Optimal Cooling Questions

[Xenologist]

Here's a few questions, mainly about hydrogen based cooling. Would you cool more (assuming either way we're trying to sink as much heat into the hydrogen as possible before reacting it) using a hydrogen generator powering an aquatuner cooling loop (petrol or ethanol, either way condension point of sour gas) or an AETN to delete a miniscule amount of hydrogen and cool a hole lot more. Pretty much, is it more worth it to use an aquatuner/hydrogen loop or an AETN, any other options could also be considered too.

[Luminite2]

The AETN deletes 80 kDTU/s of heat for 10g/s of hydrogen, which you could instead use to run a hydrogen generator at 10% uptime, so we can consider the power cost to be 80W.

An aquatuner cooling water moves 4.179*14*10000 = 585 kDTU/s of heat for 1200W. If you ran it at 6.67% uptime you would have the same power cost as before of 80W but only move 39 kDTU/s. Assuming either way you can successfully delete the moved heat (such as putting it into hydrogen destined for a generator), the aquatuner is only about half as efficient as the AETN but much, much easier to scale up.

 

If you need to do a lot of cooling (such as cooling geyser output) then the AETN simply doesn't have enough cooling power and you should use an aquatuner. If your requirement is smaller, such as cooling oxygen from electrolyzers, then the AETN is more efficient.

[ghkbrew]

13 minutes ago, Luminite2 said:

If you ran it at 6.67% uptime you would have the same power cost as before of 80W but only move 39 kDTU/s.

 

14 minutes ago, Luminite2 said:

the aquatuner is only about half as efficient as the AETN

Usually you'll be deleting the heat from the aquatuner with a steam turbine though. Which will recover about half on the power used by the aquatuner. Meaning, that an aquatuner/steam turbine combo is surprisingly close to the AETN in power efficiency.

[Xenologist]

What if you were attempting to use an AETN for cooling sour gas to a point of condensation for methane and sulfur?

[ghkbrew]

1 hour ago, Xenologist said:

What if you were attempting to use an AETN for cooling sour gas to a point of condensation for methane and sulfur?

That's one of its better uses. The AETN will get to -173C which is cold enough to liquefy sour gas, but not cold enough to freeze the methane solid. And it's available very early game. The only limitation is the relatively small amount cooling restricts your overall flow rate to. I think the max you can manage (with a good heat exhanger) is around 1kg/s.