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wheezewort to Aquatuner ratio


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14 hours ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

Does the trick still work where you build metal tiles under the aetn and the AT under the metal tiles in an oil tank and it deletes huge amounts of heat because the aetn resets the temp or something like that...sorry I never build it I can just remember it was a thing:wilson_ecstatic:

They actually fixed this heat deleting bug in Space Industry.  You can no longer cool things with 'overheating' buildings :D

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1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

If you want to cool with WWs, just use Thermo Regulators in Hydrogen. You need about 1.5 WWs per Regulator with 500g Hydrogen packets being cooled.

Or just run radiant pipe through the WW hydrogen chamber to get the absolutely same result for 0 power.

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I was trying to figure out this kinda math recently when I was experimenting with controlling a cool steam geyser with just wheezeworts.

I would love to figure out the math for how many WW it needs to cool say.. 1KG/sec of 110c steam by *just enough* to condense it, but taking into account the different thermal conductivity rates of all the involved materials (the steam itself, the pipework, the coolant and the hydrogen in the cooling chamber) I couldn't figure it out on paper, so decided to just try building some stuff in sandbox to test things...

I was playing around with a 2k/sec (average total output) cool steam vent to try and use only WW to condense all the steam without any over-pressure issues between the eruptions.

The biggest problem seem's to be trying to find the bare minimum it will operate on, without "over-cooling" the steam. I first tried with a WW room filled with 2KG of Hydrogen, a back-wall of diamond tempshift plates (1 tile in from any wall / floor as to not interact with them thermally) and a radiator setup of radiant gold pipes.

The problem was, the system was *too efficient* at absorbing heat from the steam, resulting in water temps of ~90c and needing 20+ WW to keep the temps in check. I needed to find a way to limit the thermal interaction between the steam and the radiator, so i was *only just* bringing the steam cool enough to condense, but still maintaining enough surface area of the radiator to condense all the steam each eruption without the vent hitting over-pressure (especially when storing enough water in the chamber to buffer it's dormancy period).

I ended up using a radiator that alternates pipe segments between insulated pipe and granite pipe, it would provide enough "sites" for condensing the steam, but prevent excessive heat from being absorbed into the coolant, with this I was able to reduce the WW count to only 10, rather than the previous "20+" it was using with radiant pipework in the geyser room.

And it seems that depending on the output rate / cycle time / dormancy period, each steam vent may have to be approached differently, as some have a really high output but only a short duration, most likely requiring a high SHC coolant / materials to buffer the load.

 

Also.. if all thermal interactions are basically limited by the lowest conductivity of whatever is in the system (in this case i'm guessing it's probably the steam has the lowest) does the use of radiant pipes, or coolants like the new "super coolant" or even tempshift plates really matter in such a system?

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32 minutes ago, DevilmanUK said:

Also.. if all thermal interactions are basically limited by the lowest conductivity of whatever is in the system (in this case i'm guessing it's probably the steam has the lowest) does the use of radiant pipes, or coolants like the new "super coolant" or even tempshift plates really matter in such a system?

ok, this statement is not accurate.  Here's what happens:  When heat transfers between two items (gas and floor, aquatuner and liquid, whatever) the log average of their conductivities is used to calculate the rate of transfer.  When an insulator is involved, then the lowest conductivity is used.  So supercoolant in insulating pipes transfers practically no heat to the surrounding area, while in a conductive pipe, it transfers it rather quickly.

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8 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

ok, this statement is not accurate.  Here's what happens:  When heat transfers between two items (gas and floor, aquatuner and liquid, whatever) the log average of their conductivities is used to calculate the rate of transfer.  When an insulator is involved, then the lowest conductivity is used.  So supercoolant in insulating pipes transfers practically no heat to the surrounding area, while in a conductive pipe, it transfers it rather quickly.

I was talking more as a whole system (for example with my geyser cooling), looking for the "lowest point" as it were.. the log of the average between the steam and the pipe is probably the lowest of the whole system, and as such is the limiting point of how much heat can move from 1 point in the system to another.    Ty for clarifying the thermal transfer between non-insulators, I had only previously been looking at that side of things :)

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For geyser cooling, its real easy.  Let a pipe with liquid water flow through the room.   The mass of the water in the pipe is so much greater than the mass of the steam being expelled that the steam condenses rather quickly even if your water is 60 or 70c.  If you want to cool ANY gas quickly, use a liquid in a radiant pipe.

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I had been trying to build a self-sufficient setup that could rely purely on wheezeworts to cool the steam just enough to condense, just fast enough to prevent over-pressure. I realize there are plenty of other ways to do it, including circulating Pwater through pipes etc.. , but I was really trying to make an entirely "passive" system.   

 

However without being able to figure out all the thermal interactions in the system, I cannot see an easy way to figure out how many wheezeworts are needed to condense say, 1KG/sec steam into water, without execessive cooling below that point without just trial and error building in debug :p

 

Strangely I observed basically no difference between having diamond tempshift plates in the WW chamber and not having them at all, i expected them to at least act like a heat buffer, but it didn't really seem to be the case in my trial and error's :p

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OK, so look at the numbers.  You don't need to worry about thermal transfer rates to determine if a passive system is possible.  Just look at the SHC of the various elements and the cooling power of a wheezewart.  Lets say that you want to cool your steam geyser's output to 90c.  Water has a SHC of 4.1791kg/s, so your 1kg/s of steam (100c) cooled to 90c (a 10c delta) would require 41.79kDTU of heat to be removed per second.

One wheezewart in 2kg of hydrogen can cool roughly 12kDTU -- its worse in other gasses.  So to cool your steam by 10c so that it condenses into water would require 4 wheezewarts in hydrogen.

Tempshift plates facilitate the averaging of thermal energy in their area.  If you want a buffer, use a tempshift plate with a substance that has a high SHC, like igneous rock or better yet, dirt.

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11 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

OK, so look at the numbers.  You don't need to worry about thermal transfer rates to determine if a passive system is possible.  Just look at the SHC of the various elements and the cooling power of a wheezewart.  Lets say that you want to cool your steam geyser's output to 90c.  Water has a SHC of 4.1791kg/s, so your 1kg/s of steam (100c) cooled to 90c (a 10c delta) would require 41.79kDTU of heat to be removed per second.

One wheezewart in 2kg of hydrogen can cool roughly 12kDTU -- its worse in other gasses.  So to cool your steam by 10c so that it condenses into water would require 4 wheezewarts in hydrogen.

Tempshift plates facilitate the averaging of thermal energy in their area.  If you want a buffer, use a tempshift plate with a substance that has a high SHC, like igneous rock or better yet, dirt.

So with my 2KG/sec 110c steam source I was getting it to hold its rate at around 9 WW, so looks like I was pretty close to the numbers there. The reason why i bring up the thermal transfer rates is that as i described above, with a higher thermal transfer rate (the radiant pipes) the steam would get excessively cooled, resulting in the WW not having enough cooling power.  So that's why I was having to swap to alternating insulated / granite pipes, to reduce the rate to something manageable.

Of course, once you move away from a constant 2KG/sec steam source to a geyser, that while averaging 2KG/sec, it does it in bursts of 5KG/sec during eruption period, I ended up needing to make the chamber large enough to accomodate the excess water i would need during the dormant cycle, plus enough empty space for the steam to fill during eruption without overpressure.

 

The problem(s) I was having was that if i added more conductive materials (like radiant pipes) to cool the steam faster (so needing a smaller geyser chamber), it would also typically over-cool the steam, drawing too much heat out and then not being able to keep up with the rate of incoming heat into the Hydrogen / WW chamber.  Making the radiator smaller would reduce this somewhat, but then you end up with too small of a radiator (in terms of area covered) to condense the steam fast enough and you hit overpressure again

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Forgive me for going off topic and showing a possible alternative. If you don't have quite enough wheezes to support an AT, save yourself the power and just use a radiator!

So here's why, you can still fuss around and get a setup that regulates output temp, you get exactly the same amount of cooling (in the long run; with perhaps less surge capability) and it uses hardly any electrical power.

(you really don't need quite so much pipe as I have here, this particular messy build is a result of racing against time in survival mode, and lacking both materials & research)

(1) regular view

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The left-hand air pump is a selective airlock (no gas deletion, sends H2 back in and everything else back out), the right hand pump scavenges any non-H2 gas in the cooling chamber (both of them never run after it's all set up)

Press the H2 chamber up as much as you possibly can using standard vents, this is why I have so many vents especially on the bottom layer.

(2) pipe overlay

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My automation is keeping output temp at 26C. It will drift up a little bit as the geyser heats up. Just letting the environment condense the geyser for now (I know, have to fix that soon). But I can correct the output temp by changing the temp sensor I have in that Hydrogen chamber...

(3) automation

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It's not as scary as it looks. 3 inputs anded together, when all 3 conditions are satisfied the buffer locks the pump on for 25 seconds. (specific times don't matter much, just that the buffer is set to longer than the timer's "on" cycle, but good settings will depend a little bit on how long your hot water pipe is)

- First input: temp sensor in the hydrogen chamber (I have it set to "on when below 5C")

- Second input: liquid level sensor in the cool water tank inside the base (set to "on when below 500kg")

- Third input: a timer. Counts 20s off and 1s on. The whole point here is to have a debounce feature. When the pump turns on I don't want gaps or scattered partial packets, I want a big slug of 10kg packets. So with the timer and the buffer together it reads all the inputs at the same time and then keeps pumping even if one of the sensors is bouncing.

- Explained: So every time the 20 second timer wears down, if my cold water tank is low and the hydrogen is cold, pump for 25 seconds. After 20 seconds (haven't finished pumping), if the hydrogen is still cold, keep pumping for 25 more seconds. Et cetera.

It really can't move much water but in the long run you get just as much as you would from your AT. Either way you're limited by the wheezeworts.

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