Is it possible to cool down a steam geyser?

[Erikvv]

I'm using excessc co2 to cool down a cold steam geyser, removing the hot co2 with a scrubber afterwards. The room gets colder but the geyser stays 99C even when dormant.

 

Is it possible? 

[rafker]

7 minutes ago, Erikvv said:

I'm using excessc co2 to cool down a cold steam geyser, removing the hot co2 with a scrubber afterwards. The room gets colder but the geyser stays 99C even when dormant.

 

Is it possible? 

As far as I remember, geyser is made of somewhat abyssalite (or even neutronium), cannot exchange temperature with the environment ans stays at const 99 degrees

[Christophlette]

5 minutes ago, Erikvv said:

Is it possible? 

The geyser is made of neutronium. Cooling neutronium is possible but you have to create a wide gap of temperature between your coolant and a tile of neutronium with tempshift plates to be able to cool it slowly.

Even if it is technically possible. It has no real use except using exploits with the steam turbine if I recall right.

The solution is to look at the material properties. Neutronium is a very very good insulator. So the geyser can't be cooled easily but it does not transfer heat fast. It should not interfere in your task of cooling the water or the steam it gives.

Edit : Cooling a neutronium is possible. A geyser I don't know but I assume it works the same.

[PhailRaptor]

Tempshift Plates will interact with the Geyser/Vent/Volcano objects.  However....  There isn't much of a point.

[Erikvv]

Thanks. I was worried about getting magic excess heat. The geyser is inside my base and could break the cold water supply for farming.

But if it's a good insulator it should work both ways and that it's 99C is not very relevant. 

[thejams]

Do note that CO2 is a very, very ****ty coolant due to low specific heat.  Even if you constantly pump 500 g/s of 30 degree CO2 and make a 100% efficient system (pretty complicated), you would not even be able to bring the average geyser steam below 100°C.  If your CO2 generation is based only on Dupes breathing and a Coal generator, then you will not make any noticeable difference in the geyser temperature at all once it starts erupting.

Pumping polluted water and then sending to sieve would be far better.

You are probably not in immediate danger if you didn't dig a lot around the geyser, as it takes a while for the large mass around it to get heated, but you do need to handle it differently.

[tzionut]

Quote

 

Thanks. I was worried about getting magic excess heat. The geyser is inside my base and could break the cold water supply for farming.

But if it's a good insulator it should work both ways and that it's 99C is not very relevant. 

 

My solution is vacuum in the cold vent area for collecting water sendend by pump. Te upper wall is made by iron, both side tempshift plate made by diamonds, and some whizzworths in hydrogen for cooling enough to condense the 110 degree steam to 96 degrees water. I will put a picture for you when i am at home. 

The second steam vent i use it for my steam engine rocket, so i didn't bother cooling  

[Erikvv]

You are correct the math doesn't work out, but I was thinking I'm destroying the co2 anyways might as well take some heat with me. 

Though in my current design I want the water still hot to melt an ice biome. 

[clickrush]

50 minutes ago, Erikvv said:

You are correct the math doesn't work out, but I was thinking I'm destroying the co2 anyways might as well take some heat with me. 

Though in my current design I want the water still hot to melt an ice biome. 

Melting down ice biomes with hot (polluted) water is a great way to get huge amounts of cool water during the midgame for very little power. In contrary to mining (polluted) ice you get the full amount of water back (2x more). Apart from using geyser/vent water you can also use the output of the Water Sieve as it comes out at 40°C. Note that (polluted) ice has a lower SHC than the liquid (times 0.5) so you will melt 2g of ice for 1g of hot water roughly speaking. The only downside to this approach is the fact that you will have less wild growing sleet wheat, allthough you will have tons of cheap cold water to irrigate greenhouses, which is more stable and uses less duplicant time than letting them harvest it all over the map.

[psusi]

3 hours ago, Christophlette said:

The geyser is made of neutronium. Cooling neutronium is possible but you have to create a wide gap of temperature between your coolant and a tile of neutronium with tempshift plates to be able to cool it slowly.

Even if it is technically possible. It has no real use except using exploits with the steam turbine if I recall right.

The solution is to look at the material properties. Neutronium is a very very good insulator. So the geyser can't be cooled easily but it does not transfer heat fast. It should not interfere in your task of cooling the water or the steam it gives.

You are thinking of abyssalite; neutronium doesn't have a temperature.

You can't cool the geyser; it's output is always the same temperature.  Best to use an AETN to cool the steam into water.

[crypticorb]

3 hours ago, Erikvv said:

I'm using excessc co2 to cool down a cold steam geyser, removing the hot co2 with a scrubber afterwards. The room gets colder but the geyser stays 99C even when dormant.

 

Is it possible? 

It currently is possible to change the temperature of a geyser or neutronium using tempshift plates, but it's functionally pointlesss. The only thing that will change is the visual color of the neutronium/geyser.

If you're looking for a way to get steam to condense, here's an incredibly simple method, using 2-4 wheezeworts and some hydrogen. Using wolframite radiant gas pipes, loop the pipes through the hydrogen room with wheezeworts and back out to the geyser. This was a pretty crappy geyser, and only needed 2 wheezeworts, but it does the job well.

[thejams]

Each Wheeze condenses about 250g/s (110°C to 99°C)... pretty good for early game, but it probably wouldn't be able to condense it fast enough, get over-pressure and lose water during eruptions.

[fredhp]

the only thing i do to condensate geyser's steam is to pump some colder gas (usually CO2 coming from natgas generators and going to slicksters/skimmer or H2 going to generators/AETN). Radiant pipes are the best for this application, but granite pipes works nice too. 

[crypticorb]

2 hours ago, thejams said:

Each Wheeze condenses about 250g/s (110°C to 99°C)... pretty good for early game, but it probably wouldn't be able to condense it fast enough, get over-pressure and lose water during eruptions.

True enough. It does get over-pressurized rarely, but the room is large enough to overcome this. The main reason there isn't more wheezeworts is because I haven't found enough. With 4 wheezeworts, you can condense even a top-tier steam vent. My last base had this same setup with a 6.8kg/s cool steam vent, and 4 wheezeworts was enough to keep it all condensing.

[tzionut]

This is my setup.. in spoiler more details

Spoiler

 

[psusi]

5 hours ago, crypticorb said:

Using wolframite radiant gas pipes,

Why would you use wolframite?  And actually wouldn't it be tungsten?

[thejams]

5 hours ago, crypticorb said:

True enough. It does get over-pressurized rarely, but the room is large enough to overcome this. The main reason there isn't more wheezeworts is because I haven't found enough. With 4 wheezeworts, you can condense even a top-tier steam vent. My last base had this same setup with a 6.8kg/s cool steam vent, and 4 wheezeworts was enough to keep it all condensing.

The math says that to condense a top tier vent (2kg/s average) you would need 8 wheezeworts.  So unless there is some kind of bug in play, you are losing big part of the output with 4.

[crypticorb]

1 minute ago, thejams said:

The math says that to condense a top tier vent (2kg/s average) you would need 8 wheezeworts.  So unless there is some kind of bug in play, you are losing big part of the output with 4.

Not a bug, the wheezeworts are always cooling, even down to extreme temperatures, while the vent isn't always outputting. It averages out to something that the 4 wheezeworts can handle, and the room is big enough that the steam spreads out, always keeping less than 5kg/m3.

[thejams]

The wheezewort is 12 kDTU/s of cooling.  To cool down 2 kg/s average of 110°C steam to 99°C you need 92 kDTU/s, or 7,7 wheezewort, and that already assumes you store the cooling somewhere during downtime (in the hydrogen, pipes and the water)

Or we could look at a whole eruption cycle, lets say 6.8 kg/s, 750 s eruption every 1000 s.  That is 5100 kg of 110°C steam that needs to be cooled down to 99°C, or 234 million DTU.  During the same period of 1000 s, 4 wheezeworts will provide only 48 million DTU of cooling.

Now sure, during downtime, the wheezeworts will store some cooling, for example, assuming 2 kg/tile hydrogen in the chamber plus pipes... around 80kg of hydrogen total in the system, so some 30 million DTU stored which is pretty irrelevant.  If you leave water in the chamber, you can store a lot more cooling in there, but then - for a longer period of time, assuming all cooling gets stored and used, we come back to the average 2kg/s steam which needs 8 wheezeworts to condense...

On the other hand, lets say you started with 45000 kg (15 x 3 tiles) of 50°C water in the chamber.   That water can take 9,5 billion DTU before it evaporates so it could be like 50 cycles before the system tips over and cant overcome the heat any more so you start getting a lot more overpressure.

Bottom line is, in an ideal system, you can't condense 2kg/s 110°C steam with 4 wheezeworts

[0xFADE]

You used to be able to cool down the physical geyser but they are made of abyssalite now.  You could probably still do it with some temp shift stuff.

[crypticorb]

1 hour ago, thejams said:

Bottom line is, in an ideal system, you can't condense 2kg/s 110°C steam with 4 wheezeworts

Some magic must be going on then, because it condenses just fine. Your math checks out, assuming that the wheezewort calculations are accurate. I should note that the eruption period of the steam geyser is 170s every 653s, only 26% active. According to https://onical.ga/ this geyser only puts out 1kg/s averaged over the entire dormancy as well as eruption period, but it's still more than 4 wheezeworts should be able to keep up with during eruption.

 

As my good friend Todd Howard would say:

[thejams]

So every 653s you need 53 million DTU and 4 wheezeworts put out 31 million.  If this happens in a completely empty, completely isolated chamber it shouldn't condense and should overpressurise. 

However, as I said if you have water in the chamber (or maybe tempshift plates), the heat might be going to them, and the wheezeworts will provide and may store enough cooling to completely condense the 1kg/s average steam.