Insulation useless?

[Courteous]

I'm trying to set up liquid oxygen/hydrogen piping to fuel rocket 30-40 tiles away. Insulated pipes made of igneous rock seem to work well enough with oxygen, the temperature gain at the end of pipe is only about 5-6 degrees. Haven't tried them with hydrogen yet, I think I may need better insulated pipes. Tried to use regular liquid pipes made of "insulation" material, but they work much worse! Making insulated pipes out of insulation doesn't make much sense, it requires many tons of insulation and will take tens of rocket launches to bring enough isoresin from space.

So, what's the purpose of this "insulation", how do you use it? It seems too expensive to build insulated pipes out of it and regular pipes are cheaper but bad at insulating. Building tiles out of it also doesn't make sense, using vacuum is cheaper and better.

And do you have any tips on how to pump liquid hydrogen without letting its temperature raise?

[L37]

"Insulation" is only useful if you build insulated pipes out of it. Otherwise its pointless because of how heat transfer works in game. You basically use it to build few pipe segments, like those directly in rocket path.
Other than that you have 2 options - use radiant pipes out of material with minimal SHC in vacuum, this will provide perfect insulation once pipes reach desired temperature. Or use ceramic (may use igneous too, but it is significantly worse) insulated pipes and loop them back into storage tank for re-cooling. If you leave hydrogen/oxygen sitting in anything other than insulated "insulation" pipe or cold enough pipe in vacuum it will break.

[Prometheus]

The issue most people have with setting up liquid oxygen/hydrogen is that their pipes need to cool and they heat your material until they reach that point. Just bully through it and eventually they will cool to temp and you'll be fine.

Also yes, Insulation is massively overexpensive to manufacture. This has been commented on a lot in the past. Ceramic is good enough of an insulator for the overwhelming majority of your situations that need better than igneous.

[D#]

As promethian said for insulation use igneous for early mid game and ceramic for late game until you can make true insulation (if you even need it)

[Hedning]

I have my liquid fuel and oxidizer production in space. There the vacuum of space insulates the pipes automatically. I like regular obsidian pipes since they have low heat capacity. I let a bit of super coolant run through all the pipes once before I pump the h2 or o2 through. This cools the pipes down and since it's in space it will stay down. For the final part I have a storage tank that excess fuel is returned to so that there is no fuel right next to the rocket when it lands and returns.

For insulation I don't use it much. Pipes is among the most useful uses for it though since tiles you can just double up and get as good as perfect insulation, or use vacuum seals. The only exception is for things like the steam turbine. Those tiles may be changed to insulation.

[L37]

Originally posted by Hedning:

...
For insulation I don't use it much. Pipes is among the most useful uses for it though since tiles you can just double up and get as good as perfect insulation, or use vacuum seals. The only exception is for things like the steam turbine. Those tiles may be changed to insulation.

Technically any aquatuner loop can benefit from few segmets of insulated insulation pipes in places where coolant pipes have to go through hot steam. Even with ceramics leaks in this pipes are still significant (which is even more noticable in case of gas/thermo regulators), and can sometimes cause issues with pipes breaking if the loop is not doing much cooling (aquatuner sits idle for significant time) and coolant boiling temperature is below steam temperature.

[Angpaur]

Insulation conductivity is not total zero. Normal pipe uses average conductivity of the pipe's material and pipe's contents material conductivity.

So normal pipe made out of Insulation can have quite high heat transfers if contents conductivity is high.

[Hedning]

Originally posted by L37:

can sometimes cause issues with pipes breaking if the loop is not doing much cooling (aquatuner sits idle for significant time) and coolant boiling temperature is below steam temperature.

I don't know exactly what the minimum temperature difference required for heat transfer is, but I have never had a pwater coolant turn to steam in ceramic pipes. I'm about 50% sure it's impossible even if you wait for 100 cycles. Also in the space age all of my aquatuners use super coolant.

Where I use insulated pipes first is in my sour gas boiler. I like to do boil the oil with an aquatuner instead of using free power from a volcano in some random location, and that's a case where the temperature difference is large.

[L37]

Originally posted by Hedning:

I don't know exactly what the minimum temperature difference required for heat transfer is, but I have never had a pwater coolant turn to steam in ceramic pipes. I'm about 50% sure it's impossible even if you wait for 100 cycles. Also in the space age all of my aquatuners use super coolant.

Where I use insulated pipes first is in my sour gas boiler. I like to do boil the oil with an aquatuner instead of using free power from a volcano in some random location, and that's a case where the temperature difference is large.

I've seen small dirt pieces under pipes in a loop with 3 aquatuners where 3-rd one almost never works, so that must be a result of p-water boiling. Did not see it happening though.
But even if it does not boil it still leaks some heat, resulting in some efficiency loss. Not huge, but why not remove it when possible?
Also yes, oil boiler is good place to use i too. I prefer to build whole thing in vacuum to avoid needing too much (still non-ideal) ceramics, but for coolant pipes inside sour gas insulation is very good (but still not critical, similarly to steam/water loops).

[Courteous]

Thanks all for suggestions. I'll try to use pre-cooled obsidian pipes in vacuumed-out corridor.

[Hedning]

Originally posted by L37:

I've seen small dirt pieces under pipes in a loop with 3 aquatuners where 3-rd one almost never works, so that must be a result of p-water boiling.

Yes, if you have more than one so that the steam is kept above 125° it's definitely possible. I never have that though. The first time I use more than 1 aquatuner in the same place is when I do liquid fuel, and then I already have super coolant.

If you have 3 different ones do you have it because you need 3 different temperatures? If not you can put them in series and avoid the risk your describe.

[L37]

Originally posted by Hedning:

Yes, if you have more than one so that the steam is kept above 125° it's definitely possible. I never have that though. The first time I use more than 1 aquatuner in the same place is when I do liquid fuel, and then I already have super coolant.

If you have 3 different ones do you have it because you need 3 different temperatures? If not you can put them in series and avoid the risk your describe.

They are in series, i just made separate bypass/sensor for each one to avoid huge power and temperature variations, so that second (third) one will only turn on if output temperature is high enough. As everything it has its "+" and "-"...
Not that it bothered me that much, the place was designed to be accessible by dupes from the start so they just go in and fix the pipe once in some very large time. And few insulated insulation pipes fixed that issue now.
Switching that loop to supercoolant is something that i might do at some point, but i do not even want to know how much coolant it contains, probably something like ~20T. Not looking forward to producing that much supercoolant just to save some power.

[Prometheus]

Originally posted by L37:

Originally posted by Hedning:

Yes, if you have more than one so that the steam is kept above 125° it's definitely possible. I never have that though. The first time I use more than 1 aquatuner in the same place is when I do liquid fuel, and then I already have super coolant.

If you have 3 different ones do you have it because you need 3 different temperatures? If not you can put them in series and avoid the risk your describe.

They are in series, i just made separate bypass/sensor for each one to avoid huge power and temperature variations, so that second (third) one will only turn on if output temperature is high enough. As everything it has its "+" and "-"...
Not that it bothered me that much, the place was designed to be accessible by dupes from the start so they just go in and fix the pipe once in some very large time. And few insulated insulation pipes fixed that issue now.
Switching that loop to supercoolant is something that i might do at some point, but i do not even want to know how much coolant it contains, probably something like ~20T. Not looking forward to producing that much supercoolant just to save some power.

The thing about super coolant is that its SHC is so high that it makes aquatuners power positive in a turbine instead of a power loss. So its absolutely worth replacing what you are using in your coolant loops with it.

[Hedning]

That's just another reason to not use bypasses, but use short loops which heat exchanges with the bigger loop. For me it's easy and quick to upgrade to supercoolant in all my aquatuners because I never use bypasses.

[L37]

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. It's a matter of choice in specific situation which one to use.
Also i tend to leave a lot of early-mid game contraptions built out of "primitive" materials as is apart from small and easy changes like those pipes, because power is nearly unlimited late game anyway, saving something like ~500-1000w might be fun if efficiency is the main goal, but is totally unimportant otherwise.

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by Promethian:

The thing about super coolant is that its SHC is so high that it makes aquatuners power positive in a turbine instead of a power loss. So its absolutely worth replacing what you are using in your coolant loops with it.

This is not true.
You can get very close(99% efficiency) but it won't be power positive. So you can't create infinite energy because it will be game balance issue.