How to use Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier

[giygus]

Still new to game, exploring on how to use one for cooling setups.  I understand that you pump hydrogen in to power it, and that it cannot be submersed in any liquid and function.  Wiki says fill a room with hydrogen and tempshift plates, which makes sense.

Didn't start working on it yet, so no picture.  The working idea right now, if you can imagine, is to have multiple pipes of hot polluted water (the coolant) sent to one reservoir of polluted water.  The polluted water would be built into an insulation box near the AETN.  A separate line of polluted water would be sent from the cooling box to right near the AETN.  Radiant piping would be built for all pipes in the polluted water box and near the AETN.  AETN room would be sealed and filled with hydrogen.

I apologize for no pictures, but you probably understand me.

So what do you think, workable or not?  Any better ideas?

[gabberworld]

aetn can run submerged inside ice

[Steve8]

You can turn the AETN on and off by building an airlock door underneath it and open/close that depending on a temperature reading. With that you can run the liquid or gas you want to cool directly through the hydrogen.

[sakura_sk]

7 hours ago, giygus said:

So what do you think, workable or not?  Any better ideas?

I'm not sure but I think it is difficult to cool liquids with a AETN (tried it a couple of times...). At least not in 10kg/s flow and if you manage to make it possible is difficult to not freeze them completely. I usually use AETN for the oxygen-electolizer setup, feed it excess hydrogen and letting it cool the oxygen. I don't know though how it works submerged in ice, how that is achieved and if it is a better option

[O.J.Vodka]

[gabberworld]

you could use aetn also  for sleet weed farm, for lower the water temp what it needs.

[cokess]

In my personal gameplay, I've only ever used the AETN to cool three things: battery boxes, passive cooling for the cold biome (for my late game restorative environmental engineering projects) or general cooling for the base. So nothing too serious to cool. If you're thinking of using the AETN to cool hot water from metal refineries, I suggest using more active cooling setups, like a combination of thermo aquatuner and steam generator, the AETN simply won't cut it.

9 hours ago, giygus said:

Wiki says fill a room with hydrogen and tempshift plates, which makes sense

Personally I wouldn't even bother submerging the AETN in hydrogen and building tempshift plates. The AETN gives off cooling effect of 80kDTU/s when it's fueled. SOMETHING will catch its cold regardless. This fits well with my playstyle, I just don't like to use or dig more resources than I absolutely need. 

What I sometimes do is almost-vacuum the AETN room (the AETN doesn't work in a vacuum, the game considers vacuum as having absolute 0 temperature, which is lower than the minimum operating temperature of the AETN, which is -173.2°C) and then pour just enough ethanol on the floor that the AETN doesn't malfunction entirely due to being to being flooded (in the picture, about 200kg per cell). I also built just 1 diamond tempshift plate behind the AETN so that the AETN doesn't cool faster than the ethanol (this is optional).

The point of the ethanol is it will concentrate almost the entire -80kDTU/s of cooling from the AETN in just those 5 cells where there is ethanol. So you won't have to build as many snaking conductive pipes, just on those 5 cells. So in this respect, you could achieve the same objective if you used petroleum or crude oil instead.

If cooling speed doesn't matter to you, you could make your system more robust by opting for igneous rock or granite as coolant, using conveyor rails as follows:

It is more robust because your coolant can't freeze anymore than they already are!

When your system gets cool enough, the ethanol will freeze but the AETN will continue working per the picture below (the entombed building is the tempshift plate). Note here that ethanol has an interesting property when frozen: frozen ethanol gains conductivity from 0.171DTU/s/°C to a whopping 20DTU/s/°C so it makes your conveyor rail more efficient at transferring heat.

On a side note, don't use water or polluted water as alternative to ethanol. Water and polluted water don't have the same thermal heat capacity when they change states. Thermodynamics isn't conserved so it makes your system less predictable if you're not careful.

[giygus]

9 hours ago, cokess said:

If cooling speed doesn't matter to you, you could make your system more robust by opting for igneous rock or granite as coolant, using conveyor rails

NEVER would I have ever thought of using rails like that.  Wow this game can be crazy.

 

9 hours ago, cokess said:

...the AETN simply won't cut it.

OK, the setup I was considering was basically for all cooling.  I will scale back and rethink.

[Sasza22]

I like using the AETN for cooling my oxygen. I build my electrolizer setup around it so i got the hydrogen in place. It`s pretty good for that purpose. Not as much for cooling water. Water has such high thermal capacity that the AETN can never keep up with cooling it.

[Steve8]

Using a hydrogen atmosphere isn't strictly necessary. The total cooling doesn't have anything to do with the gas the AETN is surrounded with. But based on my experiments using hydrogen results in a higher rate of cooling. This is noticeable when run something past the AETN in pipes - especially when it's a little hotter.

I really like to use it for oxygen cooling. If you use hot geyser water as input for the electrolyzers it can't really cope, but it's perfect with other water sources.

[Gurgel]

On 5/15/2021 at 4:47 AM, Steve8 said:

You can turn the AETN on and off by building an airlock door underneath it and open/close that depending on a temperature reading. With that you can run the liquid or gas you want to cool directly through the hydrogen.

Or you can control it via the hydrogen supply. Works pretty much as well, because the building changes its temperature slowly. 

Unless you are somewhat close to the minimal temperature an ATEN can reach, any gas surrounding it will be fine.