Can someone tell me why this cooling loop isn't working?

[Szczuku]

Spoiler

So, I've watched some tutorials and am trying to make an industrial brick with 2 minor volcanoes.

I'm using petroleum as a coolant since it has higher thermal conductivity and evaporation point than polluted water.

But my turbines are still rising in temperature. Are 3 too much for 1 aquatuner? In the tutorial I've seen 5 turbines being cooled by just one so I'm quite confused.

Should spill some water on the turbines and build thermo plates? Or do I just need to 'trust the process' and let it run, despite the temp going up, hoping that it stabilizes? The thermo pipe sensor is set to above 30C

[LadenSwallow]

You need to use a better coolant that petroleum. What determines the best 'aquatuner' coolant is dictated by 2 factors usually:

1) Phase change points - Is the freezing point for your liquid below the desired temperature -> preferably more than 14C below the desired temperature, but work around methods exist for different temperatures.

2) SHC (specific heat capacity) of the liquid. While I have labelled this as (2), it is really the most important factor. The amount of energy transferred by the aquatuner is equal to 14*SHC - the temperature of the output is always 14C less than the input. So water with a SHC of 4.179 will remove more energy than Petroleum which is 1.76.

So an aquatuner running water or pwater will transfer more than twice as much heat (~2.37...x) than that of an aquatuner running petroleum at 30C.

 

Petroleum is a better 'passive coolant' for use in metal refineries, because you can heat it higher than 125C and use the heat in steam rooms to reclaim energy costs by heating the steam (and cooling the petroleum) through the use of radiant pipes.

[alexkuzmov]

56 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

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So, I've watched some tutorials and am trying to make an industrial brick with 2 minor volcanoes.

I'm using petroleum as a coolant since it has higher thermal conductivity and evaporation point than polluted water.

But my turbines are still rising in temperature. Are 3 too much for 1 aquatuner? In the tutorial I've seen 5 turbines being cooled by just one so I'm quite confused.

Should spill some water on the turbines and build thermo plates? Or do I just need to 'trust the process' and let it run, despite the temp going up, hoping that it stabilizes? The thermo pipe sensor is set to above 30C

Fir steam turbines Polluted water is perfect.

The only thing better is super coolant.

[Szczuku]

31 minutes ago, alexkuzmov said:

Fir steam turbines Polluted water is perfect.

Oh, why's that?

[1moregame]

9 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

Oh, why's that?

It relates back to @LadenSwallow's post.  The SHC of PW is better and it has a wider temperature range as a liquid than clean water.  Super coolant is even better with a much higher SHC and an insanely wide temperature range.

[LadenSwallow]

I use water to cool turbines extracting water from cool steam vents, as I can use a lever effect to magnify cooling of extracted water. By feeding 1kg/s of the turbine water as a preferential feed into the cooling loop, I get 9kg/s of X C water + 1kg/s of 95C water, with an average temperature of 1/10 x (9X + 95) remaining in the cooling loop, running it through the aquatuner sets the temperature to 1/10 x (9X + 95) - 14 => 1/10 x (9X - 45), letting this equal X means that 10X = 9X - 45 , X = -45. An X value of -45 means that a loop running like this would equalise at -45C (obviously below the freezing point of the water), it means that I can extract the water at practically any temperature set by the thermosensor controlling the aquatuner, and account for the cooling required to be administered to the turbines due to the 4K + 10% rules of heat produced.

The remaining 95C water is stockpiled for downtimes before refilling the steam chamber (door under water reservoir releasing only when pressure is too low), with an overflow sent to electrolysers. It also lets me avoid snaking pipes to the vent, as the output from the turbine can be used to create its own cooling loop.

[DolphinWing]

17 hours ago, alexkuzmov said:

Fir steam turbines Polluted water is perfect.

The only thing better is super coolant.

Actually there is nuclear waste that is the second best in the game.

[alexkuzmov]

33 minutes ago, DolphinWing said:

Actually there is nuclear waste that is the second best in the game.

In terms of SHC sure, but if the problem of nuclear waste ejecting itself from pipes and buildings exists  then its worse than polluted water.

[alexkuzmov]

20 hours ago, LadenSwallow said:

I use water to cool turbines extracting water from cool steam vents, as I can use a lever effect to magnify cooling of extracted water. By feeding 1kg/s of the turbine water as a preferential feed into the cooling loop, I get 9kg/s of X C water + 1kg/s of 95C water, with an average temperature of 1/10 x (9X + 95) remaining in the cooling loop, running it through the aquatuner sets the temperature to 1/10 x (9X + 95) - 14 => 1/10 x (9X - 45), letting this equal X means that 10X = 9X - 45 , X = -45. An X value of -45 means that a loop running like this would equalise at -45C (obviously below the freezing point of the water), it means that I can extract the water at practically any temperature set by the thermosensor controlling the aquatuner, and account for the cooling required to be administered to the turbines due to the 4K + 10% rules of heat produced.

The remaining 95C water is stockpiled for downtimes before refilling the steam chamber (door under water reservoir releasing only when pressure is too low), with an overflow sent to electrolysers. It also lets me avoid snaking pipes to the vent, as the output from the turbine can be used to create its own cooling loop.

Can you share this cooling design?
I didnt quite get how it works from the text.

[DolphinWing]

3 hours ago, alexkuzmov said:

In terms of SHC sure, but if the problem of nuclear waste ejecting itself from pipes and buildings exists  then its worse than polluted water.

It will stay in the pipes. It only breaks the building.

[LadenSwallow]

https://imgur.com/W8Z50IO is a mock-up of a similar system in game.

Right 'top' pipe exports hot water

Right 'bottom' pipe exports cool water

Steam turbine fills cooling loop from sufficiently heated steam.

So I combine cool steam vent ('water' source), metal refinery (heat source). Actual build uses 4 turbines to remove 8kg/s as vent erupts with 6.9kg/s while active. Overall it is power positive, supplies ~20C water to base from the cold export at 1kg/s for most of the time (trying to redesign an appropriate pipe system to resupply just the right amount of water to cope with idle/dormant intervals) and some hot water to reservoirs (to refill steam room during idle/dormancy) and electrolysers. and provides enough cooling for about 50% uptime on steel refining. Steam room has a heat sink of tempshift plates and a layer of crude oil at the bottom to provide thermal mass, as steam pressure is kept low.

Pipework can probably be altered to make it easier to pump back in (I imagine putting the valve above the turbines which would still fit in a 4 high room space design.

[YOLO KNIGHT]

How hot is the steam and how dense is it? Two volcanoes can be a pretty big ask. Two more Steam generators might not hurt. Polluted water will help the cooling efficiency but one AT might still not be enough.

[Zakery]

IMHO Nuclear waste the more interesting scenario for coolant - its mach more easier to generate in comparison to Super Coolant and have more tricky mechanis => more fun

[pether]

On 8/22/2023 at 5:48 PM, Szczuku said:

But my turbines are still rising in temperature. Are 3 too much for 1 aquatuner? In the tutorial I've seen 5 turbines being cooled by just one so I'm quite confused.

Should spill some water on the turbines and build thermo plates? Or do I just need to 'trust the process' and let it run, despite the temp going up, hoping that it stabilizes? The thermo pipe sensor is set to above 30C

Apart from everything already said about SHC, there is also the topic of medium.

At the moment your pipes exchange temperature with the atmosphere (oxygen) and then the atmosphere exhanges temperature with turbines. Sometimes it may happen the oxygen will cool down too slowly to be a good medium. That's why many designs use 1-tile layer of some liquid (more mass than gass - more temperature trasfered). If you need gases, I believe H2 is the best option.

You can also use new Conduction Panel building, it is designed to quickly exchange temperature between piped liquid and surrounding items, making it perfect for working in a vaccum (where you would have no atmosphere to exchange temp - even worse than oxygen)

[JRup]

When it comes to this particular build I'd heavily recommend using ceramic for any coolant pipes that go through steam. It's the minimum requirement to not have more AT activity than necessary.

A minor concern is that the steam temperature is rather hot for natural tile to be forming... Steam turbines will produce more heat than they normally would if the steam is beyond 200ºC...

 

On 10/23/2023 at 8:55 AM, pether said:

That's why many designs use 1-tile layer of some liquid (more mass than gass - more temperature trasfered). If you need gases, I believe H2 is the best option.

For the purpose of cooling steam turbines the best liquid to dribble on top of turbines prior to super coolant will be crude oil or petroleum (both have same thermal conductivity: '2' vs water's '0.609').

If you're actively cooling steam turbines then you can stop at adding a liquid medium for the radiant pipes to interact with the turbines. It will be more than enough, always has been. The liquid inside the pipes should be at least water (polluted water for the extra safety) or super-coolant - that's been discussed above. Nothing stops us from having gas around, though.

If the build must have a self-cooled steam turbine then tradition would've dictated that you a gaseous medium is required to boost said cooling. Hydrogen is what's normally used for this. Its thermal conductivity is 0.168 vs. oxygen's 0.024. Sadly enough, helium doesn't normally exist in-game (according to the wiki its TC is 0.234). This build doesn't show any self cooled STs, but I wanted to mention helium .

I'm torn when it comes to the conduction panel. On the one hand I'm a fan of radiators and fancy in-game buildings; on the other, I just can't find the performance needed for heavy use cases. And then there's the funny business that can be achieved with it (which I've sincerely stopped tracking to see if it's been patched out...) The CP does allow for some neat builds but then again I'll stick with a mod that has been there before it came about and does the same but better; which is why the mod itself has not been obsoleted when klei presented an in-game solution (take "pliers", for example).

I think this thread is somewhat dated at this point and feel it would be great if we got an updated screenshot if OP has had a chance to play, but that's just my  opinion...