How to deal with heat deletion nerf?

[psusi]

So now that most buildings have been changed to a minimum output temperature instead of fixed output, and the steam turbine power output has been nerfed, how the hell are you supposed to get rid of heat?  The steam turbine takes a lot of power to make it delete heat, so where do you get that?  You only get about 400w average power from either a natural gas or hydrogen vent, which isn't even enough to run everything else, let alone have some extra to run the steam turbine.  The ethanol cycle can be used to produce cold oxygen from wild arbor trees, but if you want to tap the water from the salt water or cool steam geysers, you are going to need to delete a lot of heat, so how the heck do you do it?  I calculate that it is about break even to electrolyze the 95 degree water, heat the hydrogen to 150, burn it in a hydrogen generator, and use the power to to run that.  But that still leaves you with oxygen at around 60 degrees, and no way to cool it further without using a lot of power.

 

[Gurgel]

I tried an Oasis map with just one salt-water geyser for cooling and no steam turbine. You do have to control temperature carefully and you need to boil part of the water to steam and heat that steam further in order to cool down other water. The steam then goes into a gas-crusher whenever it gets to hot and the aquatuner used is about to overheat. In addition, the whole thing needs your dupes to generate a lot of power. But it is doable with just steel as high-temperature material and quite a bit less messy than the turbines. Oxygen was from Oxyferns though, but I think I could have made it with electrolyzers as well. I got bored before trying that as things are moving very slowly with such a set-up. Usually you want a pwater geyser or cold slush geyser for cooling. 

[avc15]

Steam turbines are fairly efficient, just not a dense cooling solution. You'll find various claims about how power positive you can make them, but I haven't seen anyone account for the amount of heat that leaks across the building (from steam chamber to outside on TOP of heat rejected from the steam it processes directly - this actually requires benchmarking to measure, not just math)

Other options.

Ethanol cycle - about 14% efficient, unless you use a trick to make it change phases a few extra times per cycle. Example 1 (multiple phase changes) - Example 2 (only 14% efficient)

Temp resets - tremendous cooling potential in a very small space, but it needs space materials to work at full capacity. "The chill pill" is probably the most compact design I've seen. Others have shown us ways of super-heating food; dupes destroy the heat when they eat food that's heated to 1000C. Others still have shown us ways to use a ranch to demolish heat (as critters advance through their lifecycle, their temp resets). Another thing is the use of lumber, which always gets dropped at the same temp as the tree itself. Various other similar tricks - anytime the game "creates" something there is a default temperature.

If you're into realism - heat some exhaust material, any material you have a replenishable supply of - vent it to space. This actually happens in nature on real asteroids, comets, and exoplanets. "Smokestack"

Wheezeworts can still be quite effective, you just can't pack them all in 1x1, and you have to spend a small amount of power to keep them fertilized.

Deleting heat with electrolysis - Effective, but I found it to be un-stable. A slight change in water supply temp drastically changes the cooler's capacity. In fact, this approach can be used with any process that creates by-products with lower heat capacity than its inputs, not just electrolysis.

Or, surprise us with your unique solution.

 

 

 

[Stoned]

I had the same problems when I started my post release map. Great cooling problems with only salt water and polluted water geysers. Just not enough power to run aquatuner/steam engine combos to cool everything down. I think it is intended to give you some challenge in early game, it all resolved for me once I got my oil business going and had enough energy at my hand. Overall the aquatuner/steam engine combo is very effective in cooling and you need just a few hundred watts to run it continuously. I exploited cold bioms to get there.

[nakomaru]

9 hours ago, avc15 said:

I haven't seen anyone account for the amount of heat that leaks across the building (from steam chamber to outside

Some things:

• The turbine is a 5x4 building for the purposes of heat exchange, including the 5 tiles it overlaps.
• The turbine is buried inside of the tiles. So it exchanges heat fairly quickly with them, and should cool them to slightly above whatever your turbine temperature is. (Ceramic or worse.)
• The turbine does not transfer heat with the steam.
• The steam will transfer with any insulated tiles. (Ceramic or worse.)
• Other sources of heat loss can be designed around, so I do not consider them.

Therefore, I consider the following common cases.

This should be a fairly reasonable time sample and ΔT to ignore non linearities of heat transfer. The heat lost through imperfect insulation is:

• 814 DTU/s (tiles, turbine) (room temperature ceramic vs 2kg steam room @ 200C)
• 542 DTU/s (tiles, turbine) (room temperature ceramic vs 200kg steam room @200C)

I don't understand why the 2kg steam loses. It was my understanding that higher heat capacity tiles will tend to transfer more heat, not less. Either way, this is a tiny baby amount of heat loss that is 0.1% the capacity of a tuner on water. For insulated insulation, the loss is of course 0 watts.

[psusi]

11 hours ago, avc15 said:

Ethanol cycle - about 14% efficient, unless you use a trick to make it change phases a few extra times per cycle. Example 1 (multiple phase changes) - Example 2 (only 14% efficient)

Yea, but that feels cheaty to me and also takes plenty of power.  I'm used to finding one or two ng geysers near the starting area for power, but on this map I have yet to find one so at over 100 cycles in, I'm still running everything off treadmills ( except I recently fired up a coal gen to power the metal refinery down in the cold biome for cooling it ).

I seem to have an open steam geyser, an open salt water, a buried salt water, burred hydrogen, and buried infectious polluted oxygen vents.  I'm thinking I should tap that hydrogen vent for power, but it comes out at 500 C so will need cooled down to 100 C to not overheat a gold pump.  That needs 100g * 2.4 * 400 = 96 kDTU/s of cooling on average, or 384 kDTU/s while erupting.or 0.656 duty cycle on a pwater aquatuner, which costs 787 watts during the eruption, or just shy of 200 watts on average, which is 1/4th of the power I'll get from burning the hydrogen.  And that heat still has to go somewhere.  Running 10 ice makers would get rid of that heat, but cost 600 watts of power, which is more than you have left from burning the hydrogen, running the AT and air pump!

I also really need to get switched over to an electrolyzer setup for oxygen instead of algae terrariums, but I calculate that the electrolyzer, 2 gas pumps ( 2 for oxygen, 1 for hydrogen, but on average 2 run ), desalinator ( @21% duty cycle ), and liquid pump for picking up the salt water from the geyser ( @half that duty cycle ) will use up all but 76 watts of the 800 watts the hydrogen generator will produce.  And you still have to get the damn oxygen cooled down from 95 C to below 30 C!  According to the wiki, a steam turbine setup deletes 923 DTU/s/watt, so that leftover 76 watts is only enough to delete about 70 kDTU/s.  Cooling the 888 g/s of oxygen @95 C coming out of the electrolyzer takes 115 kDTU/s!

This is why I'm asking how the hell you are supposed to deal with heat now.

[caffeinated21]

I don’t understand everyone’s freak out about cooling (at least outside of aridio or oasis). You can easily just let geysers dump heat into the biome’s for a loooong time. If you’re using exo-suits their oxygen doesn’t need to be cold. And once you tap the oil biome you’ve got all the power you’ll ever need. 
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[0xFADE]

Steam turbines solve everything. You can ignore most heat problems till you tech up to them. 

If you have trees you can use ethanol earlier. 

[psusi]

16 minutes ago, caffeinated21 said:

I don’t understand everyone’s freak out about cooling (at least outside of aridio or oasis). You can easily just let geysers dump heat into the biome’s for a loooong time. If you’re using exo-suits their oxygen doesn’t need to be cold. And once you tap the oil biome you’ve got all the power you’ll ever need. 
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Maybe that's it... oil must just king and I just need to get down there already.

14 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Steam turbines solve everything. You can ignore most heat problems till you tech up to them. 

If you have trees you can use ethanol earlier. 

I got 2 seeds from the printing pod and my pip made another so now I have 1 domestic and 2 wild ones growing.  I keep thinking of making an ethanol setup.  At first when I ran the numbers it looked pretty bad because I thought you had to cool the ethanol down to 40, but apparently the petrol generator somehow escaped the heat nerf and still outputs based on its own temperature rather than the fuel.  What's the trick to minimizing the heat transfer out of the fuel tanks?  A mesh tile under it in a vacuum for perfect, but is there a decent alternative that doesn't involve vacuum?  I guess just insulated tile under it?  And if instead of cooling the pwater back down down to 25 C, I can just use up most of it hot feeding the domestic arbor tree in a hydroponic tile with a fluid regulator to choke the flow so it never has any hot pwater stored in it exchanging heat.  That makes the case quite a bit more compelling!

[caffeinated21]

If you want to be extra fancy, you can cool your generators down to just above the freezing point of pwater and then they generate net cooling with all the cold water they produce 

[psusi]

7 minutes ago, caffeinated21 said:

If you want to be extra fancy, you can cool your generators down to just above the freezing point of pwater and then they generate net cooling with all the cold water they produce 

No you can't.  It's minimum output pwater temp is 40.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I honestly haven't had troubles keeping things cool.  If I try to keep EVERYTHING cool, that's a problem.  Some maps, such as Volcanea and Oasisse can be challenging because of heat early in the game, but as the game progresses it becomes easier. 

To manage the heat in most worlds, I mostly shuffle it around. I use recirculating pipes and/or vacuum doors to move heat to a location or material that can handle it without causing a problem.  These can take up quite a bit of space, but they don't need power.  I use aquatuners to move a LOT of heat quickly, but as you've stated above, that takes a lot of power.

Steam turbines can get rid of heat.  Along with Wheezewarts and AETNs, they're the only option for actually removing heat in game without venting material into space.  If you can move heat to your turbine without using power, then it can be effectively used as a generator.

However, if you look at a steam turbine/aquatuner pair as a heat removal device rather than a generator, then you can remove a lot of heat for half the power.  This configuration is capable of removing 586k DTU/s while running (using water) and requires only about 620 watts of power (once everything stabilizes).   That's 1.5 dupes of hamster wheel power.  It becomes a lot more efficient once you start using supercoolant in your lines.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

If you can move heat to your turbine without using power, then it can be effectively used as a generator.

Right, but you either have to use it as a generator using magma, or use it as a cooler at the cost of power.  I guess I need to start building out power options and hopefully the power will start to outstrip the need to run the aquatuners to delete the heat before it becomes a problem.

[caffeinated21]

5 hours ago, psusi said:

No you can't.  It's minimum output pwater temp is 40.

Ah- I didn’t know they changed that!

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Steam turbines can get rid of heat.  Along with Wheezewarts and AETNs, they're the only option for actually removing heat in game without venting material into space. 

Not quite, gas and liquid crushers are also very effective. I have been using them more and more lately, to avoid long venting pipes to space and they do not need a pump.

[psusi]

3 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Not quite, gas and liquid crushers are also very effective. I have been using them more and more lately, to avoid long venting pipes to space and they do not need a pump.

I don't understand the point.  Unless you are only heating the steam to just above boiling because you have no gold amalgam or steel and have water to spare.  If you can heat it to higher temperatures, then just let the turbine delete the heat.  You are paying to run the aquatuner either way right?

 

Also there are plenty of options that still delete heat, including the fixed output temp of 37 C from lavatories, and feeding extra hot hydrogen to generators, the list goes on.  It is just that nearly all of them take energy to run the AT to pump heat into the thing about to be deleted and you can no longer gain energy from doing so by running a steam turbine since it takes more energy to push the heat into the turbine than you get out.

[Supraluminal]

7 hours ago, psusi said:

Right, but you either have to use it as a generator using magma, or use it as a cooler at the cost of power.  I guess I need to start building out power options and hopefully the power will start to outstrip the need to run the aquatuners to delete the heat before it becomes a problem.

Not just magma. Anything that produces temperatures above 125C will do the trick with a free-flowing coolant loop, no aquatuner or thermoregulator required. The kiln and metal refinery are two pretty early examples. The metal refinery of course uses power for its own production, but there's no extra heat pump required to get a steam turbine running with it. The wiki even says it produces net positive power when refining iron and steel since those recipes create so much heat, though I haven't checked the math on that myself.

Also, consider this little nugget from the just-released patch notes for the next update:

Quote

Misc

• Steam turbines correctly obtain boost from Engie's Tune-up

If you're willing to spend the metal on the buff, this could open up a lot of possibilities for more efficient turbine coolers. Pretty sure it will make it easy to go power-positive using supercoolant in an AT.

[Gurgel]

13 hours ago, psusi said:

I don't understand the point.  Unless you are only heating the steam to just above boiling because you have no gold amalgam or steel and have water to spare.  If you can heat it to higher temperatures, then just let the turbine delete the heat.  You are paying to run the aquatuner either way right?

I think I have said everything about my reasoning now, in particular that I _wanted_ to do this without turbines. If you have trouble understanding that, I probably cannot help you. I do this with steel, incidentally. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 11/12/2019 at 1:01 PM, psusi said:

Right, but you either have to use it as a generator using magma, or use it as a cooler at the cost of power. 

Kinda/sorta.  Yes, you must have a lot of heat to use it as a generator.  Magma certainly does do the trick.  So does capturing rocket exhaust, the output from various hot gas vents (hydrogen, hot steam, etc), volcanoes, and many geysers. You've really got a lot of choices and options here other than straight magma.

However, since a steam turbine removes heat using work to produce power, you can think of it as "fueled by heat."  Heat is generated through work in other buildings (smelting, aquatuner, lightbulb, etc).   Generators aren't 100% efficient (some of the fuel is turned into heat instead of power) and neither are turbines.  Steam turbines are no exception.  They will use more "fuel" (heat) to generate power than the power used to generate that heat in the first place.  So if you're using buildings (aquatuner) to produce the heat to run the turbine, you will always have to use more power than you get back.

The efficiency of your turbine is going to be directly related to the efficiency of your heat source.  A large heat source (magma, etc) is going to be 100% efficient if you can move that heat without using power.  A turbine powered by an aquatuner will only be as efficient as the aquatuner is.  The efficiency of creating heat with your aquatuner is going to improve depending on what you use as a coolant, with "Supercoolant" being the best.  Even so, the turbine will not produce more power than the aquatuner uses to run.  The physics in ONI aren't set up that way (and they aren't in our world, either).  So yes, it is also a cooler that costs power.