Wheezewort Cooling Setup Question

[Joshsny]

I've seen individuals throughout the internet use a few wheezeworts to cool a geyser, or other application.  My idea was that if just a few wheezeworts are enough to cool a geyser, 20 of them would be enough to centrally cool my entire base.  So with that goal in mind, I set out to put as many wheezeworts as I could into a sealed room, pump it full of hydrogen, fill the middle tiles with wolframite shift plates, and use a liquid cooling loop to transfer the heat from around my base to a central location to be destroyed.  It seems to me that the temperature of the polluted water would drop by more than a measly 7C (~28c in, 21c out).  Here's a screenshot of my current setup, though the polluted water loop finishes the journey through a nearly flooded gold volcano on the right (offscreen).

P.S. I'm aware that you can destroy heat in other ways by abusing the mechanics of a few of the buildings that put out a static temperature, but I'm trying my best to avoid that path.

 

 

I think it should be cooling way more than just 7C with a total of 24 wheezeworts.  Am I doing something wrong?

[beowulf2010]

The issue is that a wheezewort affects 1kg of gas at a time and fluid pipes carry 10kg of liquid that holds just short of twice as much heat energy per gram as hydrogen. 

7 degrees sounds about right and will in the long run accomplish what you want. It'll just take a few cycles. 

[MorsDux]

wheezeworts cool 500g of gas down by 5 celsius/kelvin degrees periodically. Their gas intake is on their bottom tile, and gas output on their top tile. To maximize cooling power you need to make them a room full of hydrogen, 1.5kg/ tile average should do it. Because of hydrogen specific heat capacity compared to oxygen is much higher, you will find that you can increase a lot on their effectiveness.

In my opinion this many liquid pipes should be enough to handle the heat transfer, even if the pipes are not radiant (granite is the economic solution).

Adding more wheezeworts will also help.

[impyre]

Wheezewort does about 5 degrees of cooling, and can cool up to 1 kg of hydrogen per second.

2.4 dtu/(g*celsius) is hydrogen's specific heat. This works out to about 12kDTU per second.

12kDTU * 24 wheezewort gives 288kDTU.

pH20 specific heat is 4.179 dtu/(g*celsius). Since you are putting 10kg/s through this pipe, this works out to 288000/41790, or 6.89 degrees celsius.

EDIT: The 288kDTU figure is really what you need to be concerned with (or 12kDTU per wheezewort). Figure out how much heat you're trying to destroy. If you're only producing 280kDTU heat, the system will eventually become very cold... if you're producing more than that you'll need more wheezewort or it will get hot.

[Neotuck]

In my experience just plant the wheezes around your base, perferably near heat sourses like grills, batteries, generators, and incubators.

Maybe have one or 2 in your bristle blossom farm if you are having trouble cooling water

[Joshsny]

Thanks for the replies, everybody!  A few things that I may have left out of the original post.  The radiant pipes are gold, and the room is full of ~2k pressurized hydrogen (the extra output from my O2 generation).

Also, I have some minor automation set up in such a way that if the water leaving my chill room gets below about 17C, the doors below all the wheezeworts open and deactivate them.  It hasn't happened yet, and I've had this system running for probably 40+ cycles in some fashion.  It sounds like I'll need to get quite a few more wheezeworts in order to tame my (very) active gold volcano.

I'm guessing that without more wheezeworts, for this sort of setup anyway, there's no way to improve the efficiency?  It would be pretty sweet if they could cool anything other than gas, but oh well.

[Nitroturtle]

I played around with this crazy setup in a previous save to cool condensed water from a cool steam vent to just above freezing.  Worked pretty well, but as you can see it took a few wheezeworts 

Spoiler

 

[impyre]

@Nitroturtle That's amazing. Did it make much lag?

@Joshsny What's the stats on your volcano? Temp, active/inactive period, and dormancy/non-dormancy periods?

[Nitroturtle]

1 minute ago, impyre said:

@Nitroturtle That's amazing. Did it make much lag?

No more than my 1500+ cycle base was already experiencing.  I run on a pretty beefy machine anyways, so it wasn't much of an issue.

[SakuraKoi]

If you pump in 10kg of water every second then each °C reduction will cost you 10.000*4.179=41.790 DTU cooling. Wheeze at most are known to make it to 12 kDTU worth of cooling =>~3.5 Wheeze per °C. With 24, you barely reduce the temperature by ~7°C indeed after an equilibrium is reached.

[Joshsny]

@impyre My gold volcano is an overachiever with an output of 8.7Kg/s at 2626.9C , eruption period of 52s/731s, and active 67.1c/110.7c.  I ran the numbers through the online volcano/geyser calc, and it said it was in the 91st percentile.

Also, if an AETN is ~80kDTU, then that means I should probably move my cooling room to around one of the 2 I have on my map.  I haven't tapped into one of those guys before, but it seems that's next on the list for tonight.  I'm assuming that it stops operating if you stop feeding it H2, so it seems that I'll also be attaching a shutoff valve to my temp sensor.

[impyre]

It creates an average of 375.13 g/s of gold. It creates an average of 140.3 kDTU/s. If you only need to cool it to room temp (about 20C), then the excess heat created amounts to 126kDTU/s. So your system can handle this easily, and quite a bit more. The only potential issue you might run into is spikes due to active periods.

During the 52s active period it dumps about 152.1MDTU into your system, but if your system has 5t of pH20 in it (what's in the pipes plus one reservoir partly filled), that's only enough to raise the temp by 7 degrees... so I doubt it's anything to be worried about. (although if your system only had 500kg of coolant, you'd be looking at around 70 degrees of heating... which is still manageable assuming it starts at a low enough temp to prevent boiling) 

Ultimately it looks like you shouldn't really need any more wheezeworts. 140kDTU/s still leaves you 248kDTU/s for cooling the base. It might even be enough to cool a geyser too.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Joshsny said:

I'm guessing that without more wheezeworts, for this sort of setup anyway, there's no way to improve the efficiency?  It would be pretty sweet if they could cool anything other than gas, but oh well.

They can indirectly cool liquids. You just need to have something else (usually an aquatuner) do the cooling of the liquid, then the wheezeworts cool the aquatuner. 

Please note that it takes a lot of wheezeworts (48 plants IIRC for water) to cool an aquatuner running full bore so you'll want to throttle it back or use something else (seiving polluted water, etc) to cool the aquatuner. 

[Joshsny]

Thanks for the help, everybody!  I won't start digging out the AETN and moving my cooling station yet, but I'll still go around and add to the cooling capacity with more wheezeworts, just in case I start up anything with a high heat output.

BTW, I'm pretty happy that I figured out a way to turn off the volcano with automation.  I flooded the volcano with p-water until it was close to being over pressurized, and built a few doors on top.  When the doors close, it sucks the water up to the doors and floods the volcano.

[Iriswaters]

16 minutes ago, Joshsny said:

 

BTW, I'm pretty happy that I figured out a way to turn off the volcano with automation.  I flooded the volcano with p-water until it was close to being over pressurized, and built a few doors on top.  When the doors close, it sucks the water up to the doors and floods the volcano.

Isn't that kind of a one-shot thing?   The moment you allow the volcano to erupt, that PW will insta-boil and leave a bunch of sand clods behind...?

[MorsDux]

if you have lots of water on it, the eruption will only increase the temp slightly. You can automate to dump the polluted water at 100-110C depending on temp increase / eruption and you can sieve the hot PW or pump into space if you like.

[Joshsny]

15 minutes ago, Iriswaters said:

Isn't that kind of a one-shot thing?   The moment you allow the volcano to erupt, that PW will insta-boil and leave a bunch of sand clods behind...?

There's enough PW around it that the heat gets spread around to keep the water at a reasonable temperature long enough for me to carry it away via pipes.