The "Crying Crab" Cooler: Non-exploit phase-change heat deletion

[Blazing Falken]

Everything's gonna be alright...

The "crying crab" is a relatively simple and viable no-exploitation heat deletion system, made possible by harnessing the phase-change cooling of Ethanol.

 

Heat load can be anything-- liquid, gas, tiles, pipes, etc. Aquatuner will run 100% of the time unless coolant temps get too low. Coolant used is polluted water.

Construction:

In action:

Warning: 25 mb .gif

Spoiler

 

12,000 kg of water. 89.9c to 74c after 20 cycles. Anyone want to do the DTU math?

Update:

Cycle 760:  41.2c

Cycle 770: 32.8c  Efficiency may increase at lower temps...

Cycle 775: 28.5c

Cycle 780 24.0c

Cycle 785 19.1c

Cycle 790: 13.2c * Low temp safety cutoff has been reached. AT no longer running at 100%

 

     Dear, little crabby, don't shed no tears.
No, pokeshell, no cry.

[nakomaru]

Simple, brilliant.

It's 66 kW of cooling.

[6Havok9]

Who cares about the math, this has to be built just to see it in action 

[cblack]

Ethanol deletes heat when it changes phase?  It must be the only fluid that does that, and since that violates thermodynamics, I think I'd call it an exploit.  Then again, so do steam turbines...

It's cool (pun totally intended) but I think its underwhelming compared to other options.  It might be useful before you get the plastic for turbines though.

[Blazing Falken]

57 minutes ago, 6Havok9 said:

Who cares about the math, this has to be built just to see it in action 

I added a .gif to the original post.

[avc15]

Actually not an exploit - this cooler is just using the 6C of hysteresis between vaporization & condensation, and the difference in SHC between states to eliminate heat. Nice work.

 

[Lilalaunekuh]

Does someone have a list for viable resources for this type of cooler ?

[My first idea was "glass -> molten glass -> glass" but this wouldn´t allow the use of a aquatuner. So is there an alternative to ethanol ?]

[PickyEater]

You Sir are setting a new benchmark for showing off builds, outstanding! Thank you.

[Lafara]

sir, I have a question.

how to dumb 100kg of petroleum , 100 kg of ethanol into aquatuner pit and pump out any other unwanted gas ? in non-sand box mode.

[Blazing Falken]

12 minutes ago, Lafara said:

sir, I have a question.

how to dumb 100kg of petroleum , 100 kg of ethanol into aquatuner pit and pump out any other unwanted gas ? in non-sand box mode.

Built in sandbox, but completely do-able in survival.

Pump to evacuate gasses. Water-lock to keep vacuum. Fill via bottle emptier or pipe outlet. Build the final tile and tear down the apparatus.

[avc15]

2 hours ago, cblack said:

Ethanol deletes heat when it changes phase?  It must be the only fluid that does that, and since that violates thermodynamics, I think I'd call it an exploit.  Then again, so do steam turbines...

It's cool (pun totally intended) but I think its underwhelming compared to other options.  It might be useful before you get the plastic for turbines though.

ethanol is the only fluid that hits two requirements. (1) the gas<->liquid phase change is reversible (2) gas has a lower SHC than liquid. Plenty of fluids meet requirement 1, plenty of fluids meet requirement 2. Ethanol is the only one I know of that does both. (edit: if I had to hazard a guess - this build being possible is probably the very reason ethanol got nerfed)

As to viability. Someone will need to make a comparison between this and a steam turbine built for optimal heat deletion. Steam turbines cost power too. But a chill pill or smokestack build should be able to get about 1,180 kW of cooling per aquatuner (1200 W electricity + support load which should be nearly zero), so, this one is about 6% efficient when compared to that. biggest differences being (1) chill pill uses a temp reset exploit (2) smokestack consumes mass.

Self-cooling steam turbine? anyone have a comparison point there? It should be framed in terms of average net electric power consumption to average external cooling. 

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, cblack said:

violates thermodynamics,

Are we playing the same game?

[0xFADE]

Very nice. I didn’t know aluminum was in game yet. Can we get it from space?

Isnt it technically cheaper energy wise to use a steam gen?  Since it makes a small amount of power.  This is much more compact at least. 

[avc15]

1 hour ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Does someone have a list for viable resources for this type of cooler ?

[My first idea was "glass -> molten glass -> glass" but this wouldn´t allow the use of a aquatuner. So is there an alternative to ethanol ?]

Glass would be many times more efficient, but it'd be a much more complicated build. See if you can come up with one  I'd love to see the result.

4 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Very nice. I didn’t know aluminum was in game yet. Can we get it from space?

Living planets have aluminum.

 

 

[cblack]

59 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

Are we playing the same game?

It's just it seems like more of an oversight by the devs, whereas the steam turbine is actually intended to delete heat.  I could be wrong and maybe they want you to delete heat by exploiting using different SHCs of the same element in different states.

I guess time & patch notes (or lack thereof) will tell.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

Are we playing the same game?

There are some people that still believe (without good reason) they are playing a Physics simulation. The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary to think that is pretty staggering with not heat radiation, no mixing of fluids, no chemical reactions, mostly missing effects of pressure, etc. 

26 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Very nice. I didn’t know aluminum was in game yet. Can we get it from space?

Isnt it technically cheaper energy wise to use a steam gen?  Since it makes a small amount of power.  This is much more compact at least. 

There are some biomes that have aluminum in them. Not in Terra though AFAIK.

[avc15]

 

21 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

There are some people that still believe (without good reason) they are playing a Physics simulation. The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary to think that is pretty staggering

You don't need to be so insulting.

4 hours ago, cblack said:

It must be the only fluid that does that, and since that violates thermodynamics

You have to allow this one, it's clearly intended otherwise there wouldn't be a hysteresis temperature for state change, or materials that have different thermal properties in different states. The game doesn't follow bernoulli's laws for gases, so this is the closest you're going to come to a "heat engine" in this game. It's quite inefficient, too. It's fine.

Exploit? Non exploit? I mean, I'm doing this to amplify the work I'm getting from my A/Ts: (every bit of work put into cooling these gens to 40C is quadrupled by the waste products being produced at 40C)

(yeah I've realized I set the temp too low)

Is it an exploit? That's how the building is designed.

Is the crab cooler an exploit? Ethanol is designed to allow the existence of a thermodynamic cycle, something quite new to this game.

Exploit or not, depends on your own personal aesthetic, so arguing over it is kind of silly.

[malloc]

36 minutes ago, avc15 said:

Living planets have aluminum.

End game spoiler?

[Nebbie]

4 hours ago, cblack said:

Ethanol deletes heat when it changes phase?  It must be the only fluid that does that, and since that violates thermodynamics, I think I'd call it an exploit.  Then again, so do steam turbines...

It's cool (pun totally intended) but I think its underwhelming compared to other options.  It might be useful before you get the plastic for turbines though.

In real life, SHC is different by phase (generally, liquid is highest by a lot) and even slightly by degree; steam and ice have a lower SHC than hydrogen gas and which of water's SHCs you use in chemistry calculations is a matter of convention. ONI however normally simplifies it so the same material normally has the same SHC across phases, as it's missing things in how heat works to prevent heat being created or destroyed by phase changes. Regolith to magma is an infamous one where the SHC increase from solid to liquid leads to heat creation for massive power gain, by the way.

20 minutes ago, malloc said:

End game spoiler?

Aluminum is in the starting biome on several asteroid types. People kind of need to know how to get it on Terra considering it's absolutely bonkers (nearly the same thermal conductivity as thermium).
I must note I've been told that thermal diffusivity is more important, and thus gold is still king pre-thermium, but some testing I've been looking at recently seems to indicate it's really not, at least with how ONI handles heat and at small scales.

[nakomaru]

If there's one thing that reading this forum will teach you,
it's that absolutely every mechanic in the game is an exploit.

[0xFADE]

Sounds like a nicer starting area than all this copper 

[avc15]

6 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Sounds like a nicer starting area than all this copper 

The forest start has more challenging early game problems to solve than the terra start.

Aluminum is a minor little bonus.

[hackcasual]

Salt works in the opposite direction, so could use that to for example, amplify the heat supplied to a turbine, or improve efficiency of a regolith melter.

[Rhogar]

This increases the DTUs cooled by wheezes as long as you ride on the edge right?  SHC of l.ethanol: 2.46 and h2: 2.4.

[nakomaru]

Keep your worts in Hydrogen. They act on the gas SHC.

The conversion to liquid creates heat. The conversion to gas deletes heat.
The magic happens in the 6~8K range, where it takes more energy to go up than go down.

You could design an apparatus that dumps your waste heat into liquid eth, then the gas is cooled by conduction to your chilled hydrogen. You won't need to be particular about the hydrogen's temperature on the low end, just make sure the ethanol gas isn't heated more than necessary.