Cooling a "cool" steam vent

[Christophlette]

Hello there !

I have a little problem at the moment in my game. I'm trying to tame a "cool" steam vent and I fail miserably at it

Here is the setup :

 

At the start if was full of water and I was like : "It works pretty well. Steam condenses but not fast enough and the vent is overpressuring a lot"

So I pumped the water out of it and now my wheezeworts are heating. And I'm pretty desperate I won't be able to cool that steam vent with WW...

Here is the vent characteristics : 

It ouputs 3.5t of steam for each eruption period. It seems like a lot to me but should be manageable.

I tried to make some calculations to see how many wheezeworts I would need to cool but... Well. I'll post it here and if you can tell me if it is right or wrong...

Calculations :

3.5t to grams means 3 500 000 grams.

Heat capacity of steam/water is 4.179J/g/°C

So let's say I want to cool the steam to 90°C. I need to cool : 3 500 000*4.179*20 = 292 530 000 Joules

I need to cool that in 400 seconds. So I can divide it byt that and turn it to W : 292 530 000 / 400 = 731 325 W

I heard a WW is 12kW of cooling. So if I divide the result by the cooling capacity of a WW. I will have the amount of WW I need : 731 325 / 12 000 = 61 WW

Is that right ? Like... That's impossible... Do I need to find another way to cool that geyser down to 90°C ?

Any help is appreciated.

[Yoma_Nosme]

12kw of cooling in hydrogen if I'm not wrong. Confirmation please

Use a thermo regulator pumping hydrogen to condense the steam. (Radiator build behind the steam vent) if you just want the water and don't care about the temp.

Or better. Use an aquatuner. Cool the water from the bottom and build some pipes when it gets to cold behind the steam vent to condense the steam. Quasi 2 in 1 solution.

[Christophlette]

Yeah gasses can be largely improved in my setup. It's almost exclusively co2... But the numbers of ww needed I found by calculations tell me I won't be able to put that much ww for a single cool steam vent ^^

[WanderingKid]

Well, you need to cool it in 800 seconds or so, actually, since you have down time after the eruption.  However, you don't have space for that much atmo right now.  You need to keep a large batch of water as a heat sink so you can keep the water condensing on your water sink while you keep your cooling going.

WW's are only 12kW each if they're in Hydrogen.  That's a mixed bag at the bottom of your setup.  You're correct @Yoma_Nosme

Your first order of business should be, if you can get a down time, to stick a hydro sensor about 2/3 tiles up to keep the water base available from your liquid pump.  That'll give you enough mass to be able to pull down an entire eruption with existing water.

However, to dump heat at that level... you're going to need a heat deletion.  Simple approaches are an aquatuner PH2O boiler or building PH2O heat and dumping it into a sieve.  More complex approaches are manipulating machine temperatures to play with the outputs.  If you have a Slush geyser you'd be in really good shape, use one to feed the other and both are in a good place.

There is no easy out for a geyser that's got that much eruption power.  My guess is your dormancy period is going to be HUGE, though.  Cool Steam tends to average between 1kg - 1.5kg/s average.  I believe your best approach will be to get what you can salvage from this eruption series, then get in there and manipulate some more power approaches.  Your easiest immediate method to get more steam into water will be to fill the wheezewort series with Hydrogen.  It'll give you more cooling power.
 

Edit: I should mention that 61 WW's are far beyond what should be expected, but you're limiting your expectations to the eruption only.  There's going to be a dormancy period that will balance the actual amount of cooling on average you should need.

Edit 2: Sorry, I'm tired.  If you rethink your approach there's a relatively easier way out of the problem.  Run a PH2O pipe from somewhere nearby and use it to cool down the metal grate.  10kg/second of PH2O should get you enough cooling, as long as you don't care if the PH2O gets hot.  When you sieve it, you'll delete any excess heat in the PH2O.

[Christophlette]

For information I just use debug to see what was his dormancy period. So the actual production per second is : 7.9 kg/s * (443s/844s) * (59.4c/89.4c) = 2.75kg/s

I think I got a big cool steam vent xD

I got a cool slush a bit far away but I can maybe pump the output to cool that geyser down.

A few questions I want to ask if any of you want to answer...

1. Does the tempshift plates setup is nice ? Or do I need to make full columns ?

2. Do I need to make a vacuum in the geyser ? At the moment there is a bit of chlorine and a lot of CO2 in it... And some oxygen at the top.

3. Do I need to deconstruct the ladders ? They may store a lot of heat a slow the cooling process maybe ? 

[Yoma_Nosme]

Definitely use the slush! You won't need any other cooling.

Yes make full columns.

No. 

Yes. But leave one column for maintenance 

[WanderingKid]

2 minutes ago, Christophlette said:

1. Does the tempshift plates setup is nice ? Or do I need to make full columns ?

2. Do I need to make a vacuum in the geyser ? At the moment there is a bit of chlorine and a lot of CO2 in it... And some oxygen at the top.

3. Do I need to deconstruct the ladders ? They may store a lot of heat a slow the cooling process maybe ? 

1) Tempshift setup is fine.  You're doing massive changes to heat.  I would only bunch them up if you needed finer control.

2) The less other atmo is in there, the less you have to fight to get the pressure down to H2O faster.  It doesn't need to be a vacuum for the start, but it would help.

3) The more mass in an area you want to cool down, the longer it will take to cool the area down.  However, with your tempshift plates, the ladders pretty much won't matter.  The amount of mass in the plates will pretty much ignore the ladders.

And yes, you've got a monster steam vent there.  I usually only see that volume in Hot water geysers.

[BlueLance]

@Christophlette Are you absolutely adamant on using Wheezeworts?

If not run a radiant liquid pipe through the area around the geyser with polluted water, and feed it through an aquatuner and use an in pipe thermo sensor to keep the water as close to 90 as you want or lower.

Have the same feed connected to your slush geyser to replace the aquatuner when the geyser is active.

Dominating the geyser with liquid is easy, with gas....not so much

[Christophlette]

18 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

@Christophlette Are you absolutely adamant on using Wheezeworts?

 

Not at all. I had like 20 spare WW and I thought it would be enough to cool that vent. But I was mistaking ahah.

I'll try to replace the gas in my WW room with hydrogen and keep some water to make a heat sink to condense the steam. And I think I will use the cool slush geyser to cool it down further...

Thanks for your help !

[BlueLance]

You could use those wheezeworts to help cool output from an aquatuner, or potentially help cool the water further 

I planned to use my WW and AETN to keep my polluted water/Aquatuner build cooler for longer

[_Q_]

2 hours ago, Christophlette said:

For information I just use debug to see what was his dormancy period. So the actual production per second is : 7.9 kg/s * (443s/844s) * (59.4c/89.4c) = 2.75kg/s

I think I got a big cool steam vent xD

I got a cool slush a bit far away but I can maybe pump the output to cool that geyser down.

A few questions I want to ask if any of you want to answer...

1. Does the tempshift plates setup is nice ? Or do I need to make full columns ?

2. Do I need to make a vacuum in the geyser ? At the moment there is a bit of chlorine and a lot of CO2 in it... And some oxygen at the top.

3. Do I need to deconstruct the ladders ? They may store a lot of heat a slow the cooling process maybe ? 

Make the vacuum in the room, and just run radiant pipe over the top of the room, set the temperature sensor to like above 80 and it will condense everything to water.

[Mullematsch]

More information: 

This is only to condense the water, not for cooling it down. I use aquatuners for that if necessary. I did create a vacuum in there, you can still see the pump on top. 

The polluted water comes in an insulted abyssalite pipe of my slush geyser and gets pumped out into a sieve (insulted abyssalite) if <115C.

[Craigjw]

Put the WW's at the top, it's the steam you are trying to cool and condense, not the water.  The steam goes upwards, not down.  The water, you can just pump out whenever you want to.

[greggbert]

I have not tried this in game but in real life condensers work more efficiently when they are are above the heat source.  Why do you have them at the bottom?

 

LOL @ Craigjw.  Same thought at same time.

[psusi]

If there are no other gasses in the room then the entire room will fill with steam so can condense at the bottom just fine.  The bottom is also where the water will collect so you want to be able to keep cooling down that water when the steam stops.

 

[Whispershade]

6 minutes ago, psusi said:

If there are no other gasses in the room then the entire room will fill with steam so can condense at the bottom just fine.  The bottom is also where the water will collect so you want to be able to keep cooling down that water when the steam stops.

 

No, having the cooling element at that top is strongly preferred. There is no convection in the game, but the heat transition has a strong bias to mimic convection. Cold wants to move down and heat wants to move up. CO2 and chlorine are also powerful insulators. Notice how the wheezeworts aren't too hot to function, despite the room not being condensed. They're not setup to cool optimally, but they're not transitioning their temperature all that fast, anyway.

Piping through with radiant pipes material you intend to process or destroy is the easiest solution since it doesn't require as much atmosphere in the chamber to function. Steam will condense on contact with the pipes rather than hoping it transitions from from some wall. Hydrogen you intend to burn as fuel and polluted water you intend to sieve are great sources for this. Polluted water needs to get to 120~ degrees before state change, so cool steam geysers cannot ever bust the pipe anyway.

Note: The more mass you add in the form of tempshift plates and ladders, the more you can take advantage of the dormancy period to bank cooling in the chamber. Though, this is somewhat dependent on having a token amount of hydrogen or oxygen in there to facilitate transition from the radiant pipes to the plates and ladders.

I personally use the output of my sinks, bathrooms, scrubbers, and natgas generators to do it. In my own build I added showers to to the mix as to give enough mass to follow it up with a run through the natural gas geysers to keep them cool enough to stop overheating a pump.

As a habit I also leave enough water to keep the pump submerged with a hydro switch. This is unnecessary with the cool steam geyser, but it is just how I build them since it was necessary to keep them from overheating in previous incarnations of steam geysers.

[MorsDux]

This setup works very well, stable 98 Celsius water is extracted from 110C cool steam vent, keeping heat transfer to the minimum. The chamber for the vent is pumped to vacuum. Thermal shift plates transfer heat with steam to the point of condensation then heat transfer stops by itself. The upper chamber is filled with any liquid you want, I use 30 Celsius pwater from an infected pwater vent, polluted water is then removed with pump when the temp reaches 95 Celsius to be deleted by water sieve. This setup heats up around 1 kg polluted water to condense every 8 kg of steam. If you have slush geyser access this could go up 50% easy.

[Kabrute]

replace a section of your top floor of insulation with metal tiles and build a pool of pwater over those metal tiles, then hook a temp shift plate to either side, gives you a 6x3 ration of steam to metal and pwater to metal, the pwater will always win, toss a thermal sensor into your pwater pool, pump it dry whenever it hits 80c+ then refill with new germy pwater(may be used as a slow purification process)

send the 80c pwater to a sieve

[Mr.Trueba]

@Christophlette I think that it is not necessary that you need to do all those calculations.
I'm a chemical engineer, I know how these things work, but I've honestly never made calculations and I can say that I have decently survived 500+ hours of play.

Do you want a quick way for your geyser to stop producing steam?
Here there are two "rudimentary" forms that use and support productions of 7+ kg of steam per second.

The best would be to enclose the upper plants in a room with hydrogen at 1.5+ kg of pressure. With that you make sure that the heat does not dissipate to the environment.
In fact it's how I do it regularly, but in this map of where I'm taking the screenshots, I have not spent time with the steam geysers.

It only uses diamond tempshift plates and tungsten metal blocks. And make sure the tempshifts touch the water that condenses under the geyser.

Although as they say, you can also use cold polluted water.

Good luck and do not complicate yourself with so many calculations. If you like to make them, perfect, but if not, they are not necessary to have fun. : D

 

[RonEmpire]

50 minutes ago, Mr.Trueba said:

@Christophlette I think that it is not necessary that you need to do all those calculations.
I'm a chemical engineer, I know how these things work, but I've honestly never made calculations and I can say that I have decently survived 500+ hours of play.

Do you want a quick way for your geyser to stop producing steam?
Here there are two "rudimentary" forms that use and support productions of 7+ kg of steam per second.

The best would be to enclose the upper plants in a room with hydrogen at 1.5+ kg of pressure. With that you make sure that the heat does not dissipate to the environment.
In fact it's how I do it regularly, but in this map of where I'm taking the screenshots, I have not spent time with the steam geysers.

It only uses diamond tempshift plates and tungsten metal blocks. And make sure the tempshifts touch the water that condenses under the geyser.

Although as they say, you can also use cold polluted water.

Good luck and do not complicate yourself with so many calculations. If you like to make them, perfect, but if not, they are not necessary to have fun. : D

 

This is the right idea.   I have discovered a similar trick as well.  The idea is to have the vent/geyser be partially filled to stop the vent geyser from working temporarily by having it submerged and cooling the area around it.  and put in a single mesh tile right at the tip where it can spill / drip a few drops off.  this over flow dripping will be cool.  it doesn't take as many worts either to achieve this. 4-5 is about right.

[yoakenashi]

Another similar idea, but without the wheezeworts. I have a polluted water cooling loop running through my base. I dip it into the water surrounding the geyser and it condenses all of the steam / never becomes over pressured. I like having the water around the geyser to act as a large heat sink / the water heats and cools slowly.

You could build on this idea and add a Thermo Sensor and a Liquid Shutoff Valve to only divert polluted water when the water reservoir gets too hot.

[SamLogan]

Cool it from the top or the side, here you're cooling the water instead the steam. And the water mass is too high to be efficient.

[Christophlette]

I've finished doing a better setup base on suggestion :

The two gas pumps are there to create vacuum. And I'm still using wheezeworts to see if it can work in a optimal setup. The only thing I could improve are the metal tiles. They are made of iron instead of tungsten or gold but well... I couldn't afford that much refined metal.

The vent is not yet out of his dormancy cycle. So fingers crossed ! 

[Whispershade]

2 hours ago, Christophlette said:

I've finished doing a better setup base on suggestion :

The two gas pumps are there to create vacuum. And I'm still using wheezeworts to see if it can work in a optimal setup. The only thing I could improve are the metal tiles. They are made of iron instead of tungsten or gold but well... I couldn't afford that much refined metal.

The vent is not yet out of his dormancy cycle. So fingers crossed ! 

Two things to be mindful of here. One is that in the past, I don't know if it is still true, but save/load cycles cause wheezeworts to 'forgot' gas they contained. So you may progressively lose hydrogen in the upper chamber. For the Wheezeworts to work optimally you will want at least 1500 to 1800g per tile to make sure that the wheezeworts process a full 1000g a second so as too get the most out of then, If there isn't enough 'air pressure' they can start making vacuums out of their bottom tiles and you lose capacity.

Even with this many wheezeworts, you may find that the room gets progressively hotter between eruption cycles. If that is the case, then it depends on how much cooling you've banked and whether you'll last to the next dormancy. If it gets too hot the wheezeworts will cease to function and it'll run away again.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Whispershade said:

Even with this many wheezeworts, you may find that the room gets progressively hotter between eruption cycles. If that is the case, then it depends on how much cooling you've banked and whether you'll last to the next dormancy. If it gets too hot the wheezeworts will cease to function and it'll run away again.

That's why it is better to let the wheezewarts cool the water to bank the cold during dormancy, then the water can cool the steam.