why wheezeworts in hydrogen room?

[midjones]

I see many people put wheezeworts in a room with hydrogen next to an area they want to be cooled, and use certain type of tile or tempshift plate to disperse the cooling to adjacent room. I assume this is more efficient than just putting the same # of wheezeworts in the same room as the stuff they want to be cooled, but I can't figure out why. Does anyone know?

For example, I want to cool the oxygen that comes out of electrolyzers at constant 70c degrees. Assuming I have 4 electrolyzers in a room, I could either put the wheezeworts in the same room, or put them in an adjacent room filled with hydrogen. Which is more efficient and why?

Thanks

[Logicsol]

Hydrogen transfers heat far faster than any other gas, around 4 times as fast.

For your second question, it really depends on the set up. But Weezeworts in a electrolyzer room won't have much effect because you're pumping out the gas to fast.

Using hydrogen as a cooling medium tends to be more effective because it will absorb more heat.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Wheezewort

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Wheezeworts cool the gas around them by absorbing the gas at 1 kg/s in the bottom block of the Wheezewort, and releasing it 5°C colder...That means that the best way to utilize it is to cool high density of high heat capacity gas - for which Hydrogen is best, resulting in an effective cooling of 12 kW:

Wheezeworts' cooling effect is based partly on heat capacity of gas. Since hydrogen has a higher heat capacity than oxygen, putting wheezeworts in a hydrogen room can provide a better cooling effect.

[Lacost]

52 minutes ago, midjones said:

I assume this is more efficient than just putting the same # of wheezeworts in the same room as the stuff they want to be cooled, but I can't figure out why. Does anyone know?

The answer is heat capacity. To understand how heat capacity works here a little analogy:

 

Imagine you have a block of plastic, a block of wood and a sponge, all of the same size. You throw all of them in a sink filled with water and put them out again. The plastic will only have very little water on it's surface, the wood will be much more wet and the sponge will be soaked with water. Now you have to decide wich one of the three materials you want to use to get rid of a puddle on the floor. The plastic, the wood or the sponge?

 

The water in this analogy is of course the heat which the materials can take up. The spilled puddle is an excess of heat that you want to get rid of. The sponge is better in taking up water than the plastic. Same as Hydrogen gas is better in taking up heat than Oxygen. If you would place the Wheezeworts directly into the oxygen you would try to mop up a liquid puddle with a solid piece of plastic, which will work eventually but a sponge (Hydrogen) would be much more efficient.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, Logicsol said:

Hydrogen transfers heat far faster than any other gas, around 4 times as fast.

That's not the primary reason for using hydrogen. Heat transfers are dominated by thermoplates, heat conductivity of the gas matters very little.

What does matter is heat capacity.

[mickaux]

5 hours ago, R9MX4 said:

Wheezeworts' cooling effect is based partly on heat capacity of gas. Since hydrogen has a higher heat capacity than oxygen, putting wheezeworts in a hydrogen room can provide a better cooling effect.

That's true - and every time when I need a cooling room, I use hydrogen for this purpose. However, In my base I have a single electrolizer with 3 wheezeworts above it and a SR latch that allows the pump to pump the oxygen only if it's cool enough - and for some reason it provides constant 2kg oxygen pressure in the entire base, 20-22 degrees without extra cooling system, 9 dupes and 900 cycles. Question is, do you need a special room, if you can easily manage to work with just few wheezeworts and some automation.

[midjones]

Thanks for all the insight folks! I'm going to give hydrogen cooling a try, it makes a lot more sense now.

PS: if anyone has an effective wheezewort-hydrogen cooling system for cooling oxygen from electrolyzers, i'd love to see a screenshot. I like the idea of using automation to open the doors when the oxygen is cool enough.

I wonder if this design will work, giving this a try:

Or maybe this design for scale (bottom sensors should be thermo sensors but havent researched it yet. And ignore the ladder, I would seal that up when done building)

Another idea I was thinking about, rather than waiting for oxygen to be cooled to the levels I want, maybe I can have constant stream of cooling by using enough thermo regulators instead, since they'd instantly cool the air that passes through. And then put the thermo regulators in hydrogen-wheezewort room to cool them. I think only disadvantage with this approach is the power cost, but with constant oxygen flow.

[Kroning]

I pump oxygen through thermo regulators inside that room. Works fine.

[The Flying Fox]

My suggestion is to not bother with directly cooling the oxygen as this ends up being a waste of power if you're trying to use the regulators.  My standard practice at this point is just to pipe the hot oxygen directly into the base at a few key locations, then stick a wheezewort above the vent.  (I start out with putting the vents in the vertical shafts of my base so there's enough room for this.)  When your base is small and starting out, this is more then enough to keep the main part of your base cool enough.  The thermal capacity of all the stuff in your storage containers will certainly help keep your base around comfortable temperatures for a good while.  You can further help with cooling passively (If you need) with storage compactors filled with ice.  It takes a very very very long time for 20 tons of ice to warm up in a compactor when it's only surrounded by oxygen.

 

Later on, you can put in a more permanent system in when your dupes have spare time.  My suggestion is cooling pipes buried in the floor tiles of the base.  The thermal conductivity of the pipes buried in tiles is far better then pipes in open air, so the floor tiles work better as a radiator then the pipes by themselves.  I favor liquid over gas cooling pipes, but to each their own.  He's a screenshot of my current system, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

 

Currently, I'm just using cold water flowing in the pipes and you can see they loop from the left to the right and back.  There's a temperature sensor in the middle of each particular level that controls a shut-off valve to allow fluid into the loop.  This is pretty cheap to run as I'm only using a single liquid pump to fill the system and it doesn't even run all the time.  Works quite nicely for my blossom farms as well.

 

 

Surely, you can also use hydrogen this way too.  Just pump the cold hydrogen from a wheeze/anti entropy room into gas pipes buried within floor tiles, then use shut-off valves/sensors to control when you want cold hydrogen to cycle into the loop and dump it back into the wheeze room afterward.  The only power your spending is for the gas pump to pump the hydrogen out of the room. (And the power for the shut-off valves, when they fix them.)

[storm6436]

Also, the reason for concentrating your wort chilling on hydrogen and pumping it is a pretty simple equation: E=m*c*dT or in non-physics-nerd terms, the amount of energy added or extracted in a temp shift is equal to the mass of the substance (m) times the heat capacity of the substance (c) and the temperature shift (dT)

 What most people think of as heat is just kinetic energy -- the hotter a gas is, the faster and thus the harder the molecules hit you, thus the hotter it feels.  I won't go into quantum mechanics to explain the bulk of specific heat, so suffice it to say that the way molecules are put together dictates how much energy they can "store"... 

 Where this all comes together and starts making sense is that worts drop the temp of whatever gas they breathe in by 5 degrees Celsius regardless of the gas...  so if it breathes in a 1kg block of oxygen, the amount of energy removed from the system is -5 degrees * 1 kg * 0.024 (O2's capacity).  We'll call the result E1.  Now take a 1kg block of Hydrogen, the same equation applies: -5 * 1 * 0.168 (H2's capacity) ... and if we compare that number to E1, you'll find that the amount of energy removed by the wort is 7 times larger for hydrogen than it is for oxygen, so for every 1 breath of chilled hydrogen, it would take 7 breaths of chilled oxygen to remove the same amount of energy.

 Granted, getting that cold where you want it to go is another headache altogether, but... *shrug* it's an engineering problem so it can't be all that hard.

Full disclosure, I am on the tail end of an applied math/physics dual major, so I might not make a lot of sense most of the time.  Something about gazing into the darkness means the darkness gazes into you.

[midjones]

This system is working pretty well so far. I can feed hot geyser water directly into it

[Logicsol]

10 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

That's not the primary reason for using hydrogen. Heat transfers are dominated by thermoplates, heat conductivity of the gas matters very little.

What does matter is heat capacity.

Heat conditivity still has a sizeable influence, especially if you don't have thermal plates in. 

While it doesn't matter for cooling the gas much(thanks to wheezewoort behavior), it does effect how quickly heat gets absorbed by the gas.

That said, given that hydrogen also has more than double the heat capacity as oxygen, meaning that it removed twice the heat per wheeze wort cycle.

But if it was just a matter of spec, natural gas would work almost as well having roughly 91.3% of the heat capacity as hydrogen.

But it's generally not used because heat won't transfer to it quite as fast as hydrogen, making it less effective.

[Coolthulhu]

25 minutes ago, Logicsol said:

But it's generally not used because heat won't transfer to it quite as fast as hydrogen, making it less effective.

It's not used because it has worse heat capacity. If it had better heat capacity, it would be a superior choice for wheezewort medium, even if it still had the terrible conductivity. Heat transfer speed is not the bottleneck here, the wheezewort is.

Thermoplates are really strong when used properly.

[Logicsol]

49 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

It's not used because it has worse heat capacity. If it had better heat capacity, it would be a superior choice for wheezewort medium, even if it still had the terrible conductivity. Heat transfer speed is not the bottleneck here, the wheezewort is.

Thermoplates are really strong when used properly.

But are still limited by the conductivity of the target medium.

A thermal plate will heat hydrogen faster than it will any other gas.

 

This means that hydrogen will more quickly reach a point where it's bottlenecked by the wheezewort, and it will also normalize a spike from introduced heat faster.
 

[storm6436]

You're running into the same argument folks do as to what to make their tempshift plates out of.  Superior heat capacity but inferior conductivity just means you either need more time or more surface area to transfer the energy.  Whether or not its a superior option then depends on if you have the time or have the space available. 

 In the same vein, you could technically chill a high-heat building by first storing a bunch of dirt in an ice biome and once it hits its lowest temperature use said dirt to construct tempshift plates around said building.  It'd take a good long while for all that dirt to heat up.  Even better if you mixed diamond/tungsten/wolframite shift plates in to channel the excess heat to farther dirt tiles, which would effectively be increasing the surface area of the machine by enough that it's theoretically possible, provided a large enough array of shift tiles, to build a giant radiator that will effectively never overheat as the energy leaving the array will be equal to or greater than the input from the machine.   Just a question of having enough of the right tiles in the right places and enough gas to transmit that energy to.

[Coolthulhu]

20 minutes ago, Logicsol said:

This means that hydrogen will more quickly reach a point where it's bottlenecked by the wheezewort

By fraction of a cycle. With properly set up temp plates, conductivity of the medium is of minuscule importance. You just need to connect the plates with (non-abyssalite) tiles or doors, to make them exchange heat with each other more directly. They do not connect to each other directly.

17 minutes ago, storm6436 said:

Even better if you mixed diamond/tungsten/wolframite shift plates in to channel the excess heat to farther dirt tiles

Nope. When heating gas, just use dirt everywhere. Reminder: in most cases, lowest conductivity is used. That 60 conductivity would be wasted here.

[Logicsol]

52 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

By fraction of a cycle. With properly set up temp plates, conductivity of the medium is of minuscule importance. You just need to connect the plates with (non-abyssalite) tiles or doors, to make them exchange heat with each other more directly. They do not connect to each other directly.

 

By more than that, IMO.

Hydrogen is 4 to 6 times more efficient at absorbing heat. As long as the hydrogen is cooler than the temp plate, 4 to 6 times as much energy is being absorbed in the same amount of time. The bottleneck is still the wheezewort of course, but the higher conductivity means more engery is being pulled out of those tempshift plates.

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Nope. When heating gas, just use dirt everywhere. Reminder: in most cases, lowest conductivity is used. That 60 conductivity would be wasted here.

Yeah here just about any material is going to have a higher conductivity than the gas does. Even at 2 it's still a dozen times higher than Hydrogens rate, and 80 times higher than oxygen's.

[trukogre]

4 hours ago, Logicsol said:

Hydrogen is 4 to 6 times more efficient at absorbing heat. As long as the hydrogen is cooler than the temp plate, 4 to 6 times as much energy is being absorbed in the same amount of time. The bottleneck is still the wheezewort of course, but the higher conductivity means more engery is being pulled out of those tempshift plates.

Speed does not equal efficiency.  that's just flat out incorrect.  As long as the wheeze's cooling effect is the bottleneck, the long term cooling provided will be the same.  The conductivity only matters in the short term, unless the system is not stable.  For most systems, there's a stable equilibrium and the long run equilibrium is what matters, so the slightly quicker approach really just doesn't matter.  You can say "4-6 times faster" until you're blue in the face, but for most use cases, it just doesn't matter.

 

" As long as the hydrogen is cooler than the temp plate, 4 to 6 times as much energy is being absorbed in the same amount of time."

That's incorrect.  If the hydrogen is much cooler in one example than the other, due to the lower conductivity, then the energy absorbed can be equal.

[Logicsol]

4 hours ago, trukogre said:

Speed does not equal efficiency.  that's just flat out incorrect.  As long as the wheeze's cooling effect is the bottleneck, the long term cooling provided will be the same.  The conductivity only matters in the short term, unless the system is not stable.  For most systems, there's a stable equilibrium and the long run equilibrium is what matters, so the slightly quicker approach really just doesn't matter.  You can say "4-6 times faster" until you're blue in the face, but for most use cases, it just doesn't matter.

 

" As long as the hydrogen is cooler than the temp plate, 4 to 6 times as much energy is being absorbed in the same amount of time."

That's incorrect.  If the hydrogen is much cooler in one example than the other, due to the lower conductivity, then the energy absorbed can be equal.

>Speed does not equal efficiency.  that's just flat out incorrect.  As long as the wheeze's cooling effect is the bottleneck, the long term cooling provided will be the same.  The conductivity only matters in the short term, unless the system is not stable.  For most systems, there's a stable equilibrium and the long run equilibrium is what matters, so the slightly quicker approach really just doesn't matter.  You can say "4-6 times faster" until you're blue in the face, but for most use cases, it just doesn't matter.

This is exactly what I said.

The higher conductivity of hydrogen bring it to equilibrium faster, and normalizing spikes in heat faster. The thermal spec is still it's most important aspect, but it's conductivity helps too.

 

That's incorrect.  If the hydrogen is much cooler in one example than the other, due to the lower conductivity, then the energy absorbed can be equal.

 

I'm not sure what your trying to say here.

[trukogre]

12 hours ago, Logicsol said:

 

This is exactly what I said.
 

I'm not sure what your trying to say here.

No, it's not exactly what you said, because i'm saying speed is not equal to efficiency, and you're saying speed is equal to efficiency.  Perhaps you're not aware of what 'exactly' means? 

I'm not sure why you're not sure what I'm saying here.  I quoted a specific mathematical expressio, albeit one written out in plain english, and said "this is wrong'.   Of all the different forms that human expression takes, that is pretty much the clearest possible form to use.

"" As long as the hydrogen is cooler than the temp plate, 4 to 6 times as much energy is being absorbed in the same amount of time."

What I'm saying is that this is wrong.  The energy absorbed depends on the temperature differential as well as the thermal conductivity.  You are comparing two situations where the temperature differential in both situations is unspecified.  The ratio of energy absorbption is thus not 4-6 times, but 'unknown'.  If we specify that the system has reached thermal equilibrium, then the ratio should be near equal, which again, is not 4-6 times.

[Logicsol]

1 hour ago, trukogre said:

No, it's not exactly what you said, because i'm saying speed is not equal to efficiency, and you're saying speed is equal to efficiency.  Perhaps you're not aware of what 'exactly' means? 

No, I'm not. I'm talking about soley the transfer of heat between two different gasses with all other aspects equal. One with a higher conductivity will absorb heat faster.

 

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I'm not sure why you're not sure what I'm saying here.  I quoted a specific mathematical expressio, albeit one written out in plain english, and said "this is wrong'.   Of all the different forms that human expression takes, that is pretty much the clearest possible form to use.

Don't be an ass. I'm clearly talking about the rest of your statement, where you give a very unclear example.

 

" As long as the hydrogen is cooler than the temp plate, 4 to 6 times as much energy is being absorbed in the same amount of time."

What I'm saying is that this is wrong.  The energy absorbed depends on the temperature differential as well as the thermal conductivity.  You are comparing two situations where the temperature differential in both situations is unspecified.  The ratio of energy absorbption is thus not 4-6 times, but 'unknown'. 

It's unspecified because it's irrelevant.  It's assumed that the comparison is happening at the same temperature differential.  Hydrogen can accept .168w per K of difference. Oxygen only .025w per K, Natural Gas only .035w per K

 

At a 100K difference that's 16.8w for hydrogen, and 2.5w for oxygen, a rate over 6 times as high.

 

If we specify that the system has reached thermal equilibrium, then the ratio should be near equal, which again, is not 4-6 times.

Why would we specify that? The scenario I gave was that it would reach equilibrium faster given new heat in the system. And of course the transfer will be near zero with no temperature difference.

 

 

The thermal spec is still the most important when dealing with how much heat is removed by the wheezeworts, but even if you had another gas with the same thermal spec, it would be less effective at getting the heat into the gas circulation. And the less heat in the gas, the more heat in the thermal plates and equipment.

[trukogre]

"It's unspecified because it's irrelevant.  It's assumed that the comparison is happening at the same temperature differential."

 

It is relevant.  Assuming that the comparison is happening at the same temperature differential is a bad assumption.  You are trying to have your cake and eat it too.  The only thing that the higher conductivity does is create a higher temp. differential, since it doesn't change the heat deletion amount/time of the wheezeworts.  You are simultaneously trying to claim that the temp. differential is important enough to care about in one part of your argument, while also elsewhere in your argument making the assumption that the temp differential is meaningless enough to neglect.