One woman saved tonnes in power, find out how!

[Yunru]

Just a simple test to see how many smart batteries of power having a full storage tank in your cooling system saves.

Here's the initial setup:

Each system will initially be full of brine at 9 degrees.

Brine above 20 degrees will be sent to the aquatuner to be cooled.

The left hand side is just a loop, while the right hand side has a full storage that the brine enters before circling the cooling loop/

The cycle is about to be 104, will update at cycle 154, and 204.

EDIT: Overly optimistic, update at cycle 129

[Yunru]

Results are in:

A clear win for the storage tank. And that was with just ~2kDTU/s.

 

Now excuse me while I continue to get distracted by Starsector.

[Yalp]

54 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Each system will initially be full of brine at 9 degrees.

Brine above 20 degrees will be sent to the aquatuner to be cooled.

The loop with the storage tank has significantly more mass. This mass will take a lot longer to heat up and requires cooling.

[Yunru]

1 minute ago, Yalp said:

The loop with the storage tank has significantly more mass. This mass will take a lot longer to heat up and requires cooling.

Ah but that's the thing, it requires less cooling, because the temperatures are averaged and then rounded each time water enters the tank.

For the record, both systems heated up enough to require the aquatuner to cool them.

The left system needed it twice and was heading towards needing it a third time before the right even had it's second.

[Yalp]

58 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Ah but that's the thing, it requires less cooling, because the temperatures are averaged and then rounded each time water enters the tank.

Is this to imply, that rounding tends to be more often (or always) to the lower number, thus deleting heat? If so, good to learn of this feature.

Still, the higher mass provides additional cooling initially. The AT starts later, because all the water needs to heat up first. I'm not entirely sure if that's your actual point when saying:

58 minutes ago, Yunru said:

temperatures are averaged

If so, you should consider the cost of preconditioning your coolant. Depending on its initial temperature, the higher mass can lead to a massively increased energy investment beforehand. If the coolant was already cool, you can run the non storage loop through the extra liquid to cool it with a similar effect.
I am aware, that the storage has other benefits, like smoothing out temperature spikes, and like to use them myself. I'm merely trying to point out potential influences that might falsify your results, happy tinkering  

Edit: grammar

[Yunru]

12 minutes ago, Yalp said:

Is this to imply, that rounding tends to be more often (or always) to the lower number, thus deleting heat? If so, good to learn of this feature.

Oh yes indeed. I'm working on a massively oversized one that doesn't have any external cooling as a proof-of-concept.

...

It's taking a while to fill.

[Lutzkhie]

That title thou, very click baity I love it 

[SpreadsheetGamr]

So reservoirs can be used to heat or cool fluids.  Seems pretty legit.  And it tends to be better at cooling than heating, right?

Any idea what the optimum temperature difference between the storage and the incoming fluid is to achieve maximum effect?

I share Yalp's concern that the right system has more mass.  Looks like ~1500kg vs 6500kg?  I suppose you could run 500 tiles of insulated pipes...

 

[Yunru]

Here we go:

Each of the tanks holds brine at 9.1c.

There's a tepidizer keeping the oil at a minimum of 50c.

The valve sends half of the output back to the input, to help maintain temperature.

Let's see where it goes.

 

[Yunru]

Alas, an abject failure. It must track it to too many digits.

[SpreadsheetGamr]

I keep going back and forward on this, but I think temperature is just a derived value of the number of DTUs in a tile/object.  DTUs are just integers so it solves a lot of complication with floating point numbers and rounding.

[PhailRaptor]

It would make sense that Reservoirs average temperature, since they also average germ count.

[fishoutofwater]

so if I plan to use metal refinery coolant to power up a turbine, better I use tank or not?

[BLACKBERREST3]

Darn, I really thought we were going to see another rounding exploit, feature, bug, etc. so close!

[Yunru]

1 hour ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

Darn, I really thought we were going to see another rounding exploit, feature, bug, etc. so close!

I think we could, if we just use small enough numbers. But we're talking the likes of 1g packets.

I might just set up another experiment with that, as it was my first build.

The biggest problem is just the time it takes to confirm it's not just because of the difference in thermal mass.

[BLACKBERREST3]

A side note on rounding errors; I've noticed a few of them, from gas not changing temp if less than 1g, liquids destroyed if less than 10g (bead), critter reproduction rates are 1.66%, liquid pressure stacking, rocket reasearch rounding errors (Francis John vid), critters eating too little to reset a starving meter, etc. Then you've got constant temps from falling debri piles and temp resetting when you build anything or change the state of something. Some of these simplifications are pretty cool, but a lot are quite annoying and happen quite often. Back to the topic, maybe it just has to be less than .1% of the total capacity of the pipes or less than 10g to get a rounding error. It's a thought, but it's probably not that simple.

Spoiler

30-40g - Bead forms > 10g
Water
Polluted Water
Salt Water
Brine
Ethanol
Super Coolant
Carbon
Carbon Dioxide
Hydrogen
Oxygen
Chlorine
Methane
Propane
Helium
Mercury

300-400g - Rounding Error between 320-330g
Crude Oil
Petroleum
Salt
Sulfer

6-8kg
Phosphorus

30-40kg
Naptha

60-80kg
Steel
Niobium
Copper
Tungsten

75-100kg
Lead
Gold

90-120kg
Aluminum
Iron

100kg
Viscogel

150-200kg
Glass
Magma

 

1 hour ago, Yunru said:

The biggest problem is just the time it takes to confirm

Waiting on Liquids to transfer or building? Blueprints for building and superspeed for liquids, but even superspeed  changes a few mechanics in game; mostly critter-door interactions and morbs. I haven't tried cheatengine yet to see if I could speed the game up, but my pc not be able to handle it.

[mathmanican]

5 hours ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

... Rounding Error between ...

My experiments with liquids, and trying to predict their movement exactly, have shown no rounding errors occur even past 20 decimals, when it comes to masses.  Because of floating point arithmetic issues, I think the devs put in an epsilon error measurement near 0.0000000005kg = .5mcg on certain mechanics (not rounding the mass, rather checking for other things). As far as my tests go, I have reasons to believe that liquid masses are rounded at the microgram levels, but only when they combine with other liquids. Yothiel's post on heat management shows that thermal transfer is clamped, though this just prevents heat transfer, and does not contribute to heat loss. 

As for the values where beading occurs, liquids will disappear if their mass falls below 10g. Liquid will not flow left (or right if you block off the left side) till you reach 4*(min horizontal flow). Liquid that can move both left and right will not flow right till you surpass (16/3)*(Hor Minimum Flow).  

For kicks, I played with water to see what mass is needed (exactly, including some programmer defined error).

1. If you paint in anything equal to, or less than 0.039999997243285175668736 kg, then this registers as less than the needed .04 kg for water to flow left. The water does not move at all.
2. If you paint in anything equal to, or greater than 0.039999997243285175668737 kg, Then the liquid splits with about 10g moving left, and 30g staying in the middle. I stopped (from boredom) after going out 24 decimal places. I doubt any rounding occurs here at all. 

=> The game registers mass differences out past 24 decimal places.  I'm sure someone could figure out exactly what the difference is. 

Now let's look at what happens when liquid masses combine. Let's split the masses above into two parts, and then let the game combine them to see what happens. 

1. Paint 0.02 kg on a flat plane, and then paint 0.0199999967 kg above it. Let the game proceed and the two combine (showing 39.9g of water).  No splitting happens.
2. Paint 0.02 kg on a flat plane, and then paint 0.0199999968kg above it. Let the game proceed and the two combine (showing 40.0g of liquid). The game sends 10g left.  We could carry on this experiment further to get a better indication of where the split happens, but this is enough for here.

=>When two liquids combine, the error that results from rounding appears at the mcg level. This may explain why 10kgs of liquid, when passed through some valves, produce an extra few mcg of liquid. Water clocks can be tempermental if completely sealed off, as they can produce extra liquid if you are not careful. (See here for more details.)

Punchline: In terms of exploiting the above rounding issues for cooling large bodies of water, it's not going to help. 

[BLACKBERREST3]

This makes a lot of sense, I didn't see the point of painting in anything less than 1 gram at the time, but maybe you could scale the valve system to a ridiculous level to get a meaningful liquid creation setup. It's not an op exploit as there is not a lot to work with, but it is there. It would only be useful for controlling temperature if you use the newly created liquids as a heat sink (to above 5000 degrees or so) and destroy them. I might have to play around with this to see how many kg/cycle I can generate. Good find.