Building a Gas Cooling Loop

[AviatorAlex]

Hello all, 

I need assistance building a cooling loop, I'm wanting to cool an area where I have a hydrogen generator and a metal refinery that produce heat, I would like to keep it below 95 Degrees Fahrenheit. Should I use gas or liquid to do this? Where do I need to run radiant pipes at? I would assume where I want to cool the area and then insulated pipes otherwise? I figure I will need a Thermo Regulator to cool the gas. Any tips would be helpful!

[SharraShimada]

Thats pretty simple in fact.

Gas cools less compared to liquid, because its just 500g of gas in one pipe-tile to 10kg of liquid. For most of the cooling-situations, gas is good enough. 

The radiant pipes are placed at every location that gets hot, and should not get hot. So cover up your machine, and maybe a bit more (even the room its placed in), if you want to prevent the machine to radiate its heat to the surroundings. 

If you want to maintain a certain temperature, use a sensor for start/stop the cooling.

 

For example: In general i use a room ~6x4 with 4-5 wheeze worts, filled with hydrogen, and a gas-pump Thats enough to cool my power plant with 5-8 coal generators and 3 hydrogen generators pretty wellt. Dont expect to cool down 20° in one cycle, its a slow process but it works without much power.

[greggbert]

OK.  In the case of the one Hydrogen Generator and one Metal Refinery in a sealed insulated room the machines themselves will not produce much heat.  If you have a lot of heat, it's probably coming through the water pipes on the output of the refinery.

If you ensure that you have insulated gas pipe running into the hydrogen generator and insulted liquid pipes going into and out of the refinery, then a single wheezwort should be able to keep the room with those two machines cool enough.  If it's not cooling enough, remember that Wheezworts work best under high pressure so seal the room with an airlock and put an O2 vent in there to keep the pressure high.

[avc15]

Here's a visual example of how I keep my refinery below whatever temp I choose on a thermostat.

I am using liquid because it's more efficient, but you can use gas if you want.

A bit off-topic, on what the other pipes are doing

Quote

3 sources of pwater, the "hot tank" just below refinery, a large pool of waste pwater from the base that's about 30C, and the slush geyser. Hot tank recirculates through the refinery first, until we'd be in danger of breaking pipes on the refinery output, then it switches to the medium-temp source, cooling down the hot tank again. This way the hot water hovers around 83C, and we can send some of the refinery output to either a sieve or another room to make steam with.

The toggle switch is for manually cutting in water from the slush geyser to refine steel with.

It's pretty surprising how much refining you can do with such a small amount of water when you regulate the output to "just below the boiling point of pwater".

 

That temp sensor is set to an arbitrary value, I have it at 40C.

See the cooling loop runs across a single tempshift plate. It goes shutoff - flow control (set at 400g again arbitrary, just very low to maximize the amount of heat the coolant draws in) -> then dumping into the hot tank.

Automation can be just a single wire from temp detector to shutoff valve. I'm not going to show my automation here, because it's different from that and it wouldn't make a good illustration.

[JDL]

What sources of heat deletion have you already created?

Personally, I would set up your polluted water processing to output your clean water at 1°C, and use this as your heat sink for any hot areas. Put a thermo sensor and liquid shutoff valve in the room to stop the flow when you reach your desired temperature.

To get 1°C water, just loop your water through a thermo aquatuner in your polluted water reservoir without allowing it to dip below 15°C, then use a liquid pipe thermo sensor to redirect the final outflow of 1°C water to storage.

[Iriswaters]

On 11/25/2018 at 1:37 PM, SharraShimada said:

For example: In general i use a room ~6x4 with 4-5 wheeze worts, filled with hydrogen, and a gas-pump Thats enough to cool my power plant with 5-8 coal generators and 3 hydrogen generators pretty wellt. Dont expect to cool down 20° in one cycle, its a slow process but it works without much power.

Huh.  It seems like if you are going to use wheezeworts you are better off using a pipe loop.   No gas pump required, you just run radiant pipes through the wheeze room, normal pipes out to the hot room(not needed if they are adjacent), and radiant pipes through the hot area.  Add a bridge into the loop and it runs forever.

To the OP: WW will get you pretty far in terms of cooling.  One WW in hydrogen provides 12 kDTU/s cooling, which is enough for 3 hydrogen generators, or a bit less than 1 metal refinery.    If you start to run out of WW, it can be good to run an aquatuner loop, using PW.   Sit the tuner in a pool of PW and when the pool heat up too much, siphon some off to a sieve to create 40C clean water, replace it with more cold PW.

[SharraShimada]

Sure, i could use a pipe-loop with liquid. But its a mess, if you want to cool an industrial area with many pipes already in place. Same goes for areas with gas-pipes the other way around. I use, what suits the needs. And at the state, i can use solar panels, power is no longer a real issue at all.

[JDL]

The other option is to ensure you're dumping heat from your gas generation output back into the water input before it feeds into the electrolyzers.

A reservoir of water before your electrolyzers, a bunch of copper tempshift plates, some radiant gas pipes and a few thermo regulators above them cooling the gas output by dumping the heat into the water reservoir means you're deleting a ton of the heat from your hydrogen and oxygen, and if you're using an efficient design, it's not a big power drain either.