cooler The Singularity - An efficient sieve-based cooler

[Sevio]

I've been experimenting with polluted water boilers since before automation, when we still had to abuse tepidizers to boil polluted water and sand was scarce but ever since sand has made filtration medium abundant and we got the Aquatuner, I was also quite interested in their cooling aspect because the steam coming out of boiling polluted water has less net energy than polluted water you boiled. The recent thread on a new boiler design without offgassing inspired me to try again with the current tools we have.

However, now that the Water Sieve is our main source of dirt and regolith gives us basically infinite filtration medium, there's a big incentive to use this over straight up boiling. Also, polluted water can become scarce if you're not taking part in the oil boiling meta that can be seen in many other threads. So I've been working in debug on something alternative to push the cooling aspect to the max while using a minimum of polluted water. I wanted to squeeze every last degree of heat deletion out of polluted water cleaning that I could, and even supplement it with some hydrogen based heat deletion for good measure. (For those triggered, yes I'm aware this is considered exploity by some, save it for the exploit thread where it has been discussed at length. I'm merely posting this to show how to push this to the max if you're going to use it.)

Since this build's entire purpose is to be a black hole for heat, I'm dubbing it the Singularity.

Overlays in the spoiler.

Spoiler

The build can be divided into 4 areas:

1. The heating chamber - heated by the Aquatuner, temperature here is kept at up to 155 degrees.
2. Polluted water cleaner - heated by area 1 to up to 115 degrees. An auto sweeper automatically supplies the water sieve with sand and removes polluted dirt. This is where most of the heat gets removed from the system. Because of its size, it makes for a great radiator that heats up incoming polluted water to up to 115 degrees before it gets cleaned.
3. Cold Exchanger - cooled by the Aquatuner down to a minimum of 5 degrees. A closed loop of petroleum also passes through here and cools water offscreen.
4. Automatic sand and polluted dirt storage - This isn't really part of the build but I thought I would show it anyway since it is so integrated with the polluted water cleaner.

You may be wondering why I have the Aquatuner in a separate room and conduct the heat with doors instead of just putting it in the same room and keeping temperature right in the first place. That's because there is a radiant gas pipe running through area 1. When polluted water is scarce and cooling is needed, this gas pipe can heat up an incoming stream of hydrogen to over 150 degrees before it goes on to hydrogen generators to be used up, squeezing as much heat deletion from the hydrogen as it can.

Automation info:

• Thermo Sensor A [Below 155 C] - Safeguards the Aquatuner from overheating.
• Thermo Sensor B [Above 5 C] - Safeguards the polluted water cooling loop from freezing.
• Aquatuner runs on an AND gate combining sensor A and B.
• Thermo Sensor C [Above 115 C] - Sets the maximum temperature for area 2, controls the mechanized airlocks. You may be able to push this a little bit higher.
• Thermo Sensor D [Above 112 C] - Sets the minimum temperature to activate the liquid shutoff that controls the polluted water boiler.

Survival build notes:

You will need to have researched most of the late game technologies and you will also need a plentiful supply of refined gold and a tank of about 16 full tiles of petroleum (and some crude oil).

• Important: Filling up the Aquatuner's polluted water loop with a bridge needs to be done while the Aquatuner won't be disabled by automation and has plenty of power! If the Aquatuner shuts off for whatever reason while you're filling the loop, too many packets will make it into the loop and it will get clogged. Once the loop is filled and has looped a few times, remove the bridge immediately so you don't forget.
• Insulated Tiles are abyssalite, but normal abyssalite tiles will work just as well.
• Insulated Gas/Liquid Pipes are abyssalite, in most cases normal abyssalite pipes will work fine too, however I would recommend keeping the liquid pipes in contact with the heating chamber and the liquid pipe on the Water Sieve's exit as insulated just in case.
• Liquid Bridges are abyssalite.
• Metal Tiles and Radiant Liquid Pipes are gold.
• Radiant gas pipes are wolframite.
• Airlock doors are wolframite.
• Water Sieve and Aquatuner are gold amalgam.
• All tempshift plates are Sedimentary rock (low heat capacity, average conductivity) due to the amount used. If you have enough diamond, you can use it here to get a more responsive area 2 and 3 and maybe push temperatures a bit further.
• Area 1 contains 50 kg of oil in the bottom tiles and 50 kg of petroleum in the top. The thin layer of petroleum in area 2 is also 50 kg.
• All other petroleum tiles are full tiles.
• In area 2, the layer of air above the petroleum is actually 50 kg of steam! This helps conduct heat better to the polluted water pipes and can be prepared while building with a 50 kg layer of water over top of the petroleum.

The only part I'm not quite sure about with this build is the Cold Exchanger (area 3). I wanted to reduce petroleum usage so I filled it in with as many metal tiles as I thought I could get away with. I'm not sure what the optimal material is for a dual loop heat exchanger like this. I built a closed petroleum loop there that could then be used to cool water wherever it's needed or even send the coolant off to other parts of the base that need cooling, but I also realize the throughput is constrained because of that. If you've built your own aquatuner cooling system, what's your preferred way of distributing the cold through your base and why?

I hope you found this build interesting or inspiring. Comments, advice, your own builds on this theme and constructive criticism are all welcome!

[Grimgaw]

So your system inputs are pH20 and petroleum and outputs are water, cooled petroleum and hot hydrogen? Why not just run petroleum through Aquatuner? what happens if input pH2O is hot as well (like 120C)?

[Sevio]

@Grimgaw You're right about the inputs/outputs. It takes any temperature polluted water, petroleum and hydrogen, outputs 40 C water, cooled petroleum and hot hydrogen.

I'm not running petroleum through the aquatuner itself because Aquatuners cool the liquid by a flat 14 degrees. So the amount of heat that you actually move with an aquatuner depends on the specific heat capacity. Petroleum only has a heat capacity of 1.76 and polluted water has 6. So you can cool 3.4 times as much with a single aquatuner if you loop polluted water through it.

If input polluted water is 120 C, then the water sieve will simply delete that heat without the aquatuner doing any work. With the advantage that the heat of any water sitting in the Sieve will stay in that room instead of heating your base.

[Grimgaw]

I'm guessing that petroleum delta T is more than 14C then?

I was more pointing to the fact that 120C pH20 would heat up to 125 and boil in pipes in your design before arriving in Sieve.

[Sevio]

@Grimgaw Delta T for the liquid passing through the Aquatuner is always 14C, no matter what liquid goes through. It makes polluted water the best liquid to pass through it because of the highest heat capacity.

The polluted water cleaning room with the sieve is never heated above 115 because the doors to the heating chamber will open and stop heat transfer above that. So if you send in 120 C polluted water there the room will become 120 C and stay there.

[Lilalaunekuh]

Ok first I really like your build sevio, if done something similair without (ab-)using my hydrogen to delete even more heat.

(But I may rework my system, just keeping the hydrogen below 120°C so the hydrogen is still able to prevent my insulated hydrogen generators from overheating^^)

7 hours ago, Sevio said:

Insulated Gas/Liquid Pipes are abyssalite, in most cases normal abyssalite pipes will work fine too

Just a small addtion, I run some tests with different pipes (got the numbers posted somewhere here on this forum^^) with interesting results:

There are many cases where insulated obsidian pipes are superior to normal abysalite pipes.

(Insulated pipes inside tiles show the biggest difference)

 

 

[Sevio]

1 hour ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Ok first I really like your build sevio, if done something similair without (ab-)using my hydrogen to delete even more heat.

(But I may rework my system, just keeping the hydrogen below 120°C so the hydrogen is still able to prevent my insulated hydrogen generators from overheating^^)

Just a small addtion, I run some tests with different pipes (got the numbers posted somewhere here on this forum^^) with interesting results:

There are many cases where insulated obsidian pipes are superior to normal abysalite pipes.

(Insulated pipes inside tiles show the biggest difference)

 

 

Thanks, and if you don't want to heat hydrogen past 120 C then you could go with a combined heating/sieving room.

As for the pipes, do you have a source link that insulated obsidian is really better than normal abyssalite? Obsidian doesn't have any special low conductivity. AFAIK normal abyssalite pipes will slowly exchange temp with their contents but won't exchange heat with the environment. Since abyssalite has high heat capacity, for a while it will seem like the liquid is losing a lot of heat to the environment (but actually only to the abyssalite pipe), whereas obsidian has extremely low heat capacity and will quickly heat up to the liquid's temperature. (But still leak heat to the environment)

By the way, you can now tell what the effect of insulated/radiant pipes are because the conductivity in the properties window will show as different than the normal element itself. For example gold metal tiles have 60 conductivity whereas radiant gold pipes have 120. Granite tiles and pipes have 3.390 conductivity whereas insulated granite has 0.106.

Obsidian insulated has 0.063, ceramic insulated has 0.019. So if you're looking for the next best thing to abyssalite pipes, it's ceramic.

[Lilalaunekuh]

20 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Btw you can now tell what the effect of insulated/radiant pipes are because the conductivity in the properties window will show as different than the normal element itself

Keep in mind how the conductivity is calculated if something is overlapping.

There is always a minimum transfered energy needed to start a heat transfer.

=> For every material can be 100% insulated if just in contact with somthing which would transfer a low amount of heat.

 

Here is the place to find some more precise data

 

20 minutes ago, Sevio said:

Obsidian insulated has 0.063, ceramic insulated has 0.019. So if you're looking for the next best thing to abyssalite pipes, it's ceramic.

There was a time before cermaic was what it is now and you could build radiant pipes using raw minerals

=> I tried to build all 3 types of pipes using the material^^

 

 

(Here an older source with some detailed math, but you have to keep the averaging changes in mind:

)

[Denisetwin]

9 hours ago, Sevio said:

It takes any temperature polluted water, petroleum and hydrogen, outputs 40 C water, cooled petroleum and hot hydrogen.

I love your build, very neat, personally I'd have preferred the 40c water be cooled as an output, can I ask the advantage to cooling petroleum and then using that loop to cool the water pool?  I thought petroleum wasn't very good as a coolant?

 

9 hours ago, Sevio said:

Once the loop is filled and has looped a few times, remove the bridge immediately so you don't forget.

this is a great idea, I always end up having to delete a few sections of pipe and rebuild them empty to get my loop moving the way I want.  Thanks!

[Sevio]

1 minute ago, Denisetwin said:

I love your build, very neat, personally I'd have preferred the 40c water be cooled as an output, can I ask the advantage to cooling petroleum and then using that loop to cool the water pool?  I thought petroleum wasn't very good as a coolant?

That's exactly the thing I have been doubting about, whether making petroleum coolant (and cooling water later) is better than cooling water directly and distributing that. I may make another version of this that just outputs cool water directly.

As for why petroleum, if you're going to use radiant pipes to move heat/cold between two places, (not using an aquatuner) petroleum is pretty good due to its high conductivity and you can make do with a fairly small number of radiant pipes. But if you have a bigger radiator you could probably move more heat with a high capacity liquid like polluted water.

My original thought was that I might have multiple places in my base I want to cool, so making petroleum coolant and being able to send that to different places in my base seemed like a good idea at the time. But you could do that with the cooled water too.

[Lilalaunekuh]

1 hour ago, Sevio said:

My original thought was that I might have multiple places in my base I want to cool, so making petroleum coolant and being able to send that to different places in my base seemed like a good idea at the time. But you could do that with the cooled water too

1.) I run polluted water through my aquatuners and use petroleum to distribute the heat most of the time to save space.

(This isn´t as important anymore since we have radiant pipes to reduce the size of our radiators)

2.) But when i got the same thought in mind (I want to cool multiple places around my base), I use polluted water.

a) Polluted water will result in less disturbance on the way (my supply lines exchange less heat).

b) Polluted water can transport more heat engery for each used pipe (I got 3 full coolant pipes running^^)

c) Only downside is the radiator size, but if you want to equalize the temperature of a larger room it´s more a upside.

(If you use a gold radiator inside a large area it will most likely end with the most heat exchange happening inside the first couple pipe segments. So you end up with a cold spot where your coolant enters. )

[Sevio]

I think the biggest advantage to making straight up cooled water with this thing is that I could finally start farming bristle blossoms. (I've never properly farmed any plants that require cool water because I always lacked a sustainable source of cool water)

[Lilalaunekuh]

But there comes an other misconception:

7 minutes ago, Sevio said:

plants that require cool water

Plants don´t require cool water, just need to stay cool themself. Keep in mind plants delete mass.

=> Plants can delete heat

Cooling the plants inside a farm needs way less energy than keeping everything entering the farm cool.

(I use tempshift plates which can exchange heat with the cells occupied by the plants but not the farm tile itself to maximize heat deletion)

[Sevio]

@Lilalaunekuh Thanks for those links, I understand a little better now and did some testing of my own, The gist of it for me is that normal abyssalite pipes do indeed exchange temperature with tiles and especially with liquids. I also tried 2 kg hydrogen and nothing happened there, so it's safe for gases.

When I tried putting 20 C insulated ceramic or insulated obsidian pipes in 100 C tiles/water they both heated up much quicker than abyssalite, and they also heated up in the hydrogen. So normal abyssalite appears to still be better than any other insulated pipe.

I also tried putting 20 C water inside 100 C insulated pipes and normal abyssalite pipes. (which were sitting in 100 C metal tiles connected to 100 C water so that the external temp wouldn't change) Ceramic won again over obsidian with slower heat transfer to the water contents.

Comparing insulated ceramic with normal abyssalite pipes, you can notice that the contents of abyssalite pipes does change faster, however the abyssalite pipe also loses significant temperature while doing this so at some point it will reach an equilibrium with the external and internal temp.

Based on some quick testing for a stream of 20 C water in the pipe and 100 C external temperature in metal tiles, that equilibrium is about 35 degrees C and it will transfer heat to the water in the pipe faster than an insulated ceramic pipe does.

So the takeaway seems to be: Normal abyssalite will suffice for piping through gas and maybe igneous rock, for metal tiles or liquids you need insulated ceramic or (ideally) insulated abyssalite.

[Sevio]

As hinted, I've made a new version of the Singularity. It doesn't output cold water directly but I've included a sample water cooling tank in the screenshot this time and it does a much better job of getting the water down to a low temperature! Since apparently you don't need to cool all the water that you feed to plants but just keep the plants themselves cool, I thought I would stick with using a coolant that you can distribute throughout your base.

So the main problem that seems to be limiting this build is how fast you can send heat to the Cold Exchanger. Petroleum works well with small radiators but the heat capacity limits how much heat you can move in the pipe. So I want to use polluted water as the coolant instead, to move more heat. Since it doesn't conduct heat as well, I needed a better heat exchanger. It didn't occur to me before in this context, but I remembered that I used countercurrent heat exchangers extensively for my polluted water boiler experiments to heat up incoming polluted water. It turns out that's exactly what was needed here!

So here is the Singularity Mk II:

Plumbing in the spoiler:

Spoiler

The countercurrent heat exchanger has two layers connected with pipes, all crude oil and petroleum tiles are 50 kg. Flow in the exchanger is indicated with the big arrows, flow outside is shown with the smaller lines.

It works so well that I can now set the thermo sensor in the heat exchanger to Above 0 C (used to be 5 C). It even works fine with -5C as long as your cool water tank doesn't get too cold.

I realize the heat exchanger is quite a bit bigger but it also uses no tempshift plates, (that would defeat the purpose of the countercurrent heat exchanger) much less petroleum and only two gold tiles.

[Argelle]

Quite clever, @Sevio

It reminds me of the nephron system.

Quick question, to depose a layer of crude oil under one of petroleum, it's almost automatic, as the latter is lighter? So it's "just" a matter of laying enought to get 50 kg/tile? Is this build in real game? (=dense* people like me can try it)

Spoiler

* yea, i'm not flooting above petroleum

 

[Sevio]

@Argelle Petroleum automatically floats on top of crude oil, yes. When building this in survival I would probably use a pump/liquid vent, an atmo sensor and some pipes to get just enough there and then switch it off when I have enough.

[Lilalaunekuh]

4 hours ago, Sevio said:

When I tried putting 20 C insulated ceramic or insulated obsidian pipes in 100 C tiles/water they both heated up much quicker than abyssalite, and they also heated up in the hydrogen. So normal abyssalite appears to still be better than any other insulated pipe.

Keep in mind normal abyssalite pipes have a higher capacity than insulated ceramic/obsidian pipes.

(insulated igneous rock and normal abysslaite pipes got the same capacity)

 

4 hours ago, Sevio said:

Based on some quick testing for a stream of 20 C water in the pipe and 100 C external temperature in metal tiles, that equilibrium is about 35 degrees C and it will transfer heat to the water in the pipe faster than an insulated ceramic pipe does.

So the takeaway seems to be: Normal abyssalite will suffice for piping through gas and maybe igneous rock, for metal tiles or liquids you need insulated ceramic or (ideally) insulated abyssalite.

Yeah I got some similar results and my takeaway is a bit different:

For piping through gas (except hydrogen) I prefer abyssalite (nicer coloring^^), because there is no heat transfer if you use briges to skip walls

(Norml abyssalite is not just ok here, it´s better^^)

 

[Argelle]

As for bridges, does the material matter, as I read the content get magically transfert through it? So Abyssalite will not matter, no?

[Carnis]

On 7.7.2018 at 12:25 PM, Sevio said:

I've been experimenting with polluted water boilers since before automation, when we still had to abuse tepidizers to boil polluted water and sand was scarce but ever since sand has made filtration medium abundant and we got the Aquatuner, I was also quite interested in their cooling aspect because the steam coming out of boiling polluted water has less net energy than polluted water you boiled. The recent thread on a new boiler design without offgassing inspired me to try again with the current tools we have.

However, now that the Water Sieve is our main source of dirt and regolith gives us basically infinite filtration medium, there's a big incentive to use this over straight up boiling. Also, polluted water can become scarce if you're not taking part in the oil boiling meta that can be seen in many other threads. So I've been working in debug on something alternative to push the cooling aspect to the max while using a minimum of polluted water. I wanted to squeeze every last degree of heat deletion out of polluted water cleaning that I could, and even supplement it with some hydrogen based heat deletion for good measure. (For those triggered, yes I'm aware this is considered exploity by some, save it for the exploit thread where it has been discussed at length. I'm merely posting this to show how to push this to the max if you're going to use it.)

Since this build's entire purpose is to be a black hole for heat, I'm dubbing it the Singularity.

Overlays in the spoiler.

  Hide contents

 

• If you've built your own aquatuner cooling system, what's your preferred way of distributing the cold through your base and why?

Just straight polluted water.

High heat capacity, so low aquatuner Watts use. Rad pipes Make conductivity irrelevant.

I find the 840kW enough cooling on its own. The base then heats the pW as needed.

[Lilalaunekuh]

4 minutes ago, Argelle said:

As for bridges, does the material matter, as I read the content get magically transfert through it? So Abyssalite will not matter, no?

Bridges don´t interact with their content, but the bridge does interact like a normal building with the 2 occupied tiles.

=> Each building additional building on an with pipes occupied spot will increase the heat transfer with the atmosphere

(Abyssalie is just a bit better insulation and briges don´t have a negativ decor so there is no downside attached)

[Xarian]

Water always comes out of the Sieve at 40C. You can just loop hot water through it to cool it off.

 

I don't like it, but that's the way that it is, apparently.

[KittenIsAGeek]

3 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Bridges don´t interact with their content, but the bridge does interact like a normal building with the 2 occupied tiles.

=> Each building additional building on an with pipes occupied spot will increase the heat transfer with the atmosphere

(Abyssalie is just a bit better insulation and briges don´t have a negativ decor so there is no downside attached)

I've found that in very hot areas, any bridge that is NOT abyssalite will end up taking damage.  The contents are fine, but I've had ceramic and granite both overheat.  A ceramic gas bridge overheats at 275c just like abyssalite, but it warms up more quickly to that temperature.  My abyssalite bridges don't tend to warm up unless there's a HUGE heat differential.

[Sevio]

@Carnis At first I was using petroleum for polluted water, (already using polluted water for the aquatuner though) then I came to the same conclusion as you, that moving as much heat as possible is more important than conductivity, so I made the Mk 2 with a different radiator...

Except your post made me realize that if both loops in the radiator are PWater, there's no need for a heat exchanger at all, if you can finetune what temperature the PWater comes out of the Aquatuner using pipe mechanics and automation. This calls for a Mk 3...

[Lilalaunekuh]

51 minutes ago, Xarian said:

Water always comes out of the Sieve at 40C. You can just loop hot water through it to cool it off.

If nothing changed: Normal water pumped into a water sieve will exit at the same temperature as it enters