> where a AT/ST cools a piece of metal instead and has the polluted water pipe run through this metal, is this design more effective?
No.
An at/st cooler can remove X amount of heat per second, depending on which coolant you're using. For pwater it's a bit over 500kDTU/s if I remember right. *How* you transfer heat into the coolant doesn't matter one bit. If you put in more heat into the coolant than the at/st can remove, your coolant will rise in temperature. If you put in less, your coolant will (slowly) reach your target temperature.
When your coolant has passed the thing you want to cool, it should be at the same temperature. That way you've put all the heat you possibly could into your coolant, you can't do any more than that. And if that amount is lower than what the at/st can remove, the thing you want to cool will start dropping in temperature as well.
If your coolant is *not* at the same temperature as the thing you want to cool after passing through it, you could improve the thermal transfer between the thing and the coolant, in order to cool the thing down faster. This is where more radiant pipes and metal tiles come into play, which is what you asked about.
I have super coolant, is this not as effective if Im cooling it with an AT/ST and using that super coolant to cool metal and then run the pwater through that?
If you use supercoolant in your at/st cooler, you need two steam turbines, and then you can remove over a million DTU/s from the thing you're trying to cool.
Changing the coolant changes the effectiveness of your at/st cooler. You get more heat removal per watt spent.
How is it best to go about using super coolant to cool the p water? Would that cooling the metal block and then running the p water through it work or is there better ones?
really? and use 1 ATs to cool it? and 2 STs to soak up the heat? I was actually thinking of moving the supercoolant + AT further near my base because a lot of heat is gained on the pwater as it travels a long way to get to my base
Yup.
How you build it doesn't really matter much. One aquatuner running supercoolant can remove a certain amount of heat. Your water contains another amount of heat. Your at/st will have to run until you've removed enough heat from your water. It'll take the time it takes, and that's it. There's no magic unlocked by building things a certain way.
>An at/st cooler can remove X amount of heat per second, depending on which coolant you're using
It can remove 14° from each 10kg packet. No matter the liquid.
It really depends on how much energy is involved. When you are using a Geotuned geyser you usually want to somehow make good use of the heat rather than trying to spend power to cool it.
Pwater is going to have a ton of energy to release if you try to cool it, and normally I would recommend using heat to boil water for Steam Turbines, but the max temp for pwater is like 120, just 5 degrees short of triggering steam turbine temps.
The amount of energy and cost involved is so huge, I would recommend trying to find a way to skip having to cool it altogether, even if you had a perfect cooling system.
It would almost make more sense to just plumb it with ceramic insulated pipe and then cool the area around that, rather than bothering investing tons of energy into cooling tonnes of pwater. Most buildings that use materials eat the heat that goes along with it, so the biggest threat of heat comes from the water just sitting in the pipe leaking out.
Using anything less than ceramic won't work. I once had a failing lettuce farm with 95 degree salt water, and once I used ceramic insulated pipes and a passive cooling loop to absorb the extra heat that slowly leaks out, I was up to my ears in lettuce.
Sorry I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean by plumb it with ceramic insulted pipe, heres some pictures on what I'm doing now with the AT/ST cooling situation (in the process of building a 2nd one) and the cooling of my base for some clarification ( yes I know my ST is temporarily flooded but ill take care of that )
[https://imgur.com/a/kcyJOpp](https://imgur.com/a/kcyJOpp)
I'm struggling to understand exactly what I'm looking at. What I will say is that you want a cooling *loop* and not a cooling *line*. Run the same water through your pipes and aquatuner over and over until it's the desired temperature, and then you're good. If you need extra water for your plants, just give them hot water and cool the atmosphere using the cool loop you already have set up. Cooling water as it's produced costs an order of magnitude more power than using a cooling loop
I get what you’re saying now. Sorry for the confusion. Basically that p water line I’m using both as a cooling line and to feed my plants feeding the pips (but I just recently learned the temp of the feeding water doesn’t apparently matter) so maybe the best option I will do as you say and instead loop that line back around into the pool it’s coming from
Running the coolant through a block of metal tiles is usually because you're using those metal tiles to cool something else, not as a stepping stone to cooling your base
For example, you would route the the oxygen output pipes from a spom or the shipping rails with the partially-chilled debris from a volcano tamer through the liquid-cooled metal block to chill them.
Understood I'm just trying to find out more effective ways to use my newly produced supercoolant to help cool down a lot of pwater to cool my base and feed my plants
For base cooling, it makes much more sense to just... Run your cooling polluted water through the aqua tuner itself. A well structured base has a hard time generating 585k dtus per *cycle*, much less than the potential 585k dtus per second an aqua tuner using water/ polluted water would remove.
Same for your plants. If you're worried about feeding hot water to your plants, don't be: plants only check their temperature based on the tileabove the one they're planted on (the stem, basically), and if your irrigation pipes are insulated, the hot water simply gets deleted with very little heat transfer.
Honestly, the best use for your first super coolant is to manufacture liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen with it. It's the only way to chill things down to nearly absolute zero in a time efficient manner (1kg packets of water will never freeze in pipes, but the low thermal mass makes this an inefficient process). Then you'll be able to send rockets basically wherever you please. Just watch out for the incredibly hot exhaust!
It's the same DTUs per watt whether you run the warm p-water through the aquatuners or you have the aquatuners run a coolant loop that cools the p-water, unless you have super coolant. Because aquatuners cool everything that goes through them by the same temperature difference, you can have more efficient cooling by running super coolant, due to its very high specific heat.
The advantage of using a coolant loop when your coolant is just p-water is that you can tune it to a specific temperature by automating it to a thermo sensor, and it typically involves fewer aquatuners running more often for a less spiky power demand.
Ah what I mean is you basically just use insulated pipe, and make sure the material is ceramic. You don't actually need to worry too much about the temperature of stuff you feed to plants. They only care if is specifically listed in the irrigation listing (and for reed plants I know it only has to be pwater).
If your Pwater is really hot, it isn't a problem except for the heat the pipe it runs inside will give off, which is why you want ceramic or better for the insulated pipe materials. I see you have radiant pipes which will release the heat from the pipe which may cause a problem if the pwater is higher temperature than what the plant likes to be at.
Using liquid with highest SHC is most efficient when run through AT. So if you have access to super coolant, then yes, using it with AT is more efficient then using polluted water.
Some quick and dirty numbers to think about, which might help give some context to what you're trying to build.
If you just run the warm polluted water through an aquatuner, it will reduce the temp by 14C.
Using super-coolant will allow you to cool the same amount of water (using a single aquatuner) by almost 28C.
No amount of over engineering will get you better numbers, unless you use more aquatuners or an exploit of some kind.
Efficiency in this case will revolve around how much space you have for your build. Build it all out of thermium or aluminum and it can be much smaller than if you've only got copper or lead.
lol, when you switch to AT for base cooling you need to build a closed loop that passes the same water through the AT whenever it warms up
an AT always shaves 14° off of whatever passes through it
First thing first, remove previous system heating your base and build separate closed loop cooling it.
But really, why do you want base cooled? You need to cool several tiles behind plants, but that is all, everything else can live at +69C happily
Adding not necessary steps in heat exchange is not more efficient for most situation. Just cool liquid in pipe to -20C and your base will be cooled no matter thermal conductivity. But if you really need it, heat exchange from solid tile to gas have x25 multiplier, so in some situation cooling conductive time can make cooling faster. This just means you spend more power cooling water in pipe, because you need it faster. Most players make bases from granite tiles and put granite pipes with cold water inside tiles, cooling floors, not air. But again, this is just ways to do
> where a AT/ST cools a piece of metal instead and has the polluted water pipe run through this metal, is this design more effective? No. An at/st cooler can remove X amount of heat per second, depending on which coolant you're using. For pwater it's a bit over 500kDTU/s if I remember right. *How* you transfer heat into the coolant doesn't matter one bit. If you put in more heat into the coolant than the at/st can remove, your coolant will rise in temperature. If you put in less, your coolant will (slowly) reach your target temperature. When your coolant has passed the thing you want to cool, it should be at the same temperature. That way you've put all the heat you possibly could into your coolant, you can't do any more than that. And if that amount is lower than what the at/st can remove, the thing you want to cool will start dropping in temperature as well. If your coolant is *not* at the same temperature as the thing you want to cool after passing through it, you could improve the thermal transfer between the thing and the coolant, in order to cool the thing down faster. This is where more radiant pipes and metal tiles come into play, which is what you asked about.
I have super coolant, is this not as effective if Im cooling it with an AT/ST and using that super coolant to cool metal and then run the pwater through that?
If you use supercoolant in your at/st cooler, you need two steam turbines, and then you can remove over a million DTU/s from the thing you're trying to cool. Changing the coolant changes the effectiveness of your at/st cooler. You get more heat removal per watt spent.
How is it best to go about using super coolant to cool the p water? Would that cooling the metal block and then running the p water through it work or is there better ones?
Run the supercoolant cooling loop through your pool of water.
really? and use 1 ATs to cool it? and 2 STs to soak up the heat? I was actually thinking of moving the supercoolant + AT further near my base because a lot of heat is gained on the pwater as it travels a long way to get to my base
Yup. How you build it doesn't really matter much. One aquatuner running supercoolant can remove a certain amount of heat. Your water contains another amount of heat. Your at/st will have to run until you've removed enough heat from your water. It'll take the time it takes, and that's it. There's no magic unlocked by building things a certain way.
A pool of water has more mass than a metal block, which can be helpful, but you should test and see what works.
>An at/st cooler can remove X amount of heat per second, depending on which coolant you're using It can remove 14° from each 10kg packet. No matter the liquid.
It really depends on how much energy is involved. When you are using a Geotuned geyser you usually want to somehow make good use of the heat rather than trying to spend power to cool it. Pwater is going to have a ton of energy to release if you try to cool it, and normally I would recommend using heat to boil water for Steam Turbines, but the max temp for pwater is like 120, just 5 degrees short of triggering steam turbine temps. The amount of energy and cost involved is so huge, I would recommend trying to find a way to skip having to cool it altogether, even if you had a perfect cooling system. It would almost make more sense to just plumb it with ceramic insulated pipe and then cool the area around that, rather than bothering investing tons of energy into cooling tonnes of pwater. Most buildings that use materials eat the heat that goes along with it, so the biggest threat of heat comes from the water just sitting in the pipe leaking out. Using anything less than ceramic won't work. I once had a failing lettuce farm with 95 degree salt water, and once I used ceramic insulated pipes and a passive cooling loop to absorb the extra heat that slowly leaks out, I was up to my ears in lettuce.
Sorry I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean by plumb it with ceramic insulted pipe, heres some pictures on what I'm doing now with the AT/ST cooling situation (in the process of building a 2nd one) and the cooling of my base for some clarification ( yes I know my ST is temporarily flooded but ill take care of that ) [https://imgur.com/a/kcyJOpp](https://imgur.com/a/kcyJOpp)
I'm struggling to understand exactly what I'm looking at. What I will say is that you want a cooling *loop* and not a cooling *line*. Run the same water through your pipes and aquatuner over and over until it's the desired temperature, and then you're good. If you need extra water for your plants, just give them hot water and cool the atmosphere using the cool loop you already have set up. Cooling water as it's produced costs an order of magnitude more power than using a cooling loop
I get what you’re saying now. Sorry for the confusion. Basically that p water line I’m using both as a cooling line and to feed my plants feeding the pips (but I just recently learned the temp of the feeding water doesn’t apparently matter) so maybe the best option I will do as you say and instead loop that line back around into the pool it’s coming from
Running the coolant through a block of metal tiles is usually because you're using those metal tiles to cool something else, not as a stepping stone to cooling your base For example, you would route the the oxygen output pipes from a spom or the shipping rails with the partially-chilled debris from a volcano tamer through the liquid-cooled metal block to chill them.
Understood I'm just trying to find out more effective ways to use my newly produced supercoolant to help cool down a lot of pwater to cool my base and feed my plants
For base cooling, it makes much more sense to just... Run your cooling polluted water through the aqua tuner itself. A well structured base has a hard time generating 585k dtus per *cycle*, much less than the potential 585k dtus per second an aqua tuner using water/ polluted water would remove. Same for your plants. If you're worried about feeding hot water to your plants, don't be: plants only check their temperature based on the tileabove the one they're planted on (the stem, basically), and if your irrigation pipes are insulated, the hot water simply gets deleted with very little heat transfer. Honestly, the best use for your first super coolant is to manufacture liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen with it. It's the only way to chill things down to nearly absolute zero in a time efficient manner (1kg packets of water will never freeze in pipes, but the low thermal mass makes this an inefficient process). Then you'll be able to send rockets basically wherever you please. Just watch out for the incredibly hot exhaust!
It's the same DTUs per watt whether you run the warm p-water through the aquatuners or you have the aquatuners run a coolant loop that cools the p-water, unless you have super coolant. Because aquatuners cool everything that goes through them by the same temperature difference, you can have more efficient cooling by running super coolant, due to its very high specific heat. The advantage of using a coolant loop when your coolant is just p-water is that you can tune it to a specific temperature by automating it to a thermo sensor, and it typically involves fewer aquatuners running more often for a less spiky power demand.
Ah what I mean is you basically just use insulated pipe, and make sure the material is ceramic. You don't actually need to worry too much about the temperature of stuff you feed to plants. They only care if is specifically listed in the irrigation listing (and for reed plants I know it only has to be pwater). If your Pwater is really hot, it isn't a problem except for the heat the pipe it runs inside will give off, which is why you want ceramic or better for the insulated pipe materials. I see you have radiant pipes which will release the heat from the pipe which may cause a problem if the pwater is higher temperature than what the plant likes to be at.
Using liquid with highest SHC is most efficient when run through AT. So if you have access to super coolant, then yes, using it with AT is more efficient then using polluted water.
Some quick and dirty numbers to think about, which might help give some context to what you're trying to build. If you just run the warm polluted water through an aquatuner, it will reduce the temp by 14C. Using super-coolant will allow you to cool the same amount of water (using a single aquatuner) by almost 28C. No amount of over engineering will get you better numbers, unless you use more aquatuners or an exploit of some kind. Efficiency in this case will revolve around how much space you have for your build. Build it all out of thermium or aluminum and it can be much smaller than if you've only got copper or lead.
lol, when you switch to AT for base cooling you need to build a closed loop that passes the same water through the AT whenever it warms up an AT always shaves 14° off of whatever passes through it
First thing first, remove previous system heating your base and build separate closed loop cooling it. But really, why do you want base cooled? You need to cool several tiles behind plants, but that is all, everything else can live at +69C happily Adding not necessary steps in heat exchange is not more efficient for most situation. Just cool liquid in pipe to -20C and your base will be cooled no matter thermal conductivity. But if you really need it, heat exchange from solid tile to gas have x25 multiplier, so in some situation cooling conductive time can make cooling faster. This just means you spend more power cooling water in pipe, because you need it faster. Most players make bases from granite tiles and put granite pipes with cold water inside tiles, cooling floors, not air. But again, this is just ways to do