Cooling with Chlorine

[SkunkMaster]

I found a use for Chlorine: Cooling.

 

After accidentally cooling my geyser in my other colony, i wondered if there might be a way to "industrialize" the system. 

 

This meant no use of either weezes or AETN's (anti entropy thermo-nullifiers), while also being scaleable. 

 

Looking through the different kind of gases and fluids i found out that carbon, while also being a resourse for oil, was actually quite bad for the job.

Reason was that not only does it have a very low transition temperature, it also freezes close to it's gas temperature. This meant it could cause a problem if cooled to much. Actually one of the problems i had in my other colony was that frozen Carbon would close of the flow of liquid carbon into the cooling pool beneath it. quite a headache!

 

Then i looked at Chlorine. It has quite a bad rep for being "useless", but at close look, it's actually quite good for cooling, atleast with the bubbler method that i will showcase for you here.

Reason why it's so good, first and foremost is it's very low transition temperature. It's condensation point is 34.6 degrees, but it goes liquid at around -37 degrees. 

Second reason is that it freezes at a very low temperature of beneath -101 degrees, giving a lot of room for "overcooling" and also removing the requirement for automation to control the cooling.

 

This temperature can not be reached with oil, but using petroleum it can. Using oil as the receiving cooling fluid, used in combination with Chlorine, is on the other hand quite good. This is because it's freezing point is above the temperature of the Liquid chlorine, which results in liquid Chlorine being on top of the oil, until it "dissipates" which after the whole process restarts.

 

Well, enough words, some pics - or it didn't happen.

Overview:

Thermo Overlay: 

I tried to keep all the relevant temperatures in one picture - upper left corner, where the petroleum is obscuring the writing, it says "liquid pipe".

 

Next is piping - Note on the pumps pumping chlorine, this was to test if the cooling gained from this system came from the "stairs heat deletion bug".

Suffice to say, it does not.

 

This system does use an extensive amount of energy to get going, but the amount of energy required falls drastically as soon as the upper cooling agent has been cooled sufficiently.

Actually it fell so much that i had hydrogen build up and i had to introduce other power consumption methods to solve that issue.

 

 

Notes on the setup, This was just for testing purposes. It took me about 300 cycles to make because i honestly had no clue how i would set it all up, or how to test it even. 

I tested the cooling capacity by cooling my hydrogen production from my oxygen pyramids. It seems thou like the system has more to give, since it keeps pushing the temperature of the hydrogen down at a constant, even though it gets burned of and replenished all the time. 

 

In the case of not having a Chlorine geyser:

I do believe this setup can be done with fluid oxygen as the upper cooling fluid, petroleum as the receiving cooling fluid and carbon dioxide as cooling transporter, seeing as petroleum has a lower freezing temperature then fluid carbon. - But this setup would require more energy to get going and most likely require more (or at least some) automation in order to avoid problems, like frozen carbon blocking flow.

 

This setup is quite easy to get going, and i believe a more industrialized version, optimized to cool down a big reservoir, could cool down entire bases with minimal power input.

 

I hope this setup can help others, seeing as some have problems finding enough weezes or nice AETN's, and how to cool the base seems to be a reoccurring theme.

p.s. i believe this setup right here makes the Chlorine geyser worth more then having 2 gas-geysers. 

[Luminite2]

I may be misunderstanding the pics, but isn't this just a more convoluted Borg cube? Instead of cooling petroleum to condense chlorine to drop on the oil... just cool the oil directly with those aquatuners and dump it on top. It's just the same bug again, right?

[SkunkMaster]

28 minutes ago, Luminite2 said:

I may be misunderstanding the pics, but isn't this just a more convoluted Borg cube? Instead of cooling petroleum to condense chlorine to drop on the oil... just cool the oil directly with those aquatuners and dump it on top. It's just the same bug again, right?

Well, i thought not. But some people say it is. 

About the oil, no you need petroleum in the upper compartment because oil goes solid too close to the transition temperature of chlorine. 

You could use oil, if you are willing to setup more automation, but then you would have to cool down the oil very carefully so as to not have state-changes occur in your pipes. 

 

[Luminite2]

1 minute ago, SkunkMaster said:

Well, i thought not. But some people say it is. 

About the oil, no you need petroleum in the upper compartment because oil goes solid too close to the transition temperature of chlorine. 

You could use oil, if you are willing to setup more automation, but then you would have to cool down the oil very carefully so as to not have state-changes occur in your pipes. 

 

I meant that if you dump the aquatuner's output oil directly back into the pool (with a tile I believe to trigger the bug) then you get the net cooling without needing the chlorine or petroleum; that's the standard Borg cube.

[SkunkMaster]

55 minutes ago, Luminite2 said:

I meant that if you dump the aquatuner's output oil directly back into the pool (with a tile I believe to trigger the bug) then you get the net cooling without needing the chlorine or petroleum; that's the standard Borg cube.

Hmm. Well, i actually don't know really. 

 

My reasoning being is that i use different kind of fluids, so even though the fluids touch, they don't mix. 

My understanding of the borg cube is that it exploits how fluids, of same kind, mix and exchange heat. This system, because the fluids do not mix, does not work in straight the same way, i would say. 

 

I honestly can't say i understand this system. I did read the explanation of why my last system worked, but now the fluids work differently. 

First the fluid chlorine does not seem to drop to the bottom of the pool, like the fluid carbon would drop to the bottom of the water tank. 

This leads to second, which is it does not bubble - even thou it's a bubbler setup. 

 

That said, if exploits are a concern in this game, then not playing is the only solution. Everything from weezes, to AETN's to water sieves and what not destroy heat in some way or the other. 

It's actually quite impossible to play this game while not taking any "exploit" in use, and since we have no voids where we could potentially just dump our heat the only other solution i see is to make a build you find "fair" and live with it. 

 

I like this setup because it's as close to a realistic cooling setup as it can get, without abusing heat deletion methods to the extreme.

 

[The Plum Gate]

Anywhere you have cold liquids cascading down steps - you get the cooling bug. It seems the game simply doesn't get the math right when switching from liquid on floor to liquid in falling state. It seems to go a little bit crazy with this apparently.

It looks more like you've got a chlorine rain chamber thing going on - probably a bit of that bug in the area with the mesh tiles near the liquid chlorine outlets... other than that, it's just another gas acting as mass in the cold zone. I'm surprised that the thermal conductivity isn't an issue.

[SkunkMaster]

9 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

Anywhere you have cold liquids cascading down steps - you get the cooling bug. It seems the game simply doesn't get the math right when switching from liquid on floor to liquid in falling state. It seems to go a little bit crazy with this apparently.

It looks more like you've got a chlorine rain chamber thing going on - probably a bit of that bug in the area with the mesh tiles near the liquid chlorine outlets... other than that, it's just another gas acting as mass in the cold zone. I'm surprised that the thermal conductivity isn't an issue.

I have no cold liquids going down steps, that's what the pumps where for to check. 

 

It appears the mechanics behind how fluids, and "stuff" in general, exchange heat is somehow the cause.

That said, i think this build is "realistic". The evaporation of the liquid Chlorine from the surface of the oil would cool the oil in the process. 

If it would actually work in real life, or if it should work in-game, i don't know. But it looks cool, so many colors !

[QuQuasar]

This post is a brilliant (but probably not practical) idea subverted by a few misunderstandings.

 

The biggest misunderstanding first:  any net cooling you are getting out of this build is due to a bug. This is because the Aquatuner (as currently designed) is not supposed to remove heat. It’s supposed to *move* heat from one location (the liquid flowing through it) to another (it’s own mass, and/or the liquid surrounding it). Pumping cooled liquid back into the pool the aquatuner is submerged in is supposed to result in 0 temperature change.

 

The brilliant idea is using liquid chlorine for temperature transfer. See, chlorine is an insulator: it’s utterly terrible at receiving and transferring heat. However, the game multiplies the temperature transfer rate between liquids by 20 to simulate convection. Condensing chlorine and letting it drop into a warm pool is, theoretically at least, a good way to transfer heat from the pool into the chlorine.

 

Unfortunately, for as long as the cooling bug exists this style of system is going to be extremely sensitive to the exact quantity of liquid in the pool (and my opinion is if you’re going to deliberately exploit the cooling bug you might as well build a Borg cube supercooler and negate the challenge of temperature management entirely). Plus tempshift plates and metal tiles would very likely make any transfer system redundant.

 

If you could find a way to transfer heat into the chlorine and then destroy it (and replace it with fresh chlorine from the geyser) that would provide a net cooling effect, but I don’t see how you could utilise it in a liquid state with a system like that.