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Hey, I would like to share my design for the aqua tuner cooling loop that has served me faithfully since the turbine rework. I know that there are several ways to implement it, both with or without valves etc, but this how I like to build mine:

I have discovered why liquid loops stop when you fill them with too much liquid. I'm not sure if the exact reason has been found by anyone else, but I'm pretty sure there are at least a few people doing cooling builds looking for this reason. First, how does a cooling loop work? For the loop to work, the liquids need to be able to move from a outlet to an inlet somewhere on the loop. If there is no inlet to flow to on a path, it will not take that path. This is why most cooling loops have a liquid bridge on them, though anything with an outlet and inlet that lets the liquid through can function for this. E.g. valves, shutoffs, some refining machines. Now lets look at how these devices work. If their outlet is not blocked, any liquid that begins entering the pipe on the inlet is immediately transported to the pipe on the outlet if it is not blocked. If the outlet pipe is connected to an inlet pipe somewhere, it will begin moving the liquid in the same second. In this case, the liquid never actually was in the inlet pipe. Hover your mouse over it as the liquids flow, and you'll see that fact. That pipe always remains empty. If the outlet is blocked though, the liquid that enters the inlet pipe cannot be transported, so it stays. As such, an extra packet of liquid can enter the system somewhere to fill the gap created by allowing us to hide this packet of liquid. This is where the problem begins. If there are no empty pipes in the loop, liquid will not move. At least one packet of liquid needs to see that there is room in front of it to move up. If all such gaps caused by the inlet pipes are filled, the loop will never flow again. In fact, if some are filled but not others, you may see packets start and stop in phases around the loop. This indicates that at least one inlet pipe cannot get rid of it's packet before all the other inlets do. Now the gaps are traded around the loop in a round-robin fashion. This is not optimal. Some people I've read have claimed that adding another gap into the loop can fix this, but this is only true if you have stopped adding more liquid and it is not optimal unless you were off by one packet. In fact, the only way I can see right now to fix this problem is to first remove a bridge or valve somewhere, liquids are never stored in these and will not cause your system to leak. Then you count the total number of bridges and valves in your loop, and step ahead that many segments of pipe and have a plumber empty from there. This is ahead of the piece you've made, not behind it. This way you remove the exact amount of packets you need to. Finally, reinstall your bridge and it should start running optimally. There is a way to safe fill this up to capacity though. This involves using a liquid bridge to create a filler valve, as in the bridge exits directly into the cooling loop, and then fill that way. So long as the loop can flow naturally during the filling process, you wait till it's full, then remove the bridge. I hope this helps those who were confused about cooling loops and why they stop on you.

Hello, I used to cool my steam turbines by putting them in a hydrogen filled room cooled by zigzagging pipes behind the turbine itself. It wasn't neither satisfying nor clean to me and the control over temparture was not great so it had to be colder than theoretically needed. I figured out I could use ethanol temperature range for a condensation based cooling. The idea is quite simple, have liquid ethanol in direct contact with the turbine, cool the ceiling of the turbine room so that when ethanol boils off due to turbine heat, it evaporates, reach the cooler ceiling and condensate there, falling onto the turbine and restarting a cooling cycle. Here's how it looks applied to a double turbine room, notice the ethanol raining on the turbines : And its plumbing : How would you improve this system? Also, I actually have no idea what is the sweet spot of mass of ethanol needed; I did put ~100kg of ethanol per turbine and works like a charm but if min-maxing, what would be the best quantity of ethanol for cooling like this?

This isn't mindblowing breaking news or anything but it seems that a lot of new players are interested in avoiding the need for steel for a while.

Re-titled since this isn't worth the effort. 3 consecutive days of sleep deprivation can do wonders. Sorry, folks. Nothing super fancy this time but possibly the most efficient way to abuse game mechanics, this time courtesy of the ice maker. Full speed operation will require one dupe dedicated to operating it but the more the merrier. Materials are aluminum and ceramic, coolant loop is polluted H2O. The main pool is filled with a total of 2,000 kg of water. Vacuum in lower chamber is recommended for best efficiency. Doors are optional depending on how much cold bleed you find acceptable vs. power/time lost. Note that in later screenshots there is a door to the lower pump area. This door is NOT optional as it is for recovering dropped water bottles... because dupes are jerks like that. The 2 metal tiles to the right are where you would load heat to be removed. The 2x2 water pocket to the right is being used for demonstration purposes. Updated conveyor screenshot to match original design. Bridge direction AND position were off. Sleep is important. At first the dupes will be idle frequently because water takes a long time to cool and freeze. This phase will not last long. As the temperature of the water pool dives, so does the "slow" portion of the cooling process. Once the water inside the ice maker goes below -0.6c, the water becomes ice. Since ice has a higher conductivity than water, the ice maker cools it down to -20c much more rapidly. Since the ice maker is still generating heat at a fixed rate, the heat removal has greater efficiency. Pre-heated room and all contents to ~50c for demonstration. Pool temps after just 3 cycles: After 10 cycles: After 15 cycles: We've reached nearly max efficiency where water being fed to the ice makers is almost instantly turned to ice and reaches -20c very quickly. After 20 cycles: External 4,000kg pool heat removed after 20 cycles (36c starting temp, 4.2c final.) Keep in mind, this is all while removing nearly 50c of heat from the entire system in the process. Cooling ability from this point onward will be a lot stronger.

Everything's gonna be alright... The "crying crab" is a relatively simple and viable no-exploitation heat deletion system, made possible by harnessing the phase-change cooling of Ethanol. Heat load can be anything-- liquid, gas, tiles, pipes, etc. Aquatuner will run 100% of the time unless coolant temps get too low. Coolant used is polluted water. Construction: In action: Warning: 25 mb .gif 12,000 kg of water. 89.9c to 74c after 20 cycles. Anyone want to do the DTU math? Update: Cycle 760: 41.2c Cycle 770: 32.8c Efficiency may increase at lower temps... Cycle 775: 28.5c Cycle 780 24.0c Cycle 785 19.1c Cycle 790: 13.2c * Low temp safety cutoff has been reached. AT no longer running at 100% Dear, little crabby, don't shed no tears. No, pokeshell, no cry.

Inspired by @Lilalaunekuh's research, I've tried to build some automated critter based cooling modules, hoping for them to be convoluted, unnecessarily complicated and have that "The Incredible Machine" feeling when you made Rube Goldberg machines instead of solving the puzzles. Work in progress, but they seem to be working fine, despite my pc struggling to keep up with basic automation. The top ones work for climbing critters, they can accommodate Pips and Glossy Dreckos. For Dreckos, you'd have to substitute the 800 kg pools of water with about 100 kg of petroleum/crude oil, since they drown easily in small quantities of those liquids. The middle ones work for ranches, and the bottom ones for pokeshells. They are like the middle ones, just with different thermo sensor settings and substituting the 800 kg water tiles for 740 kg of petroleum. All rooms are vacuum. They rely on automation to deliver eggs in a round robin fashion. You could use conveyor bridges to achieve the same result, but they don't save their state on save/load, while memory toggles do, ensuring that the correct sequence is always respected. Each module is mirrored and consists of two side chambers where eggs are dropped and critters are precooked mature in a warm environment, a dispenser like mechanism and a double central chamber where they are cooked spend their adulthood. In the first chamber, eggs are heated up to the upper livable temperature of the critter, set by the thermo sensor. After they hatch and reset their temperature, they get heated up again. They can't move, ensuring no pathfinding and proper heat absorption. When they grow up and reset their temperature again, they are able to enter the dispenser due to "mechanics" and get dropped into the furnace of hell itself a chamber where they'll be able to evolve into bacon. Only one thermosensor per pair of chambers here, due to their... different nature. Autosweepers with corner access pick up the corpses the hard earned results of their efforts. Some overlays for the Pip/Drecko module: And for the Hatch/Pokeshell module: This was fun to build. It's scalable and seems quite powerful. And 101% cooler (HA) than a steam turbine! Link to @Lilalaunekuh's post for reference: Cya

I do not seem to understand the interaction between buildings and background tiles. I have smart batteries in a vacuum with diamond shift plates behind them and a radiant pipe cooling loop, but the batteries do not seem to exchange temperature either with the shift plates or with the pipe. Is my understand correct? Does temperature exchange between buildings and temp shift plates have to be mediated by atmosphere and/or liquid?

Hello everyone, I used to play the game before MK I, and I am back with the Launching update. I had two strategies for cooling. Crude oil+AETN+ hydrogen combination and moving the crude oil through major heat sources. Second, wheezewort+hydrogen for minor heat sources. Occasionally taking advantage of slush, cold carbon-dioxide geysers and ice biome. In this verdante map (seed: 379054978), there is no AETN, wheezewort, or ice biome. I am on cycle 96, but the colony has remained primitive. The sole cooling source in the map is carbon dioxide geyser at -55 C. Is this reasonably enough to continue with this map? If so, do you have any suggestions for efficiency of carbon dioxide cooling? Thanks!

So... I have a setup (sorry, no screens as it is scattered in many places) which basically gathers polluted infected water from toilets to reservoirs and then later this cool water is used to produce few early packs of steel and then dump extra hot water... somewhere. In previous base (around 2 weeks before, testing branch ofc) I was using it directly for reed fibres, feeding them ~85C water with limited throughput to almost meet plant requirements - and it WAS working, I mean - plant was not overheating. In this base I've used the same trick and I have overheating in few cycles. Was there any change I am not aware of in recent updates?

Hi guys, I have decided to take a different approach to space cooling. I basically drop petroleum on my robo-miners to cool them. The door below the miners stay open closed for a short time after the bunker door opens to give miners time to.. mine. After a few seconds (160s) the doors will open and drop the regolith down. When the doors are open closed, petroleum keeps dripping on the miners for cooling. It stops when they close open. Space-scanners are not affected by open doors so they work ok. Petroleum drips down to a chamber with a pump that pumps it back up. It if is hotter then a threshold temp. it is dropped to space. *** UPDATED VERSION ***

So I've got a really nice scenario. I've got a Water Geyser close to an AETN, which makes a great combination for an Oxygen factory. But I'm scratching my head a bit about where to apply the cooling to the overall process. The Electrolyzer's minimum output of 70 C means there's a limit to how much cooling I can do to the Water prior to the Electrolyzer. But the 95 C output makes me think it's still a good idea to do what I can beforehand, probably using a Steam Turbine setup. But the numbers on that aren't nice -- 1 pass wouldn't be enough, and 2 passes would be less than 70 C and thus wasted effort. It's also been a really long time since I've done any math involving AETNs and their effective cooling, so I'm not entirely sure what the best way to assemble a cooling radiator is -- how big it needs to be, what materials to use, vertical vs horizontal.... It will need to cool the Oxygen from <95 or 81> C to ~23 C for my base supply. I seem to remember a long time ago 1 AETN could about manage 2 Electrolyzers at 70 C output, but again, that was a long time ago, I don't know if that math holds up. Seed is 1469931496 if anyone is interested. It's a Terra asteroid. The Caustic Steam exposed is straight above the AETN, incidentally, and straight down from the Printer Pod is a regular Volcano.

I thought my experiments and caclulations about cooling solutions that (ab)use critters could be of some interest. So before they get lost in a post inside an hijacked thread: The concept is easy: You can´t spoil an egg by overheating it. A critter spawns at a fixed temperature. A baby critter will reset it´s temperature to the spawn value when reaching maturity. On death a critter will delete the stored energy and spawn some meat at a fixed temperature. => You try to heat up the egg as much as you can,than the baby critter just to a point it will not die and at least the critter till it dies. [Sounds like a difficult setup, but all you need is a hot chamber with a fixed temperature so your critters will die after ~6cycles. Or you could engineer it so that all critter can lay an egg before beeing coocked, but you lose some of the cooling potential which the temperature reset on maturity provides.] All DTU calculations asume you heat the eggs just to the same temperature as the critters, but you could exploit this to delete even more heat. => Superheating one 2kg egg and the 1kg eggshell (asuming we produce >1000°C lime and substract this heat) can delete up to 19M DTU. [But this requires thermium, insulation and a lot more work to implement.] Shine bugs (all morphs): => 1,2 M DTU/egg Pufts (all morphs) / Longhair slickster: => 17,5 M DTU/egg Slickster: => 33 M DTU/egg Hatches (all morphs) / Pip / Pokeshell / Molten slicksters: => 35 M DTU/egg Gulp fish / Glossy drecko: => 52 M DTU/egg Tropical pacu / Gassy Moo: => 62,5 M DTU/egg Pacu: => 70 M DTU/egg Shove vole: => 83 M DTU/egg Drecko: => 87 M DTU/egg The values for the pufts are outdated and are now different for each morph. Additional notes: Killing gassy moo will require at least steel. Killing shove voles will require at least niobium. If we superheat the egg and eggshell the (normal) pacu would provide the best heat deletion for a single egg. [Up to 108M DTU for a pacu compared to 106M DTU for a drecko. This would require thermium in both cases, but a much larger and more complexe build for the pacu version.] To provide some scale: A full time running aquatuner using polluted water can transfer up to 351M DTU/cycle. A full time running aquatuner using super coolant can transfer up to 709M DTU/cycle. A domesticated wheezewort inside a hydrogen atmosphere can delete up to 7,2 M DTU/cycle. The "old" list which was sorted after the dominant critter morph: This is an easy implementation of a hatch based cooling system. [Just an critter drop-off for excess hatches.]