build Nearly Vacuum Food Storage

[ghkbrew]

Now that vacuum food storage has been nerfed I had to scramble to keep a million calories from spoiling in my current base.  Here's what I've come up with:

 

It's essentially 1g of hydrogen in my former vacuum storage setup and a thermo regulator.

 

The thermo regulator keeps the just the two tiles where food is stored at -50C.  The tiny amount of hydrogen in the tile means it barely exchanges heat with anything.  The TR is running at about 10% uptime to keep things chilled and putting out so little heat as to barely affect ambient temperatures.

 

One interesting note is that this is build order dependent.  The radiant piping has to be built after the ration box.  If built in the other order, the hydrogen gas will stay clamped to the temperature of the ration box (20C).  I think what's happening is that building-to-tile interactions are processed in the order the building were built and the last update sets the temperature that the food system sees.

 

[inlojv]

Nice！

The ideas are more similar.

 

 

 

 

[Yobbo]

1 hour ago, ghkbrew said:

The thermo regulator keeps the just the two tiles where food is stored at -50C.  The tiny amount of hydrogen in the tile means it barely exchanges heat with anything.

For some reason i find this hilarious

[SharraShimada]

I would make one addition to it:

If there is just one flatulent dupe, it will (not if but when) flood the storage with natgas eventually. 

So an exu-suit dock in front of it would prevent this. Or, as an alternative, a gas pump that removes everyhing >1g.

[Hokaeru]

33 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

If there is just one flatulent dupe

Unfortunately I would have to disagree with the premise of your argument, these kind of dupes aren't allowed in my bases haha

[chemie]

wack-a-mole.

Klei sets up stupid rules on food and the work arounds are easy.

If in vacuum, use food temp.  If not, use gas temp.  OK.  I will use 1 g gas.  Check-mate.

[ghkbrew]

2 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

If there is just one flatulent dupe, it will (not if but when) flood the storage with natgas eventually. 

I guess I didn't really explain the food storage functions.

The dupes never enter the food room. The door disallows entry. They can reach through it to take food out of the ration box. That way they never enter the (near) vacuum to contaminate it, or get sopping wet debuffs.

Food is delivered to the conveyor loader, which is set to priority 7 and manual use. It the gets dropped in an infinite storage pile out of reach of the dupes. The bottom sweeper loads the ration box with whatever food(s) I want dupes to eat, but it can't reach the loader to avoid a storage loop. The top sweeper picks up cooked food from the the grill and delivers it to the loader for storage.

 

 

[Ceos]

I know H2 has better thermal properties but wouldn't chlorine do the same thing and also disinfect? Or would it take too long to cool the food with chlorine? 

 

Oh... and nice build! I love this community. 

[ghkbrew]

1 minute ago, Ceos said:

I know H2 has better thermal properties but wouldn't chlorine do the same thing and also disinfect? Or would it take too long to cool the food with chlorine? 

I actually tried chlorine in sandbox, but it didn't work for reasons I don't fully understand. The same setup, couldn't keep the gas cold enough. I think maybe the low TC was preventing the radiant pipes from cooling the gas fast enough.

[JRup]

15 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

I actually tried chlorine in sandbox, but it didn't work for reasons I don't fully understand. The same setup, couldn't keep the gas cold enough. I think maybe the low TC was preventing the radiant pipes from cooling the gas fast enough.

Chlorine is the worst in terms of TC, it's more effective to cool the food as debris on top of a (cooled) tile at the speed of genetic ooze... But then that adds bulk to the build.

[ghkbrew]

3 hours ago, JRup said:

Chlorine is the worst in terms of TC, it's more effective to cool the food as debris on top of a (cooled) tile at the speed of genetic ooze.

The idea of the build is to avoid actually cooling the food, but keep it in a cold gas so you get the deep freeze bonus. In that respect having a low TC is better because it decreases the amount of heat blead into the gas.

... I just don't know why the radient pipe wouldn't keep it cold.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, chemie said:

wack-a-mole.

Klei sets up stupid rules on food and the work arounds are easy.

If in vacuum, use food temp.  If not, use gas temp.  OK.  I will use 1 g gas.  Check-mate.

I would not call them "stupid", I would call them "experimental". After all, they get pretty immediate feedback from quite a few smart people on whether and how their approach can be abused.

3 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

I actually tried chlorine in sandbox, but it didn't work for reasons I don't fully understand. The same setup, couldn't keep the gas cold enough. I think maybe the low TC was preventing the radiant pipes from cooling the gas fast enough.

Have you tried insulated tiles all around?

10 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

The idea of the build is to avoid actually cooling the food, but keep it in a cold gas so you get the deep freeze bonus. In that respect having a low TC is better because it decreases the amount of heat blead into the gas.

... I just don't know why the radient pipe wouldn't keep it cold.

Maybe the amount of heat exchanged is too low and runs into the limitations the game uses, possibly "the calculated thermal flow is less than 0.1 DTU":

https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Thermal_Conductivity

You would have 1. pipe-content to pipe 2. pipe to surrounding gas. My guess would be that pipe to gas surrounding it counts as "building to cell", but that is really only a guess.

[gabberworld]

pedestal is still the ultimate food storage, docent matter  if it is in cold or hot area , it just not spoil at there

[SharraShimada]

5 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

I guess I didn't really explain the food storage functions.

The dupes never enter the food room. The door disallows entry.

I did not noticed the door at all. Well done.

[ghkbrew]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Maybe the amount of heat exchanged is too low and runs into the limitations the game uses, possibly "the calculated thermal flow is less than 0.1 DTU":

Yeah, I suspect something like that. But buildings usually bypass limits on heat transfer.

From the wiki:

Lower Limits

Heat Transfer will not occur if:

• the temperature difference is less than 1 °C
• the calculated thermal flow is less than 0.1 DTU
• either of the masses is less than 1g

I know buildings ignore the 1C limit and the 1g limit. It'd be odd for the 0.1DTU limit to apply.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, ghkbrew said:

Yeah, I suspect something like that. But buildings usually bypass limits on heat transfer.

Hmm. Tricky. This would be

1. Pipe content to pipe
2. Pipe to gas
3. Gas to building

If just one respects a limit, the path may be broken. No idea which one may be responsible. You clearly are using some of the limits already to make the hydrogen not heat up from the walls and the liquid lock. 

[JRup]

This is part of my chlorine condenser, I had built a radiant gas pipe in order to "catch" any stray chlorine that was out and about, but the last of it just didn't budge... The door on the right is also below chlorine's condensation point...

As stated above, something must be limiting heat transfer. In my case, I'd accepted the 1g limiter as justification.

[Sasza22]

Nice idea but is there really a difference between this and a cooled CO2 pit? I guess it takes less power to keep cool but in essence it`s an efficient version of a sterile enviroment with active cooling which seemed to be what Klei intended us to use.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

Nice idea but is there really a difference between this and a cooled CO2 pit? I guess it takes less power to keep cool but in essence it`s an efficient version of a sterile enviroment with active cooling which seemed to be what Klei intended us to use.

I would say it is one more variation. Always nice to have options.

[Sith515]

I used a classy 1-tile-vacuum and seems like it's working just fine, although doesn't remove germs like it used to with chlorinated room.

Basically same as OP has but compressed in a single tile with conveyer chute. No cooling, all vacuum, food doesn't go off anywhere.

Minor downside - random dreckos can run into the chamber.

[ghkbrew]

@JRup @Gurgel.  After some testing in sandbox, there's no minimum transfer limit.  It's happily transferring 0.00005 DTU into 10mcg of chlorine.  Looks like the problem is just the low thermal conductivity of chlorine. With a 100C delta to steel radiant pipe it will change the chlorine's temperature by 8.75C.  The same 100C delta with hydrogen can transfer enough heat to change it's temperature by 181C, i.e. it will always equilibrate in 1 tick.

And it's fighting against the heat transfer to the ration box which gets a large bonus because building-to-tile conduction is scaled by heat capacity of the hotter material.

 

[ghkbrew]

Update:

I've made some tweaks for better efficiency:

• Insulated pipes are ceramic, upgraded from igneous rock
• The target temperature has been increased to -25C
• I decreased the pressure to 45mcg / tile with a switch operated mini-pump

 

The food essentially does not change temperature anymore.  The thermo regulator claims to have a 2% average uptime.  Power draw and heat output are negligible at this point.

[Y_xiao]

How about this?

[chemie]

57 minutes ago, Y_xiao said:

How about this?

 

replace metal tiles with weight plates to control amount.  How much heat bleed from the water side?  I suppose if you go with the OP 1g pressure, none.

[ghkbrew]

54 minutes ago, Y_xiao said:

How about this?

Nicely done.  I like this style of build too.  Chilling the food, in a vacuum, using contact with the tile below.  It's much simpler than a pre-chiller before storing the food in a vacuum.  You may need to worry some about the time it takes for the food to reach "deep freeze", but it should be well before the food spoils.

The big conceptual difference between this and my build is that I'm actively trying to avoid transferring heat from the food, but still keeping it in a cold atmosphere.  Why cool the food when it's just going to get eaten anyway? Meep likes his BBQ hot!

Realistically, it doesn't make much difference whether you chill the food or not.  High quality foods have so little mass that the amount of heat involved is pretty small.  But the pursuit of pointless efficiencies is the main reason I play ONI