which cooling setup?

[aquatic]

Hello.

I need to cool a hot liquid (petroleum) but I want to use the best method there is for a station in space using aquatuners and steamturbines. There is at least one aquatuner in the room full of steam underneath the steam turbines, which is used to cycle a separate coolant to keep the steam turbines above at a functioning temperature.

The temperature of the petroleum coolant is being lowered, because it is cycled through a large amount of units that create heat, and is often run through falling blocks of regolith that can cause the devices to overheat and suffer damage.

The temperature of the liquid is always above 120C when it enters the station, and is very commonly reaching above the 200 degree mark.

Do I:

Use aquatuners to cool the liquid directly?

Or

Use the heat of the liquid to raise the temperature of the steam in the room, which causes the steam turbine to lower the temperature of the room and the petroleum coolant altogether?

Or

Is there a another method I should use?

If possible, give reasons for your answer, or why I shouldn't use any of the other methods.

Thank you for your time.

[ghkbrew]

Why are you cooling hot petroleum?  You might be better served with some sort of counter-flow heat exchanger.

43 minutes ago, aquatic said:

Use aquatuners to cool the liquid directly?

Because aquatuners decrease the temperature of the coolant by a set number degrees, they're most efficient (heat moved/ watt) when using a high specific heat coolant this basically means you should use polluted water in the early game and super coolant in the late game.

If you're cooling petroleum in a pipe, you can make a small water loop that goes through the aquatuner and a block of conductive tiles (diamond or metal) then and flow your petroleum through the coolant block.

47 minutes ago, aquatic said:

Use the heat of the liquid to raise the temperature of the steam in the room, which causes the steam turbine to lower the temperature of the room and the petroleum coolant altogether?

This will actually be the most efficient, but it's more complicated since you can't use the 120C heat directly in a turbine.  What you can do is heat 95C exhaust water from the turbine to 120C with the petroleum (cooling the petroleum slightly in the process).  Then put an aquatuner in the steam chamber runing a water/super coolant loop to heat the now 120C steam to 125C that the tubine can use.  Then further cool the petroleum with the aquatuner's coolant loop.

A variation of this is to split the steam tubine into 2 chambers. One with 120C steam heated by the petroleum and one with 125C steam heated by the aquatuner.  The tubine will suck steam from all of it's ports as long as a single one is over 125C.

[mathmanican]

3 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

you can't use the 120C heat directly in a turbine

You can, if you use a split turbine.  You can cool steam all the way down to phase change temp this way. It just isn't super efficient space-wise. 

[TheMule]

9 hours ago, mathmanican said:

You can, if you use a split turbine.  You can cool steam all the way down to phase change temp this way. It just isn't super efficient space-wise. 

I think it was actually mentioned in the comment:

12 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

A variation of this is to split the steam tubine into 2 chambers. One with 120C steam heated by the petroleum and one with 125C steam heated by the aquatuner.  The tubine will suck steam from all of it's ports as long as a single one is over 125C.

--

13 hours ago, aquatic said:

very commonly reaching above the 200 degree mark.

is so, then the best option is:

13 hours ago, aquatic said:

Use the heat of the liquid to raise the temperature of the steam in the room, which causes the steam turbine to lower the temperature of the room and the petroleum coolant altogether?

@mathmanican while experimenting with the heat deletion bug, came up with a L-shaped steam chamber design. I've found that very effective in cooling down hot liquids, as it basicly creates a split turbine situation w/o all the shenanigans of actually having two small chambers.

You let the turbine output fall at the bottom of the vertical side of the L, and that makes it the coldest place. The hot petroleum enters from the opposite side. If you balance steam pressure right (it takes some trial and error), you get a relatively thin tile of steam, that, if the liquid is hot enough, is easy to get above 125C and turn the turbine on. The rest is kinda self balancing... most of the heat is removed as the liquid follows the L. I can't take a picture now, but it's similar to what you see here:

Hot petroleum would be entering from the left. You have to move the vent up to the ceiling, and "bend" the petroleum pipe around it, the last tile being the bottom one (where temp is around 100.8 - 101 if there's steam). It can go even lower if water starts pooling there.

[impyre]

On 7/22/2020 at 3:50 PM, aquatic said:

Do I:

Use aquatuners to cool the liquid directly?

Or

Use the heat of the liquid to raise the temperature of the steam in the room, which causes the steam turbine to lower the temperature of the room and the petroleum coolant altogether?

What method you use really depends on a couple factors:

How cool do you want to get it?

Do you care about power generation?

If you just need to keep it below around 150-200C and do *not* want to generate power, a steam sauna is a great way to delete tons of heat at the moment. It'll almost certainly get patched at some point, but for the moment... for 60W you can cool as much as you want, at least down to near the temp of steam. The sauna takes in steam at any temperature, the steam doesn't heat up the building or the dupe, and it spits out water at 80C. 

The description of the sauna says the output temp depends on inputs, so again, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets patched. Also, you have to be careful not to let your steam room get too hot for whatever gas pump (or pumps) you're using, since the sauna requires the steam to be delivered in a gas pipe.

Below, this sauna is turning 900C steam into 80C water:

Spoiler

The more "legitimate" method, if you don't care about power generation is to just use an aquatuner to cool down the petroleum, and a steam turbine to delete the heat. This is a pretty standard build, and you can find examples pretty much everywhere. 

Aquatuners are more efficient when used to cool a liquid with a high specific heat, water typically but supercoolant is preferred. The reason is you move a lot more heat for the same amount of power. Water, though, will limit the temperature ranges you can work with. To spread it out a bit, you could cool off a large tank of water, and then run your petroleum through that. If you have problems with steam forming, try using valves to limit the amount of petroleum in a given segment of pipe (you may need to run several pipes in parallel).

Of course, if you would like to take advantage of the additional power that heat brings, you can use a slightly more complicated setup:

Spoiler

The system above uses 4 turbines to remove the heat from half of the space biome (should've used 5). It generates a fair amount of power as well. The steam turbines output 8kg/s of water at 95C, this warm water can take one of two possible paths:

Turbine cooling loop -> steam room

aquatuner -> turbine cooling loop -> steam room

If the room temp is below 99C, the liquid shutoff is enabled which acts like a bypass, removing the aquatuner from the loop. This way, the aquatuner only runs when necessary to keep the turbine room below 100C.

In hindsight, I really should've used 5 turbines so that the aquatuner processes full 10kg batches. This 4-turbine design wastes a bit of power (since cooling an 8kg packet uses the same energy that cooling a 10kg packet uses). Regardless, even with the waste, this one produces on average about 1.1kW of power (in excess of what it consumes for the aquatuner and liquid shutoff). This if for half of the space biome, so I guess you could probably get about 2kW out of the whole thing reliably.

BTW, in my previous build I didn't use the 95C water to help keep the turbines cool. Using it nets you an extra 100-200 watts on average, and on some cycles the aquatuner isn't needed at all.

Edit: once you suck all the excess heat out of there, you'll get less output out of it... just as a heads up.