I made a nifty thing.

[Whispershade]

I was inspired to make this after reading Kasuha's attempt at self-cooling Natural Gas Generators and borrowing from the guide of rezecib I made a thing that's pretty nifty.

Here, I made a thermally isolated room except for a one tile vent for polluted water.  Two Wheezeworts in a hydrogen atmosphere have a negative temperature delta on upto 5 Natural Gas generators. (They "should" break even on 6) This eventually produces sub-zero polluted water from the Natural Gas Generators which help cool the remaining 9. In turn, they produce more cold polluted water to chill the hydrogen generator bank and the battery bank of 20 charged batteries. There is a atmo switch in the wheezewort room hooked up to a filter that when triggered will divert hydrogen from the hydrogen generators toward the vents in case the wheezeworts eat hydrogen, it should automagically re-pressurize the room. The polluted water from the airscrubbers will be used to temperature stabilize a bank of transformers and batteries warming a 120 peppernut plant farm. But that project isn't done yet.  Right now it all just dumps into a basin with the natgas gen water to be pumped into a bank of 32 fertilizer factories.

I have a tap for the CO2 in case I want to pipe it around before being sent for scrubbing or a desperate need to setup sterile a location. Ignore the filter on the side, I decided to relocate the filter that's currently setup but that project isn't finished.


 

 I am actually quite impressed with how quickly the polluted water takes up heat. I ended up hooking those batteries and the hydrogen generators up before getting the Natgas generators running.  But they cooled down very quickly.  Going from 40+ to single digits in just a few cycles. The important thing is to keep the Natural Gas generators thermally isolated except for their output. Any heat they receive from the batteries and generators end up in the output water and can lead to an upper trend. But I think with this 2 wheezeworts will effectively cool my entire energy production and distribution. I think that's good value! (I think the output water is in the teens and the wheezeworts haven't gotten the first generators to -20 yet, so theirs substantial room for more cooling.

[Sevio]

Some good engineering work right there! You said the cold polluted water output of this goes to the fertilizer makers, does the temperature of their input water affect their output and does that matter for the natural gas gens?

[GreatGameDota]

Gotta love the high specific heat capacity of water!

[Whispershade]

3 hours ago, Sevio said:

Some good engineering work right there! You said the cold polluted water output of this goes to the fertilizer makers, does the temperature of their input water affect their output and does that matter for the natural gas gens?

I have added 4 additional batteries to fill out that bottom row and the output polluted water is at 9c after 24 batteries and dropping. But it gets mixed with 40c water coming from the scrubbers. I do not believe the input temp of the water affects the fert factories they seem to be set at an output of like 45c. The thermally isolated bank of factories appeared to stabilize around 48c. Assuming abyssalite pipes, it does not affect the generators. The outputs are the temp of the machine.

I have considered piping the generator output around to cool other things but it isnt worth the extra hassle for all the wiring and pumps to do that effectively.

[Whispershade]

I've had to make adjustments to the scrubber portion of my Nifty Thing (tm) as they underperform.  This was first noticed by Dead_eye in the thread: http://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/80352-need-some-help-with-airscrubber-setup/

And I began noticing in my device when the CO2 started backing up the vents and generators even though I should have a 45g/s edge for the four scrubbers over the fourteen natural gas generators. The output pipe for the scrubbers was regularly showing only 3kg rather than the normal 4kg it should have considering it was a very pressurized room of CO2.

I made the finally adjustments which soaked up some dead space and gave more room capacity.  But also added a fifth scrubber to operate when the pressure exceed 1500g. This scrubber should not really turn on but it does.  The output now waffles between 3kg to 5kg.

The limiting factor of processing is that it is still only 1 water geyser feeding the scrubbers and those are supposed to produce 4kg/s over the course of a day. So I guess I'll see if the geyser gets tapped and the room starts backing up.  But I think there's definitely an issue with the scrubbers now.

Anyway, here is how the adjustments look.

[Whispershade]

It is obvious now, but I never planned for a run away success. To that end, I've uncovered a fatal flaw. The room is too cold.

The floor on the output of the polluted water is the temperature just above state change.  So I thought I would be safe here, but I neglected to factor in the hydrogen freezing it once it landed. An obvious oversight and a frustrating blunder. The output after the 24 batteries is -2c now, though. And that is with the poor thermal transfer the polluted water because too much is being lost to freezing that isn't getting to the next tier of generators.

My plan is an emergency installation of a thermally triggered pump to take up the hydrogen when it gets too cold and push it into the generators.  I suppose once I know how regular this process is I can evaluate it for the cooling of other things, like a regulator.

[Mango523]

Hi, great design so far!

I think the easiest solution would be to try to put 1 or 2 heaters triggerd by a thermal switch in the room with the wheezeworts.

Therefore you could regulate the output temperature of the cooling system and with this you would be able to manage the temperature in the whole electricity room quite exact.

Hope this works, good luck trying

 

[Whispershade]

That is a great idea, Mango523.  And if I ever build it again I'll try that solution. I went about it in a more convoluted manner and I haven't yet seen how effective it is yet as it hasn't gotten to the point where it started to freeze again to see how it works out.  I've done two things. Introduced a pump at the top to pump out cold hydrogen if it gets too cold which potentially does 3 things. Removes gas cold enough to freeze polluted water, reduce the atmospheric pressure around the wheezeworts potentially slowing them down a bit, and making room for warming hydrogen to take up below through an automatic delivery system. The cold hydrogen goes directly into the generators

I've also added a rerouting of 40c scrubber output to help melt any ice that does happen and warm up the room triggered on a thermal switch. Again, I'm stilling waiting to see the effectiveness and flaws of these approaches. Also, here are some images of the thermal overlay as the cooling room failed due to iceover and the temperature changes once things were flowing again.

Also, here are some images of the thermal overlay as the cooling room failed due to iceover and the temperature changes once things were flowing again. When that room fails, temperatures get out of hand quickly.  The next level of NatGas generators got up to 60+ and were scalding some of my dupes during repairs.

 

[Whispershade]

As an update, the arrangement with the pump worked.  I have the pump set to trigger on -20.3 and the flow redirect of the scrubber output to ~-25c. The idea being that if an iceover happens an infusion of 40c 4kg/s should handle it pretty well but it'll spike the cooling temp a bit.  But that hasn't happened as the gas pump does a good job keeping the wheezeworts from making too much cold hydrogen.  It pumps for about 5 seconds, drops the temp a whole 1c and occasionally causes the atmo switch at the bottom to allow infusion of 50-70c hydrogen. The atmo switch triggers if the pressure drops below 1850 so it is set to keep the room pretty well pressurized anyway.

It takes the ceiling above the wheezeworts about 2 to 3+ minutes to recover from the 1c temp increase. Depending on how the temperature of the room changes. I don't know if the thermal wattage of the generators will keep the room slightly above -20c and it'll stay at this equilibrium forever or if the room will gradually get more and more uniform in temp as the top of the room shifts between -20 to -19c and the pump will end up working harder before warmer hydrogen takes up the space.