Polymer press overheating

[chemie]

Are there any designs to avoid the polymer press overheating without dripping water on them?

I avoid dripping water and standing water for things like nat gas gens because I feel it is a bit exploity.  However, I tried letting polymer press sit in its own mess (condensed steam) and even that overheats.  The only way to get it to work was to drip water continuously on it.  This frustrates me as I would like to see machines designed in a way that you can run them without exploiting game mechanics.  (I guess a plus side of this is that it forces you to have cooled water instead of running everything on 80C water but still...)

Any designs?

[Kasuha]

I found water cooling very satisfactory, I had it running for tens of cycles just stainding in a puddle of water in former ice biome, with no actual dripping involved.

If you want to avoid using water, then perhaps put it in a hydrogen room and plant a wort on each side? Its 160 W heat production is slightly smaller than heat production of thermal regulator so two worts should be enough.

[Reaniel]

Direct dripping from a vent does not trigger the cooling bug.

[Michi01]

Its heat production seems too high. I'm not saying that it can't be dealt with or is too hard, it just seems a bit weird and out of place for this particular machine to have such a high heat production.

[chemie]

51 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

I found water cooling very satisfactory, I had it running for tens of cycles just stainding in a puddle of water in former ice biome, with no actual dripping involved.

If you want to avoid using water, then perhaps put it in a hydrogen room and plant a wort on each side? Its 160 W heat production is slightly smaller than heat production of thermal regulator so two worts should be enough.

OK.  H2 with weeze seems a good option.  Thanks

[Lifegrow]

28 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

Its heat production seems too high. I'm not saying that it can't be dealt with or is too hard, it just seems a bit weird and out of place for this particular machine to have such a high heat production.

I posted pics about this a week or so back - my method is to use the water it outputs, paired with a few worts and some granite/wolframite tiles. it runs intermittently because i'm not actively cooling it with any radiators or anything, just cooling the natural gas output by the refineries, and the steam is condensed to trickle over all the machines. Space heater at the bottom is to stop the water from freezing if the system is ever toggled off for a while, i.e. i'm routing my crude oil elsewhere.

If you're not throttling the petroleum input, then use a thermo switch above your polymer presses to turn them off if it gets above a certain temperature... Runs at around 40 degrees-ish for the most part, however having the refineries in the same room is pushing it a little  

My excess petroleum get's stored in a holding tank for use by my petrol gens.

[Michi01]

@Lifegrow Thanks for the advice, although what I meant is that I think that it's a bit weird that this particular building produces so much heat. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it if it stayed this way, but it seems like an oddly high amount of heat for this type of building. Perhaps it really is just intentional though, I mean it outputs steam after all so it's probably meant to be hot. What initially just put me off is that it's such a high and specific value. 162.5 W is the same amount that the electric grill generated before it was fixed.

[Lifegrow]

1 minute ago, Michi01 said:

@Lifegrow Thanks for the advice, although what I meant is that I think that it's a bit weird that this particular building produces so much heat. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it if it stayed this way, but it seems like an oddly high amount of heat for this type of building. Perhaps it really is just intentional though, I mean it outputs steam after all so it's probably meant to be hot. What initially just put me off is that it's such a high and specific value. 162.5 W is the same amount that the electric grill generated before it was fixed.

But it's easily cooled without any additional power, save maybe a pump to recycle your water. If you decided not to cool it with water, you could just as easily cool it with 1 pump circulating wheezewort cooled hydrogen.

At the end of the day, it's always going to need cooling - most machines do, the only difference is the extent of cooling. The polymer press (and to a lesser extent the refinery) both output a lot of heat - but we're given the tools to deal with it. So....well, there's really no other way to say this : deal with it  

I'm not directing this to anyone in particular, so kindly keep the pitchforks to a minimum - but I'm sick and tired of every new feature to the game being dumbed down/nerfed to oblivion/buffed to insanity because people aren't willing to tinker or learn new methods without being spoon fed the solution from the internet. All that's happening is we're being left with a game where fewer and fewer "smart" builds, clever mechanics and in-depth systems are emerging - and instead we're left with cookie-cutter bases where everyone's just copy/pasting builds.

There are many, many people out there who like myself have gone out and actually used the new kit, figured out the quirks, dealt with the new head scratching moments, and then implemented functional builds into their bases. Problem is these people don't ***** and moan about how easy it was to do  

[Michi01]

1 minute ago, Lifegrow said:

But it's easily cooled without any additional power, save maybe a pump to recycle your water. If you decided not to cool it with water, you could just as easily cool it with 1 pump circulating wheezewort cooled hydrogen.

Like I said, it's not the effort required that initially offput me, I'm fine with it, the heat production just seemed oddly high for this type of machine (I'm not saying that it is, I was just getting that impression when I first saw it).

[Lifegrow]

Just now, Michi01 said:

Like I said, it's not the effort required that initially offput me, I'm fine with it, the heat production just seemed oddly high for this type of machine (I'm not saying that it is, I was just getting that impression when I first saw it).

I'm not disagreeing with you, but asking what constitutes "high" temperatures? If the heat can be handled with a very, very basic method of cooling - is it too high?

[Michi01]

6 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

I'm not disagreeing with you, but asking what constitutes "high" temperatures? If the heat can be handled with a very, very basic method of cooling - is it too high?

I meant compared to other buildings. If I'm not mistaken, the polymer press has by far the highest heat production of any building that isn't specifically related to heating or cooling and it confused why this particular building produces so much heat.

[Lifegrow]

2 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

I meant compared to other buildings. If I'm not mistaken, the polymer press has by far the highest heat production of any building that isn't specifically related to heating or cooling and it confused why this particular building produces so much heat.

God knows where they get the figures from  

Maybe they read a wiki - like this one : polymers

and copy/pasted this bit : must take place at high temperatures and pressures, approximately 300 °C and 2000 atm.

[Risu]

Like half the new buildings they make are added at 32 operating kilowatts. It has never once worked out.
Maybe bump the space heater up to 32 instead and give everything else 16 instead. Because overheating is fun apparently.
 

[Lifegrow]

6 minutes ago, Risu said:

Like half the new buildings they make are added at 32 operating kilowatts. It has never once worked out.
Maybe bump the space heater up to 32 instead and give everything else 16 instead. Because overheating is fun apparently.
 

I find stopping things from overheating to be quite fun  

[brummbar7]

I think the attempt to add lots of heat to the grill was a mistake because the grill exists in your core base, and newer players will want to use that, but maybe not have mechanical cooling down yet, so then they have problems.   It's unreasonble to expect the player to atmo-suit their dupes just to cook food.  Petroleum equipment on the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to expect you to atmo suit your dupes, considering the biome itself requires them under normal conditions.    I think they quite clearly moved aggressively to make oil related machinery rather difficult to use without atmo suits and/or cooling.  It's probably also not unreasonable to expect newer players to have some concept of cooling machinery at that point.  Though even if they don't there's the wheezewort fallback.  So I'm guessing the heat they put out is as planned, and hopefully won't be rolled back.

[Lifegrow]

28 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I think the attempt to add lots of heat to the grill was a mistake because the grill exists in your core base, and newer players will want to use that, but maybe not have mechanical cooling down yet, so then they have problems.   It's unreasonble to expect the player to atmo-suit their dupes just to cook food.  Petroleum equipment on the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to expect you to atmo suit your dupes, considering the biome itself requires them under normal conditions.    I think they quite clearly moved aggressively to make oil related machinery rather difficult to use without atmo suits and/or cooling.  It's probably also not unreasonable to expect newer players to have some concept of cooling machinery at that point.  Though even if they don't there's the wheezewort fallback.  So I'm guessing the heat they put out is as planned, and hopefully won't be rolled back.

Switches above grills solve the machine overheating problem - build more grills and have them toggle off when above a certain temperature...

The real trick is the speedy removal/storage of the 100 degree fried mushrooms  

[Riph]

I addressed the problem by adding a liquid valve to veeeery slowly feed petroleum into the polymer press. This forces it to operate slowly and take many tiny breaks while it waits for resources. During this time it is cooling down.

Mix this strategy with a shallow layer of water and you can now ignore the polymer press and let it do it's thing in peace.

[WanderingKid]

Let me ask a different, yet related, question, because my google-fu has failed me.

What the heck is a watt in heat?  I get the idea, sure, but can someone point me at a specific web page (that I can read, the fonts in the wiki are illegible on my machine) that can explain what a watt of heat actually does?  Or walk me through it?

[Saturnus]

44 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

Let me ask a different, yet related, question, because my google-fu has failed me.

What the heck is a watt in heat?  I get the idea, sure, but can someone point me at a specific web page (that I can read, the fonts in the wiki are illegible on my machine) that can explain what a watt of heat actually does?  Or walk me through it?

A Watt(W) is a Joule second(Js), ie. a unit of energy transfer or consumption over time. In relation to heat it is the amount of energy transferred or radiated. So if a machine dissipates 6.5W like a tiny battery then every second 3.25J of heat is added to the two tiles the battery takes up. So if it is in a vacuum with no air to radiate into, that energy into it will quickly make overheat and take damage. Every substance in the game, and in the real world, has a thermal conductivity and a specific heat capacity. These are used to calculate the rate at which this energy transfer occurs. 

[WanderingKid]

1 minute ago, Saturnus said:

A Watt(W) is a Joule second(Js), ie. a unit of energy transfer or consumption over time. In relation to heat it is the amount of energy transferred or radiated. So if a machine dissipates 6.5W like a tiny battery then every second 3.25J of heat is added to the two tiles the battery takes up. So if it is in a vacuum with no air to radiate that energy into it will quickly overheat. Every substance in the game, and in the real world, has a thermal conductivity and a specific heat capacity. These are used to calculate the rate at which this energy transfer occurs. 

Thank you.  I'm somewhat hoping I can find a resource that will help me understand what that watt does to, say, 1kg of x specific heat capacity because of the thermal conductivity.  For example, a Thermo Regulator can remove 25.2F from the gas passing through it.  That doesn't help me understand what 162.5 watts of heat did to the particular air previously so I can figure out how many of the things I need to keep a place at equilibrium. 

Didn't care much until I decided plastic looked like a good idea, and I'd prefer not to cookie cutter someone else's build if I can understand the fundamental mathematics and have some fun with it instead of banging my head on things until I figure out something that works by trial and error.

[Saturnus]

7 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

Thank you.  I'm somewhat hoping I can find a resource that will help me understand what that watt does to, say, 1kg of x specific heat capacity because of the thermal conductivity.  For example, a Thermo Regulator can remove 25.2F from the gas passing through it.  That doesn't help me understand what 162.5 watts of heat did to the particular air previously so I can figure out how many of the things I need to keep a place at equilibrium. 

Didn't care much until I decided plastic looked like a good idea, and I'd prefer not to cookie cutter someone else's build if I can understand the fundamental mathematics and have some fun with it instead of banging my head on things until I figure out something that works by trial and error.

For that you need to take a nose dive into some reasonably high level math.

The Heat Equation

[WanderingKid]

11 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

For that you need to take a nose dive into some reasonably high level math.

The Heat Equation

Ha!  Thank you!  What I was looking for... and errr... not to be tackled at midnight needing sleep, apparently... but, yes!  Thank you!

EDIT: Well, mostly, still can't find where the heck wattage/ Joules/s plugs into this thing...

EDIT2: Ahhh, there you are.  That was the long way round... XD

[Riph]

9 hours ago, Riph said:

I addressed the problem by adding a liquid valve to veeeery slowly feed petroleum into the polymer press. This forces it to operate slowly and take many tiny breaks while it waits for resources. During this time it is cooling down.

Mix this strategy with a shallow layer of water and you can now ignore the polymer press and let it do it's thing in peace.

Well, that was a total bust. I loaded my save where this was fine, and suddenly the press was overheating. So I turned it off, and it cooled down to 90f, and it was still taking pulses of overheating damage, despite being cooled off.

Thar be bugs, I think.

[Lifegrow]

33 minutes ago, Riph said:

Well, that was a total bust. I loaded my save where this was fine, and suddenly the press was overheating. So I turned it off, and it cooled down to 90f, and it was still taking pulses of overheating damage, despite being cooled off.

Thar be bugs, I think.

Keep an eye on the plastic that's being spat out on the ground, it's normally pretty toasty...

[Xarian]

It gets hot quickly because of the steam that it outputs. The steam immediately contacts the press, rapidly raising its temperature. I cool mine by running water over it, with a thermo switch next to it set to cut off at 40C. If I run water over it at 25C, it has about 70% uptime. If I cool the water to ~10C it goes to 100%.

IMO we should be able to pipe the steam rather than releasing it ambiently...