Why doesn't my cooling system work

[blash365]

Hey guys,

i am trying to setup a plant to cool down some of my water, but i cannot get it to work. Please check out my screenshot and point out my mistakes.

 

The concept is rather simple. I drop down small packages of water (@~60°C) into my tank. (dont mind the disconnected waterpump, i installed it for later usage)

 

Then i pump in extremely cold (~ -150°C) hydrogen with vents.

I use termally reactive vent material and even installed a row of tempshift plates in the back (hoping it would be helpful).

 

Still the temperature of my water is slowly rising (~50°C). With an gas temperature of <20°C in its immediate surroudings and only a few drops of fresh water every now and then.

 

Also the inputline of my hydrogen vent is ~20°C cooler than my output line, so there is some energy that is being exchanged. Still none of it seems to arrive in my water.

 

 

P.S. Any answers containing the words "borg" and "cube" in this or any constellation will be dismissed. Sorry @Kabrute.

[Saturnus]

7 minutes ago, blash365 said:

P.S. Any answers containing the words "borg" and "cube" in this or any constellation will be dismissed. Sorry @Kabrute.

I'm not sure why you mention him. He's got absolutely nothing to do with it.

[blash365]

4 hours ago, Kabrute said:

search borg cube if you don't believe me

maybe i am mixing some people up. there is someone on the forum, who frequently posts "borg cube" to everything remotely temperature related. It's just not the answer i am looking for, so i tried a witty pre-empt.

[The Arcanian]

Hydrogen in pipes does not seem to be a very effective cooling method, I had a set up for geyser water cooling with hydrogen pipe, from my cold biome oxygen gens, snaking through the water with granite pipes then into a nullifier with temp-shift plates to radiate from that through the water. And on top of it taking a long time to cool, the hydrogen was often brought up from about -30 C at least 10 C fairly rapidly. Got to the point where I was making a hydrogen/wheezewort cooling room on the other side to increase cooling from the temp-shift plates.

[Saturnus]

Anyway. Your problem is mass related. You're try to cool down tonnes of water, quite literally, using kilos of air through gas pipes which is notoriously bad at affecting temperatures outside the pipes. Thermally reactive just means they're good at heating (or cooling) whatever is inside the pipes without affecting the outside much. 

[The Arcanian]

14 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Anyway. Your problem is mass related. You're try to cool down tonnes of water, quite literally, using kilos of air through gas pipes which is notoriously bad at affecting temperatures outside the pipes. Thermally reactive just means they're good at heating (or cooling) whatever is inside the pipes without affecting the outside much. 

That's what I thought it might be when I posted my response, I just forgot to mention it...

[storm6436]

Okay, so real-world physics wise, here's your problem:

 You have your hydrogen being pumped into a set of pipes.  Those pipes absorb a certain amount of thermal energy from the hydrogen at a rate set by the thermal conductivity of the two, say rate A.  Those pipes then transfer that energy to their surroundings at a rate set by their thermal conductivity and that of their surroundings, call it rate B (if they're submerged) and rate C if they're not.

 Thus, you end up with two paths that cool your water:
1. H2 via rate A ->  pipe via rate B ->water
2. H2 via rate A -> pipe via rate C ->air via rate D (depends on gas)->water

 Each jump moves thermal energy, but each jump involves a conductivity restriction, so it should be somewhat obvious that path #2 much less efficient than path #1.

 This gets even more complicated when one considers thermal mass/specific heat, ie. the amount of energy necessary to raise/lower a given substance by 1 degree Celsius/Kelvin..  If I dropped 1 kg a hypothetical material at -100C into 1000kg of the same substance at 100C, I shouldn't expect much overall change... and if we change the 1000kg mass to another substance with a significantly higher specific heat, the apparent temp change will be that much smaller.

 But... there are things you can do:

1. Due to the tile based nature of the physics sim, it is easier to cool a partial tile than it is a full one.  A working chiller room is going to be pretty wide so as to dramatically increase the surface area being chilled.

2. All the pipes in the open air are accomplishing very little.  They're path 2 above.  Use temp-shift plates in a checkerboard pattern to pass their chill down to the water.  Diamond works best, wolframite is acceptable.  You could use refined metals but... that's a lot of metal.

3. Place storage containers between exit pumps and your water input.  Store ice in them.  As you pump water out, it will drag the warmer water across the container, force-chilling it.  Granite works best due to its much higher thermal conductivity.  Speaking of which, your ventilation pipes also need to be granite for the same reasons.

 Using those three methods, I've been able to chill roughly 28,000 kg of fresh sieve output to colder than 70F over the course of 5-ish cycles to help act as a heat sink for my installations.  That's with my hydrogen chiller incompletely primed (ie. not -70F yet.)

Here's my expanded water treatment/power production plant currently under production.  I canceled out the bottom set of vent piping so you could see what's going on.

Disregard the unfinished sections in the upper left corner.  A morb spawned outside the swamp biome in that chamber, and after killing it I had to wait for all the slimelung to dissipate.  I just haven't queued up the final set of walls/digging or removed scaffolding, etc.

[blash365]

Thanks for the answers so far. Maybe i am underestimating the problem concerning masses, but shouldnt the temperature of my pond at least marginally change?

 

[storm6436]

Depends on the amount of energy being transferred.  A given volume of water at a given temperature has a certain amount of energy.  It's entirely feasible with the set-up you have that you are replacing the energy removed by your cooling system as fast or close to as fast by the addition of the extra water.   Mass chilling isn't a fast process without a fairly large facility like the one in my screenshot... and even then, it's only "fast" for values of "fast."

 To give you an idea, what's in the screenshot above, I wouldn't expect to chill much in the line of water by itself.  Those four granite storage containers will do the bulk of the actual heat reduction until I can layer in the temp shift plates to shift the chill from all the rest of the pipes to the water.  If you want more thermal chilling, you need more pipes and those pipes need to be positioned to where they can actually remove energy from the water instead of just the air.  My first set of tempshift plates will go between each of those metal tiles and checkerboard up to the top, eventually.

 All in all, it's a matter of scale. Each exposed granite vent pipe only provides so much thermal chilling and that chill can only be applied to its immediate vicinity without tempshift plates. More pipes, more available cold. More properly positioned plates, more available surface area to pull chill from.

[Falcahtas]

Cold Hydrogen is fine for cooling water....however if there is a constantly stream of hot geyser water you will need quite a few regulators

[storm6436]

Depending on what you're doing, the best method of using geyser water is to pump it via abysallite pipes to your hydrolysis units and your carbon scrubbers.  Lowers your chill water requirements significantly and saves you the effort of chilling water that's going to be processed to a set temperature anyway.  Having an extra valve to output it directly to your chiller doesn't hurt, but usually I end up having an excess of clean, cold water due to ice.

 Worthy of note, one should immediately work to encase your steam/nat gas geysers in abyssalite as well.  Constant slow draw will raise temps of the emitted mass... and in the case of the water geyser, significantly so.   Waiting for Klei to make the steam geyser useful, as I've been eyeballing plans to hijack  that slow draw-> high temp+steam process for power production.

[blash365]

@storm6436:

So you suggest that i make my water cooler wider to increase the surface contact to the cool surrounded gas?

And to further increase the surface by adding tempshift tiles spreading the temperature evenly throughout the entire room to allow it come in contact with more gas?

When it comes to isolating a geyser. Is it sufficient to use insulated tiles or should i just go for ordinary abyssalite tiles?

[GrindThisGame]

 

Quote

When it comes to isolating a geyser. Is it sufficient to use insulated tiles or should i just go for ordinary abyssalite tiles

 

They seem to work equally well. The normal abyssalite tiles take much less material. 

Surface area helps but mass is the key. You can build a coolant system that uses liquid and an aquatuner that is not the borg cube. 

[The Arcanian]

2 hours ago, blash365 said:

Thanks for the answers so far. Maybe i am underestimating the problem concerning masses, but shouldnt the temperature of my pond at least marginally change?

 

One packet of hydrogen at -150 C has 295,560 joules of energy in it (specific heat capacity * grams * temperature in Kelvin, so 2.4 * 1000 * 123.15 = 295,560) while one full block of water at 60 C has at least 1,392,233,850 joules of energy in it (4.179 * 1,000,000 * 333.15 = 1,392,233,850).

Given infinite thermal conductivity (meaning unlimited energy transfer rate) the temperature would balance out at 59.88 C (I'll spare you the formula for that unless you ask, took me forever to figure out...) So each packet of hydrogen can only drop one full block of water by up to 0.12 C, But it is less than that because of thermal conductivity and that you also have to cool the pipe before you can cool the water.

[storm6436]

Wider tends to be better, yes.  When I get back around to playing I'll see if I still have some of my older saves around for a earlier version of my completed completed chiller.  Important to note that once you have your temp plates down, everything will appear warm.  This is because it's pulling the heat out of the water and up into the plates.  Working as intended, though can be frustrating at first seeing a big block of yellow/orange.

 As for regular abyssalite vs insulated tiles/pipes ...  regular abyssalite constructions will still transmit temperature just like any tile, but their conductivity is ... something like 1% of anything else, so the transmission is super low.  The insulated tiles/pipes transmit even less, but honestly, unless you're drowning in abyssalite or are being super paranoid, there's little justification for going from 25 to 400 per pipe or from 200 to 800 (if I recall correctly.)

3 hours ago, GrindThisGame said:

 

 

They seem to work equally well. The normal abyssalite tiles take much less material. 

Surface area helps but mass is the key. You can build a coolant system that uses liquid and an aquatuner that is not the borg cube. 

 *nod*

 Specifically, the surface area on the liquid translates to chilling the top layer faster.  It's not a huge increase, but the thermal exchange calculations (which might've been patched by now) had a flaky habit of making it a lot easier to chill bulk fluids if you could get the top layer relatively thin.

 My second reference for surface area was more about "Number of pipes whose chill could be applied directly to the water" ... which I suppose technically is a volume, but *shrug*

 Just wanted to be clear in what I meant .

[blash365]

36 minutes ago, storm6436 said:

The insulated tiles/pipes transmit even less, but honestly, unless you're drowning in abyssalite or are being super paranoid, there's little justification for going from 25 to 400 per pipe or from 200 to 800 (if I recall correctly.)

i was asking about normal abyssalite tiles vs non-abyssalite insulated.

Do abyssalite tiles make insulated tiles obsolete or are they equivalent of some sort.

[storm6436]

I'd have to look up the conductivity coefficients again, but I'm 95% certain that if you have enough abyssalite, there's no call for insulated anything.

[Zarquan]

29 minutes ago, storm6436 said:

I'd have to look up the conductivity coefficients again, but I'm 95% certain that if you have enough abyssalite, there's no call for insulated anything.

Abyssalite tiles are fine unless you are dealing with things over around 500 C.  If you are hotter than that, you want to use insulated abyssalite.  Crude oil to natural gas boilers should use insulated abyssalite tiles.

[The Plum Gate]

I have had excellent if not somewhat overwhelming results melting ice sculptures into my water basins. Since wheat and blossoms accept the cold clean water, everything else can use hot-filtrated polluted water, this isn't a big deal - I simply don't originate my o2 production with clean water - instead using the water distiller to filter polluted water ( generating some polluted dirt -> composted into fertilizer as a side effect ) - and generally don't care what temperature it is when it gets to the machines or buildings. My base is turning into an ice box...but I'll deal with that later. They don't complain about being chilly.

 

[Kabrute]

Abysalite is so op that no normal insulated tile can compare.  When making LOX machines I noticed that insulated anything was still conducting, just that the mass was taking longer to get shoved around, and seemed to do so a bit slower.  I was seeing, however, this tunnel of cold in the middle, furthest from my walls.  When I switched to abysalite, temps only traded where equipment let it or I hit the thermal exchange wall so instead of seeing a tunnel of cold down the middle, the entire tube layered into cold from top to bottom.  As for making anything useless, thats neither here nor there, maybe you want to apply a good thermal drag somewhere, wrap a room in insulated igneous then replace later, always some option

39 minutes ago, The Plum Gate said:

I have had excellent if not somewhat overwhelming results melting ice sculptures into my water basins. Since wheat and blossoms accept the cold clean water, everything else can use hot-filtrated polluted water, this isn't a big deal - I simply don't originate my o2 production with clean water - instead using the water distiller to filter polluted water ( generating some polluted dirt -> composted into fertilizer as a side effect ) - and generally don't care what temperature it is when it gets to the machines or buildings. My base is turning into an ice box...but I'll deal with that later. They don't complain about being chilly.

 

those results are because of the liquid cooling bug

happening right there

[blash365]

So which one is the correct order?

non-abyssalite tile < non-abyssalite insulated tile < abyssalite tile <  abyssalite insulated tile

non-abyssalite tile < non-abyssalite insulated tile < abyssalite tile =  abyssalite insulated tile

non-abyssalite tile < abyssalite tile < non-abyssalite insulated tile <  abyssalite insulated tile

non-abyssalite tile < abyssalite tile < non-abyssalite insulated tile =  abyssalite insulated tile

non-abyssalite tile < abyssalite tile = non-abyssalite insulated tile <  abyssalite insulated tile

non-abyssalite tile < non-abyssalite insulated tile = abyssalite tile =  abyssalite insulated tile

or any other.

Is it just the mass of insulated tiles (which would validate my first equation), creating a more significant temperature barrier or is there some other magic at work?

I know that we can usually stop at abyssalite tiles when it comes to isolation.

[Saturnus]

The first one but you need a temperature gradient of at least 500C to detect any difference between abyssalite tiles in regular and insulated form.

[blash365]

So it makes no sense to build insulated tiles, when you can build normal abyssalite tiles instead?

For what reason do we have insulated tiles then? (apart from the 500°C thing)

[Saturnus]

Two reasons primarily.

A) Legacy, there was a time when you could not use abyssalite for anything. It was on the map and you could dig it out but you could not sweep it or build anything from it.

B) There are times when you actually want something to be partly insulating. I've often used insulated tiles on the past to cap especially chlorine geysers. They'd make sure that most of the heat stayed inside but are heat permeable enough to prevent it heating up so much that a gold pump would break.

[blash365]

Well according to the wiki insulated tiles actually limit heat exchange to a mere 5% (of a normal tile with the same material). So there actually is magic at work.