to ranch glossy dreckos) I'm doing it wrong (less efficient)?

I suspect that that could fail from a bit of oxygen (note the far left, imagine that sliding to the right) slipping across. The key is to have only one tile above the divider between the pump and where gases intermix, so that once hydrogen is in that tile, nothing can slip by to the pump.

[Yoma_Nosme]

6 hours ago, Kermack said:

Just noticed that the element sensors sometimes let the wrong gas through.

Probably your pipe is full and packets gets pushed the wrong way

[PickPay]

Brilliant design. I tested the save and found out these issues :

1. Most importantly the hydrogen cooling the AT will heat (fast), be released from the loop and it won't (ever?) replenish fast enough therefore blocking the coolant (because the AT is disabled).

2. The mix of 3 gasses in the bridge blocks the pumps frequently, which over pressurizes the Electrolyzer often.

3. Not a big deal but the P.water isnt flowing constantly in the gas chamber thus not cooling the oxygen to a fixed temperature.

I'm wondering if the newly produced hydrogen could be constantly introduced into the loop while letting out an equivalent amount of over heated hydrogen.

[Kermack]

Here's the same thing with some slight tweaks, the water has become fully primed to the point the aqua tuner only needs to run very little.  I stole another bit from Brothgar and let the water for the electrolyzer dip into the heating chamber bringing the water just below 100c.  I set the thermo sensor to 100c so the aquatuner doesn't break itself, any higher and it occasionally flashes the overheat warning.  Added some more redundancy and automation to limit the coal generators from running as much as possible, probably a smarter way to handle the logic but I'm just a mechanic with only 32 hours of PLC training.  

 

 

The Ultra Colony.sav