Cooling Request

[Xenologist]

If I wanted to make a refinery system that perpetually reused its coolant, how would I go about cooling it? Would I choose aquatuner for cooling connected to a steam loop or the refinery coolant itself goes into a steam chamber to discharge the heat. Pretty much, aquatuner for the coolant or for the turbine? Will it take less cooling to directly cool the aquatuner or less to cool the coolant in the steam chamber.

[Steve8]

Run the coolant through a steam chamber. Petroleum is good for that. It will be much faster. Also you get some of the power back or produce excess power even depending on the metal

[psusi]

Seeing as how the AT is going to be dumping the heat into the steam anyway, why would you spend the power to run it when the coolant ( provided you are using petrol or oil ) can dump the heat into the steam for free?  You only have to spend power running an AT to cool things if you need them to be cooled to temperatures below 125 C since that is the coolest the steam room will get.  Anything above that you can just let it naturally exchange heat with the steam.  Since petrol or oil can operate up to 400 C ( a little higher for the petrol ), it has no problem dumping the heat into the steam for free.

[cpy]

Get petroleum with bypass. What I tend to do is run pipes to a steam engine place and to refinery and one liquid container with about 1000kg of extra petroleum for buffer.

Then you put liquid shutoff just before refinery intake and check temp with liquid temp sensor. If temp is higher than your set temperature let's say 150-175-200-225 i wouldn't go higher than that in setting. Done! You will never make sour gas and if your steam engine breaks or stop working, refinery will never overheat your base! You can shove aquatuner in it to ocasionally cool steam engine room from the outside but, i have central AC. That is what those polluted water pipelines are for.

Lo and behold my first ever screenshot posted to this forum I think. You can call it base reveal!

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 hour ago, cpy said:

Get petroleum with bypass. What I tend to do is run pipes to a steam engine place and to refinery and one liquid container with about 1000kg of extra petroleum for buffer.

Then you put liquid shutoff just before refinery intake and check temp with liquid temp sensor. If temp is higher than your set temperature let's say 150-175-200-225 i wouldn't go higher than that in setting. Done! You will never make sour gas and if your steam engine breaks or stop working, refinery will never overheat your base! You can shove aquatuner in it to ocasionally cool steam engine room from the outside but, i have central AC. That is what those polluted water pipelines are for.

Lo and behold my first ever screenshot posted to this forum I think. You can call it base reveal!

Very nice screenshot.  Great information about how to set it up as well.  I often use two reservoirs -- a cold one and a hot one.  The cold one stays about half to two-thirds full.  The hot one loops continually through steam room until the temperature drops back down.  Its the same idea, just a little clunkier.

[ScreamingPict]

16 hours ago, psusi said:

Seeing as how the AT is going to be dumping the heat into the steam anyway, why would you spend the power to run it when the coolant ( provided you are using petrol or oil ) can dump the heat into the steam for free?  You only have to spend power running an AT to cool things if you need them to be cooled to temperatures below 125 C since that is the coolest the steam room will get.  Anything above that you can just let it naturally exchange heat with the steam.  Since petrol or oil can operate up to 400 C ( a little higher for the petrol ), it has no problem dumping the heat into the steam for free.

Just to expand upon this; in any cooling system using an AT + Steam engines will only be power-neutral *if* you are using super coolant and have tuned-up the steam engine. Otherwise it costs you power to extract heat...

In comparison if you skip the Aquatuner and just use a coolant that has a high vaporisation point (like petroleum) and run the pipes through a steam engine setup, then you can get some power back- indeed I believe that some refinements, like steel, are actually power-positive if you do this.

The next thing you need to consider is how to get the heat to dump into the steam-room as efficiently as possible.

For that you're going to want radiant pipes with high thermal conductivity (Aluminium is best, if you can get it) and temp-shift plates. You can also do clever things with shutoff-valves and temperature sensors to cycle the coolant in the steam-room until it's extracted enough heat.

[Soulwind]

For my refinery room, I use a triple setup.  A refinery with 800kg petroleum that runs through a radiant pipe loop.  A glass forge that drips into the steam room where it's picked up and run through a conveyor loop until below 150c then shunted to a co2 room with a couple of slicksters.  And finally a steel aquatuner that cools the water in the base's cooling loop.