Drip cooling a natgas gen

[psusi]

Is there some trick to drop cooling a natgas gen?  I've seen videos of dripping cold water onto machines to cool them and it looked like it landed on the top and ran off to the sides, but my natgas gen setup appears to fall right past the generator and is cooling the tiles underneath it, which are then cooling the generator.  That is, the tiles are cooler than the generator.  I'm dripping 500g/s of 37 F polluted water onto the generator and it's only at 61 F.

 

 

[The Flying Fox]

Buildings don't directly thermally interact with tiles they're sitting on, just the air/liquid around them.  So, try sticking a tempshift plate just above that metal tile.  That will not only increase the thermal transfer of the pH20 dripping on the metal tile, but also to the air around it that's also touching the natural gas generator

[psusi]

2 minutes ago, The Flying Fox said:

Buildings don't directly thermally interact with tiles they're sitting on, just the air/liquid around them.

No, they definitely do and that is a very well known thing that is mentioned on the forums all the time.  This is why if you want to fully insulate hot liquid in a reservoir it not only has to be in a vacuum, but also on insulated abyssalite.  My question is why does the water not seem to interact with the building and instead has to transfer heat through the floor tile.  The mesh tiles also don't exchange heat with adjacent buildings, tiles, or tempshift plates, which is why I made that one tile directly under the drip a solid metal tile.

[Yunru]

I thought they removed drip cooling?

[psusi]

3 minutes ago, Yunru said:

I thought they removed drip cooling?

From what I gather that used to refer to some sort of trick where dripping water a long way would cause it to cool off itself.  Here I mean dripping cold water onto a building to cool it off.

Ok, so I noticed that the dripping water is cooling both the CO2 and natgas sitting inside the generator, which I guess makes sense.  So I guess if you really want to void the heat in the natural gas, and keep the generator cool so that it produces cold CO2 and pH2O, it would need to be in a vacuum, but you can't keep it there since the pH2O off-gasses.  Boo.  Wait.. maybe a layer of clean water on top of a pool of polluted water could keep it from off-gassing and let the fresh polluted water fall through it and maintain a vacuum around the generator.

[Soulwind]

Dripping doesn't directly cool the machinery.  It cools the tiles it lands on (it doesn't actually hit the machines).

Use a tempshift plate to move the coolness from the tile into the surrounding area of the generator and you'll get the effect you want.

Not that it's really necessary anyway, one generator isn't going to affect things much with all that open space.  I'd be more concerned

about the refinery. 

[The Flying Fox]

7 minutes ago, psusi said:

No, they definitely do and that is a very well known thing that is mentioned on the forums all the time.  This is why if you want to fully insulate hot liquid in a reservoir it not only has to be in a vacuum, but also on insulated abyssalite.  My question is why does the water not seem to interact with the building and instead has to transfer heat through the floor tile.  The mesh tiles also don't exchange heat with adjacent buildings, tiles, or tempshift plates, which is why I made that one tile directly under the drip a solid metal tile.

Trust me, they don't.  The reason that you have to build insulated tiles under a reservoir is that the contents of storages interact with the environment around them, even in a vacuum.  Vacuum tiles don't let thermal energy pass through them, but debris and storages with contents in them will happily heat/cool the tiles under them.  Tempshift plates are special buildings that are 3x3 buildings that let you build them in a 1x1 space.  Thus, they can occupy the same space as a solid tile.  They still don't directly touch other buildings, however.  ANY  transfer of heat in ONI requires a medium to transfer through (Solid tile/liquid/gas (Vacuum tiles technically count, as well, but obviously are handled differently.))

 

So, for your question, pH20, since it doesn't have much thermal conductivity, either needs more tile to have heat transferred to it from the generator.  The metal tile helps, but a tempshift plate makes the transfer much faster.  Just assume that tempshift plates act as heatsinks.

[Soulwind]

Oh and by the way, insulated abyssalite is overkill for anything short of magma level heat and is just wasting a limited resource in most cases.

For anything under normal temp ranges, insulated igneous is more than good enough or use ceramic if you're making it.

[psusi]

Just now, Soulwind said:

Dripping doesn't directly cool the machinery.  It cools the tiles it lands on (it doesn't actually hit the machines).

Did it used to? I have definitely seen videos of it doing just that.  I guess you just need to keep the generator in a cold room/biome then?

 

2 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

I'd be more concerned

about the refinery. 

The refinery is shut down atm until I get the turbine going to delete hit and transfer it from the refinery to the steam with petrol.  Before I started making steel I was able to keep the refinery cool by looping it through the cold water side of my aquatuner/sieve/lavatory system, but steel seems to make way too much heat for that.

[Neotuck]

try moving the metal tile and the dripping one tile to the right

let me know if that helps

[psusi]

5 minutes ago, The Flying Fox said:

Trust me, they don't.  The reason that you have to build insulated tiles under a reservoir is that the contents of storages interact with the environment around them, even in a vacuum.  Vacuum tiles don't let thermal energy pass through them, but debris and storages with contents in them will happily heat/cool the tiles under them.  Tempshift plates are special buildings that are 3x3 buildings that let you build them in a 1x1 space.  Thus, they can occupy the same space as a solid tile.  They still don't directly touch other buildings, however.  ANY  transfer of heat in ONI requires a medium to transfer through (Solid tile/liquid/gas (Vacuum tiles technically count, as well, but obviously are handled differently.))

Oh right.  But radiant heat pipes interact with buildings even in a vacuum right?  Otherwise there would be absolutely no way to cool buildings in a vacuum.  Oddly though, mesh tiles do not interact with either radiant heat pipes or tempshift plates.

3 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

Oh and by the way, insulated abyssalite is overkill for anything short of magma level heat and is just wasting a limited resource in most cases.

Yea, I've been using igneous for most things and ceramic for the hotter things ( ~200 F ) up to now.  About to use abyssalite for the ~500 F petrol coming out of the refinery once I convert over to that.

[Soulwind]

No dripping has never directly cooled buildings.  Look closer at the videos you've been watching. 

They always are dripping past the machine itself and onto the tiles the machine is sitting on to let the tiles cool down

and then transfer to the surrounding air, which then eventually cools down the machine.  That's where temp shift plates come in.

Also, some of the drip cooling you've probably seen were set up to use the drip cooling exploit.  That exploit worked by dripping

a small (few grams) amount of very cold liquid into a larger tank of the same liquid.  The small drips would kind of set the surrounding

liquid it was landing in to it's temp allowing tiny amounts to rapidly cool large quantities.  That's been fixed by the way and doesn't work anymore.

1 minute ago, psusi said:

Oh right.  But radiant heat pipes interact with buildings even in a vacuum right?  Otherwise there would be absolutely no way to cool buildings in a vacuum.  Oddly though, mesh tiles do not interact with either radiant heat pipes or tempshift plates.

Yea, I've been using igneous for most things and ceramic for the hotter things ( ~200 F ) up to now.  About to use abyssalite for the ~500 F petrol coming out of the refinery once I convert over to that.

Normal abyssalite tiles can handle 500F easily, no reason to use insulated abyssalite.  Literally those aren't needed for anything less 1000F unless you are just truly paranoid about having absolutely zero possibility of heat transfer.

[psusi]

1 minute ago, Soulwind said:

They always are dripping past the machine itself and onto the tiles the machine is sitting on to let the tiles cool down

and then transfer to the surrounding air, which then eventually cools down the machine.  That's where temp shift plates come in.

Shouldn't that not even work since the tile itself has liquid sitting on it and thus, there can be no gas there, so the heat must transfer from the liquid to the machine, and the fact that the tile is also cooled is just a side effect.

Also I'm sure I saw a video a few months ago before I got the game where the liquid landed on top of a carbon skimmer and waterfalled off of the side.

 

3 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

Normal abyssalite tiles can handle 500F easily, no reason to use insulated abyssalite.  Literally those aren't needed for anything less 1000F unless you are just truly paranoid about having absolutely zero possibility of heat transfer.

500 F petrol sitting inside even an igneous pipe forever will heat the surrounding.  I'm not sure if it is slow enough for ceramic that it doesn't matter, but I haven't really used abyssalite for anything else and have 50t of the stuff now so...

[The Flying Fox]

7 minutes ago, psusi said:

Oh right.  But radiant heat pipes interact with buildings even in a vacuum right?  Otherwise there would be absolutely no way to cool buildings in a vacuum.  Oddly though, mesh tiles do not interact with either radiant heat pipes or tempshift plates.

Yea, I've been using igneous for most things and ceramic for the hotter things ( ~200 F ) up to now.  About to use abyssalite for the ~500 F petrol coming out of the refinery once I convert over to that.

Nope, they don't.  Radiant pipes don't interact with anything in a vacuum.  They still need to be touching some medium.  In this case, vacuum tiles don't count.  The only things that transfer heat in a vacuum is debris or the contents of storage and they transfer to the tile below them.  In the beginning of the Cosmic update, people were having a bunch of problems with solar panels because they generated heat and you couldn't easily get rid of the heat because people were making them in a vacuum.

 

PS.  The one tile of liquid pH20 is, in fact, touching the generator and transfering heat.  Its just that one tiny amount of liquid there isn't enough to soak up all of the 10kDTUs (10k Joules) of energy that natural gas generator creates.  You need to increase the speed of the transfer.

[psusi]

4 minutes ago, The Flying Fox said:

Nope, they don't.  Radiant pipes don't interact with anything in a vacuum.  They still need to be touching some medium.  In this case, vacuum tiles don't count.  The only things that transfer heat in a vacuum is debris or the contents of storage and they transfer to the tile below them.  In the beginning of the Cosmic update, people were having a bunch of problem with solar panels because they generated heat and you could easily get rid of the heat because people were making them in a vacuum.

I swear I've seen images of people keeping sweeper arms cool in a vacuum by running a radiant pipe past them.  But maybe they also had a tile of trapped liquid there I didn't notice?

[Neotuck]

22 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

dripping has never directly cooled buildings

not entirely true.  buildings do transfer their heat into the surrounding gas or liquids that take up the same space as the machine.  

However too much liquids will flood most machines so allowing the liquids to drip past them prevents flooding

but the liquid will still take up a full tile of space at the bottom of the machine and draw heat from it quickly

In the pictures shown I have a hot generator cooled by dripping cold water under it, yet the tiles are insulated abyssalite so they are not getting cooled

@Soulwind you said they drip past the machine and cool the tiles underneath which cool the air then the machine?

explain this^

 

[The Flying Fox]

3 minutes ago, psusi said:

I swear I've seen images of people keeping sweeper arms cool in a vacuum by running a radiant pipe past them.  But maybe they also had a tile of trapped liquid there I didn't notice?

That is exactly how that works.

[thejams]

Regarding the NGG cooling - Why don't you just put the generators in a Hydrogen or even Natural Gas filled room and stick a Wheezewort in there.  The cooling from a WW (-12kDTU in hydrogen, -11kDTU in natural gas) is enough for 1 generator (10kDTU), with surplus for a smart battery and a transformer (if in hydrogen).  You should be able to equalize the temperature of the room with few tempshift plates and control with sensor + door under the WW so you can keep it at just above pwater freezing.

Getting -20 degree pwater from a single NGG has around 56000 DTU potential for cooling elswhere + using the CO2 in a carbon skimmer adds another 35000. The total potential cooling from a single NGG is more than an AETN, with no additional input besides the initial natgas.

P.S. if you dont wanna use WW, it's just a bit more complicated to use that cooling back into the NGG room.

EDIT: NGG's actually generate 10kDTU of heat (not 4kDTU as I wrote previously), so corrected the above.

[Neotuck]

natural gas generators emit polluted water which in turn emit polluted oxygen so I don't know how effective it would be to put it in a hydrogen room

[psusi]

6 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

natural gas generators emit polluted water which in turn emit polluted oxygen so I don't know how effective it would be to put it in a hydrogen room

If the hydrogen is over 3000g doesn't that stop the off gassing?  It does with polluted dirt.

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, psusi said:

If the hydrogen is over 3000g doesn't that stop the off gassing?  It does with polluted dirt.

It does but can you keep the polluted Waters level even to ensure that no blank tiles appear as you drain it?

While it's unlikely it just seems like a lot of effort to keep a natural gas generator cool when it would just be easier to either drip cool or feed it cold natural gas with a radiant pipe

[Rebrait]

13 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

natural gas generators emit polluted water which in turn emit polluted oxygen so I don't know how effective it would be to put it in a hydrogen room

The P.Oxygen will stay in the P.water Pit(in the hydrogen case) you can use a Mini liquid pump/mini gas pump in the pit space... better than the normal pump

[psusi]

8 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

It does but can you keep the polluted Waters level even to ensure that no blank tiles appear as you drain it?

When the liquid goes down, the space will be filled by the hydrogen.  And yea, I was planning on keeping it at a constant level with a hydro sensor.

5 minutes ago, Rebrait said:

The P.Oxygen will stay in the P.water Pit(in the hydrogen case) you can use a Mini liquid pump/mini gas pump in the pit space... better than the normal pump

It's smaller.  I wouldn't say better.  A regular pump is more energy efficient unless you are trying to maintain a vacuum.

[thejams]

15 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

While it's unlikely it just seems like a lot of effort to keep a natural gas generator cool when it would just be easier to either drip cool or feed it cold natural gas with a radiant pipe

I find it kind of easy to do as long as you go by the premise that all generator rooms must be isolated from the rest of the base.  Vacuuming and filling a room with gas is a few cycles worth of work, and you can easily minimize/eliminate off-gassing if you design for it.  The example below was super-easy to build, and it doesn't off-gas as far as I can tell.

Anyway, the system that would put that -20 degree cold pwater/CO2 to use is orders of magnitude more complex, but I'm not sure you realise how much the 80-90K DTU cooling (per NGG) is.  

[Neotuck]

52 minutes ago, thejams said:

I find it kind of easy to do as long as you go by the premise that all generator rooms must be isolated from the rest of the base.  Vacuuming and filling a room with gas is a few cycles worth of work, and you can easily minimize/eliminate off-gassing if you design for it.  The example below was super-easy to build, and it doesn't off-gas as far as I can tell.

Anyway, the system that would put that -20 degree cold pwater/CO2 to use is orders of magnitude more complex, but I'm not sure you realise how much the 80-90K DTU cooling (per NGG) is.  

A fair point I usually design my Nat gas generators over my bases main pwater tank so it all drips into one location

Also I have 2 slush geysers on my map.  Most of the -10C pwater is used to cool my sour gas refinary and the runoff from that is between 15 to 20C.  I then drip that on top of my 25 natural gas gens.

That with randiant gas pipe full of almost 0C natural gas keeps all 25 generators around blue to green on the thermal overly