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How do you cool your industry?


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I've gotten some reasonable oil things going and the heat is really starting to build up. It seems the common wisdom is to use supercooled oil and granite pipes. This just breaks when the oil freezes. I'm not sure how folks are making that work. 

Other folks suggest wheezeworts, but those don't seem to dissipate much heat at all. 

I'm currently using a massive pile of regulators to cool hydrogen to nearly 0K. I cool the regulators with a nearby antientropy device. I then pipe the hydrogen through the base in insulated abyssalite pipes, switching to granite when they are in front of something that really needs cooling, snaking back and forth. This kinda works. My hydrogen is leaving near 0K and returning at 44°C. But my equipment is still running really hot. It's like the hydrogen doesn't have enough mass to carry the heat with any speed. 

But I can't find a liquid that will work in decent ranges for this. All normal liquids freeze at those temps. And cooled gasses will break the pipes when they heat up and boil out. There's nothing with a large enough temp range that I can find. 

What do you use? 

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Supercooled oil and petroleum were fixed in the latest update.

For avoiding overheating, wheezeworts should be just fine. I put all my batteries in a hydrogen room with 3-4 wheezeworts and the tempereture is below 20°C. Also, you can just use polluted water or another easy to make liquid like oil to steal the heat. If you put everything together correctly, you can even end up with germless polluted water at 75°C, which I believe was a setting you were looking for in another thread.

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I put all heat generating things outside base.

I have simple HVAC (actually VAC) system with 2 pumps and some regulators to keep base at 25C and pressure even throughout (I use electrolyzers in the open at top of base).

If needed, I put a unit with heat issues in H2 room with weeze (like the regulators, batteries, polymer press).  You could run a simple automation to run for xx seconds every minute to stop overheating (I did this on a petroleum gen but honestly they eat so much oil, nat gas is much better).

What are you trying to cool?

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using wheezeworts is a little gimmicky - you have to understand how they work. A wheezewort absorbs up to 1000g of gas per second, cools it by 5C, and then releases it back at its base. But the wheezewort itself (the building tiles) will give off a bit of heat to the cold air it releases, so the process seems a bit slower than that.

What you have to realize is you get the same temp reduction no matter how much air they're exchanging, and no matter which gas they're breathing. So, you get the most work out of them if they're in a high pressure atmosphere (above 1000g per tile) and if they're breathing a gas with higher specific heat (hydrogen has the highest)

How much work can you get from a wheezewort? Q = ΔT*m*s

If it's breathing oxygen? 5K * 1000g * 1.005 = about 5,000 joules per second.

If it's breathing hydrogen? 5K * 1000g * 2.4 = about 12,000 joules per second.

That might seem like a lot. Most habitability equipment emits less than 10W of heat directly, and we're talking about wheezeworts compensating for more than 5,000W apiece. But it can be challenging to actually deliver that cooling because the things only touch one tile at a time.

Some people use wheezeworts inside an insulated heat trap to condense hydrogen. They use the liquid hydrogen to actually cool their base instead of just placing wheezeworts inside the peoplespace.

But, you indicated you're having trouble cooling your industrial equipment. Something to think about - do you really need to? Locate the bulk of your power generating equipment outside the living area, in a swamp biome. Build an abyssalite wall separating your people space from your equipment room. That'll give you a few hundred cycles to work with, before temperatures actually become a problem.

Just a real basic example here, it's a young base (a bit over 40 cycles). I put power generating equipment outside the people space and built an insulated wall from abyssalite separating the two spaces. Heat will dissipate towards the swamp. The only machinery I located inside the peoplespace are things I don't expect to use much (the granulator) and habitability equipment. In my opinion you don't gain much benefit trying to wall off atmosphere equipment because you'll have to just put air pumps everywhere to compensate.

tempwall.PNG

tempwall2.PNG

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brute force my dude, the aim for cooling is to have as much cooled liquid/gas hit your target as possible, considering gas/liquid pipes have a maximum capicity this puts the methods in pretty much this order 

Wheeze wort open cooling(depends heavy on the local gas), gas pipe granite cooling (1000g/s) liquid pipe granite cooling (10kg/s) open water cooling (either drip fed or local coolant base (1000kg per tile max). the more coolant you can shove into the space the better cooling you can achieve but always remember the coolant used and how you transfer heat across the two mediums makes a huge difference. like tiles for example. Granite is the best normal tile but metal tiles kick the crap out of granite. variables like that. heres an example of a brute force system. Cooling3.thumb.jpg.2be4c66eb13c9d7a419d0b1a30fda6ff.jpg

Water is pumped up from a medium size holding tank (16tiles maybe) to the small chamber next to the metal tiles (its been cooled down to 20oC in the lower chamber) the metal tiles and shiftplates help move the heat from the press into the water. ( a gas medium is also needed, oxygen kept the machine in the 40c, hydrogen in the 30c). the chamber on the left is 3 tiles so it holds around 3000kg of water when full (brute force baby). if the water chamber is over 800kg and the temp is over 40C the door opens for 15s and the water returns to the holding chamber then fresh cool water is dripped into the chamber again.

its always going to come down to the factor of how much coolant can you get in good thermal contact with the object you want to cool, open air is 2K per tile (for dupes working it) (20k for dupes using exo suits) 1k per tile for gas pipes, 10kg per tile for liquid pipes and 1000kg per tile for open water.

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At 80 cycles i've got my heat nullifier going (anti entropy device) and electrolyzing for 10 duplicants. Still, power generating equipment is rejecting heat away from the living spaces so I don't have to cool it yet. I'm cooling the living quarters and farms.

cyc80-1.thumb.PNG.ec6a6a6b46f93136e00ed2b80d117546.PNG

In the entropy chamber, I'm piping oxygen in at 75 degrees and it's coming back at -147. Key to doing this is again make sure the room has high pressure (if you try for high air flow you might keep the pressure in the room low). I'll have to start filtering out CO2 inside the living quarters because it keeps on freezing inside the pipes in the entropy chamber.

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Now, inside the base, pressure will be a bit high because we're electrolyzing. Rather than using high pressure vents (it'll wind up popping my duplicants' eardrums all the time) I've just placed vents all over the place, especially near machinery and my crops.

Next I'm going to have to switch to geyser water, which will add some heat back into the living quarters. But, this system should be able to handle it.

cyc80-3.thumb.PNG.46bf664591d5cda8c97e1e73dcaf0ddc.PNG

The entire challenge was to get a small base (10 dupes or fewer) using bristles as the main food source. I don't know if I'm ready to switch foods yet because the geyser water might still be too hot for the bristles (might have to add a water cooler, those take a fair bit of setup)

Ventilation and O2 gen is pretty basics. The fan at the top of the hydrogen hood filters H2 and dumps everything else into a distribution header for ventilation. H2 goes down to the entropy device and excess is fed to a h2 generator. The two fans at the bottom of the hood pump to the entropy device. I only return air with one fan, which also ties into the ventilation header. (writing this I just thought of a way i can eliminate one fan and still keep pressure high in the cooling chamber)

It might get so cold that I have to start regulating hydrogen to the entropy device. We'll see.

Anyway, I've just cut out the need to cool my biggest machines by putting them in the swamp. It makes the whole base much more efficient. I'll worry about it again when my equipment starts getting near overheat temps.

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Pipe cooling is a possible think, but it is inconvenient. Better is a closed room with some of the Wheezeworts and cool the room itself. Put the heat engines in there and your regulators. So, u cool the regulators itself and the other machines. If u have luck with the anti entropy device, build the heat stuff around the thing and use the temp shift plates to the heat stuff.  But u must setup a automation function, that the hydrogen not gets to cold. U know why, the pipes get broken.

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Some interesting ideas here. Sounds like pipe cooling with oil used to be feasible, but no longer is. Some good suggestions though in using metal for the pipes, but that only works with a liquid coolant. Here's my cooling system:

20171125181903_1.thumb.jpg.a846138ffa715acc7b8959b4c9234d74.jpg

And here's the primary consumer of that cooling:

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I'd love to have more efficient heat transfer, but it's not happening with the hydrogen. :/

I'm confused about the wheezewort, too. Wheezewort only seems to work in temps up to 95°C. How are y'all making this work? Was that changed recently as well?

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Your pipe are surrounded by natural gas, wich doesn't transfer heat that well (thermal conductivity 0,035 (W/M)/K) . H2 would be better (0,168) and C02/Chlorine far worse (0,0146 & 0,0081). This may solve your problem.

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I think your verbiage has convinced people that you're trying to cool machines, but it appears you're actually trying to cool natural gas you've produced by heating crude oil to 500+ Celsius.  That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, as the amount of heat involved is just much higher.  Is that the case?  If so, what throughput are you aiming at achieving?  You're asking for help but with unclear parameters.

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Fair enough. The parameters were unclear to myself at the time (and to some extent still are). Heating oil to NG via magma is the only efficient way to create NG for energy production, right?

I'm actually using the same system for cooling my machines and my hot NG. In retrospect, that might not be ideal. :) However, it is mostly working for my industry, now. It took a lot of cycles to start seeing the difference:

20171126174945_1.thumb.jpg.2de21ef63c2aaf2a4800311b770fa7bc.jpg

Careful observers will note that I'm actually a bit too cool. I'm freezing out my polluted water. But that's easily handled with a bypass on a thermal switch.

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12 hours ago, alficles said:

Fair enough. The parameters were unclear to myself at the time (and to some extent still are). Heating oil to NG via magma is the only efficient way to create NG for energy production, right?

That depends on how efficient you need it to be, currently you can setup 6 fertilizer makers powered by a single nat gas generator but it supplies two generators which gives you roughly 880w of free power once running and it gets more efficient the larger you build it.

 

As for the cooling I've taken to digging out a screen width chunk from the highest ice biome to the start of the oil biome, having an ice biome at the top causes the cold to fall cooling everything including the oil it also has a nice side effect of allowing all your co2 to fall rapidly to slicksters and removes the need for carbon skimmers which in turn allows you to dump your co2 high and use it as the cooling agent.

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2 hours ago, CoolNitro said:

As for the cooling I've taken to digging out a screen width chunk from the highest ice biome to the start of the oil biome, having an ice biome at the top causes the cold to fall cooling everything including the oil it also has a nice side effect of allowing all your co2 to fall rapidly to slicksters and removes the need for carbon skimmers which in turn allows you to dump your co2 high and use it as the cooling agent.

Interesting! That would be quite useful for quite some time. Though melting ice is something you'd have to deal with, too. Feasible for sure, though. I'm working on digging above my base at the moment, so that might help.

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If you want to cool natural gas from a geyser to prevent pumps from melting, you can stack fertilizer synthesizers inside. They output natural gas at a fixed temperature, so your chamber will never be truly "cold" - just cool enough not to melt amalgam.

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6 hours ago, alficles said:

Interesting! That would be quite useful for quite some time. Though melting ice is something you'd have to deal with, too. Feasible for sure, though. I'm working on digging above my base at the moment, so that might help.

The ice biome its self without ice has a natural cold temp but heat in hot biomes seams to be attached to tile mass, also heat doesn't seam to be programmed to rise in the same way that cold falls as even with static gasses cold will eventually drop down so any remaining ice tends to stay frozen. It's a good thing thought to place high walls to the left and right of the pit to catch any liquid or to be extra safe use gas tiles just before the oil so you can pump or mop any stray liquid since slicksters don't like it when any liquid is sitting on the oil and its a nightmare to clean it.

 

18 minutes ago, Bloxxed said:

If you want to cool natural gas from a geyser to prevent pumps from melting, you can stack fertilizer synthesizers inside. They output natural gas at a fixed temperature, so your chamber will never be truly "cold" - just cool enough not to melt amalgam.

I've never had the issue of a nat gas geyser over heating although with that said I only ever feed it to two generators and allow it to over pressurize for maximum gas in pipes and stable power generation.

 

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