The Chillbox - For Your Habitation Cooling Needs

[Occam Blazer]

Presenting The Chillbox. This simple machine provides all the cooling you need for a modest sized base.

Highlights

• Uses all early-game materials. No steel, no plastic.
• Copper ore Thermo Aquatuner to keep your base temperate
• Gold amalgam Thermo Regulator to freeze food
• Uses only novice and advanced research
• Keeps your base or farm in the mid-20's
• Maintains deep freeze for your foods
• Very stable and reliable

So how does it stay cool without a steam turbine?

Heat is removed by running electrolyzer water through the bath before getting turned into oxygen. I started exploring this idea six months ago. This particular machine takes in 80° C water, heats it up to 89° and stuffs it into an electrolyzer. It also uses hot oxygen destined for atmo suits and hydrogen going to generators to chill the bath. O2 comes out of the electrolyzer around 78°C and goes into suits at 86°.

Automation keeps everything stable. As long as the bath is under 92°C both coolers are allowed to run. The filter gate prioritizes the thermo-regulator keeping food cold (probably a premature optimization, but whatever).

Materials

• Aquatuner - copper ore
• Thermo regulator - gold amalgam
• Generators and electrolyzers - gold amalgam
• Insulated blocks - ceramic between the Chillbox and base. Maffic or igneous elsewhere
• Insulated pipe - ceramic inside the chillbox. Other material elsewhere
• Uninsulated pipe - granite for heat transfer
• Radiant pipe - copper or gold
• The bath uses about 35 kg per tile of crude oil on bottom and water on top

How does it fit into a base?

Spoiler

I put it at the top of my dupe hab. This one supports 8 dupes. Two electrolyzers provide oxygen and about 0.75 kg/sec of excess hydrogen not used to power the Chillbox. The coal generators are for kickstarting the process and emergency backup. They never run after the thing gets going.

Things stay pretty cool. There are three deep freezes here. Top-to-bottom are pincha peppernut storage, prepared food pantry, and ingredient storage.

Overlays

Liquid & Gas

Spoiler

Power

Spoiler

Alternative Build

If you just want cool oxygen you can integrate the Chillbox into your Full Rodriguez SPOM and amazingly still keep it self-powered. This build takes 70°C water and outputs 25°C oxygen. It does not perform deep freeze because the extra 1,440 watts to power the fans take up all of the hydrogen.

Spoiler

There are two generation circuits with this build, prioritizing the electrolyzers over the aquatuner because on startup the machine can not power everything. It's as simple as starving the generators powering the aquatuner (and some other equipment) until the pipes fill up with hydrogen.

Spoiler

The heavy-watt wire and transformers are unnecessary here, but I wasn't bothered to change it. Both circuits are under 2kW.

Edit: Updated the save file.

Save File

Chillbox.sav

[wonni]

Love this design, but does the Thermo Regulator work while flooded though?

[NeoDeusMachina]

4 hours ago, wonni said:

Love this design, but does the Thermo Regulator work while flooded though?

it doesn't, but I suspect OP uses a small enough amount of both liquids to avoid flooding the thermo-regulator.

[tuxii]

Never seen a copper ore Aquatuner practically used before. Nice touch.

You inspired me to come up with my own SPOM.

[Occam Blazer]

22 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

it doesn't, but I suspect OP uses a small enough amount of both liquids to avoid flooding the thermo-regulator.

That's exactly what I'm doing. About 35kg / tile of liquid. That's why I use a mix. Didn't even realize the thermo regulator was subject to flooding. (-:

15 hours ago, tuxii said:

Never seen a copper ore Aquatuner practically used before. Nice touch.

Thanks. All you need is a way to move the heat somewhere else quick enough. This works especially well because the hot water is converted into gasses with much lower specific heat capacity so about 60% of the heat energy magically disappears.