Using thermo aquatuners for cooling the base

[Glimi]

I did some testing with my debug mode base and it seems thermo aquatuners are excellent at destroying heat. I use one to cool down the steam geyser output, and here to cool down petroleum to make a cooling pipeline. One aquatuner is easily enough to cool a Natural Gas Geyser and the machinery involved in its running. Also you can see my sleet wheat farm happily cooled by circulating super chilled petroleum in the pipes.

Petroleum doesn't freeze so it's quite excellent to use for remote cooling. So much so that polluted water from the Natural Gas Generators tends to freeze easily if the flow is not managed carefully. Done again I would make a separate loop for the machinery and the farm.

Respectfully
Glimi

[Technoincubus]

They hog 1200 kW of power. That's almost one nat. gas geyser

[Coolthulhu]

I use a single aquatuner to cool down my natgas gens and petroleum generator and the produced CO2 is cold enough I have problems heating it back up to Slickster-safe temperature (35C and up) despite using it to cool 3 geysers (2 natgas and one water) and a big grill in the middle of colony. The aquatuner barely runs.

While cooling petroleum lets you reach much lower temperatures, it is 3 times less power-efficient than cooling polluted water. I'd avoid petroleum/naptha cooling for general purpose cooling and keep it just for liquefaction.

[mckzchi]

8 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

I use a single aquatuner to cool down my natgas gens and petroleum generator and the produced CO2 is cold enough I have problems heating it back up to Slickster-safe temperature (35C and up) despite using it to cool 3 geysers (2 natgas and one water) and a big grill in the middle of colony. The aquatuner barely runs.

While cooling petroleum lets you reach much lower temperatures, it is 3 times less power-efficient than cooling polluted water. I'd avoid petroleum/naptha cooling for general purpose cooling and keep it just for liquefaction.

how do you do this with polluted water and have the aquatuner barely running? could you please explain your setup to me so i could learn from it?

[Coolthulhu]

6 hours ago, mckzchi said:

how do you do this with polluted water and have the aquatuner barely running? could you please explain your setup to me so i could learn from it?

You need a generator design that allows you to drip water in the generators, seals them almost completely in abyssalite and has a place for gas pump. In case of gas generators (not petroleum), you want to create a full vacuum there before pumping any water or running the generators. In pure vacuum, polluted water won't offgas and this makes managing temperature easier.

The water from generators and drip cooling must be pumped out to a storage tank. The tank is an abyssalite rectangle with two pumps, each connected to thermo regulators. One pump goes to aquatuner, the other directly to feed the drip cooling. The pipe from aquatuner also goes to cooling (not back to tank). The pump that goes to aquatuner should not pump if water temperature is below -5C (otherwise freezing water will break aquatuner pipes), in this case you want to use the water directly to cool the generators, with the other pump.

You want to have some way of handling excess water. Either the pipes that go to vents or ones that go to cooling must go somewhere when overfilled.

If this is not clear enough, I could provide screenshots, because the whole system fits on one screen.

[Epilogue1212]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

You need a generator design that allows you to drip water in the generators, seals them almost completely in abyssalite and has a place for gas pump. In case of gas generators (not petroleum), you want to create a full vacuum there before pumping any water or running the generators. In pure vacuum, polluted water won't offgas and this makes managing temperature easier.

The water from generators and drip cooling must be pumped out to a storage tank. The tank is an abyssalite rectangle with two pumps, each connected to thermo regulators. One pump goes to aquatuner, the other directly to feed the drip cooling. The pipe from aquatuner also goes to cooling (not back to tank). The pump that goes to aquatuner should not pump if water temperature is below -5C (otherwise freezing water will break aquatuner pipes), in this case you want to use the water directly to cool the generators, with the other pump.

You want to have some way of handling excess water. Either the pipes that go to vents or ones that go to cooling must go somewhere when overfilled.

If this is not clear enough, I could provide screenshots, because the whole system fits on one screen.

Hi Coolthulhu. That sounds great. Could you share a screenshot? I would love to try it. Thanks.

[mckzchi]

3 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

You need a generator design that allows you to drip water in the generators, seals them almost completely in abyssalite and has a place for gas pump. In case of gas generators (not petroleum), you want to create a full vacuum there before pumping any water or running the generators. In pure vacuum, polluted water won't offgas and this makes managing temperature easier.

The water from generators and drip cooling must be pumped out to a storage tank. The tank is an abyssalite rectangle with two pumps, each connected to thermo regulators. One pump goes to aquatuner, the other directly to feed the drip cooling. The pipe from aquatuner also goes to cooling (not back to tank). The pump that goes to aquatuner should not pump if water temperature is below -5C (otherwise freezing water will break aquatuner pipes), in this case you want to use the water directly to cool the generators, with the other pump.

You want to have some way of handling excess water. Either the pipes that go to vents or ones that go to cooling must go somewhere when overfilled.

If this is not clear enough, I could provide screenshots, because the whole system fits on one screen.

Thats a very detailed explanation, thank you i did set up my generators to have drip cooling. I was just unsure about the aquatuner part. How do you cool the aquatuner though? I guess a screenshot would be good. It would be so much clearer. 

[Le0n1des]

7 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

The tank is an abyssalite rectangle with two pumps, each connected to thermo regulators. One pump goes to aquatuner, the other directly to feed the drip cooling.

Couldn't you achieve the same result with a single pump, and a bypass on the aquatuner, whth the aquatuner configured to operate above -5°c? Would require to get the heavy wire into the cold room though...

[Coolthulhu]

15 minutes ago, Le0n1des said:

Couldn't you achieve the same result with a single pump, and a bypass on the aquatuner, whth the aquatuner configured to operate above -5°c? Would require to get the heavy wire into the cold room though...

You probably could, but that wouldn't save any power and would require more complex design, with everything close up. With aquatuner far away, you could easily put it in some good place, like inside petroleum storage tank (both uses of petroleum ignore its heat).

[Coolthulhu]

Here are the screenshots. The pipe coming from the left is polluted water from cold biome - totally unnecessary, but I had to dump it somewhere. The aquatuner sits in petroleum - anything will do as long as it can absorb the heat. Moving it to my petroleum storage tank would improve efficiency, but it doesn't run anywhere near often enough to warrant it.

The gas permeable tiles in cold water tank are just for OCD purposes - somehow the tank always ends up with polluted oxygen in it, even after I ensure it has no gas at the time of sealing. I should replace them with abyssalite tiles, because they let too much heat in.

[mckzchi]

That is a very nice design! Thanks for sharing in my current run i have yet to get to oil (currently digging down to it) but i need cooling for my base. Do you think I could submerge the aquatuner in the cooled polluted water? Would it work? 

[Coolthulhu]

13 hours ago, mckzchi said:

Do you think I could submerge the aquatuner in the cooled polluted water? Would it work? 

You mean water cooled by what? As long as you don't put it too close to the tank for cold water used for actual cooling, it should work.

The aquatuner doesn't need a lot of cold unless you run it a lot, just make sure it is entirely submerged. If you run it only ~10% of the time, even a small "tub", like the one in my screenshot, will be enough.

[mckzchi]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

You mean water cooled by what? As long as you don't put it too close to the tank for cold water used for actual cooling, it should work.

The aquatuner doesn't need a lot of cold unless you run it a lot, just make sure it is entirely submerged. If you run it only ~10% of the time, even a small "tub", like the one in my screenshot, will be enough.

i had a separate tank of polluted water which i ran through some aquatuners to prime the system. but you're right, the aquatuner barely runs at all.