Thermo Regulators Useless?

[MadCre8tor]

They seem pretty useless.

I was thinking about cooling down fresh oxygen after it is created using electrolyzers.

My argument for using the thermo regulators is that the oxygen has bad thermal conductivity.
Soo pumping the oxygen through a cold environment (20°C) is likely not going to cool it down enough.

Thermo regulators enforce an instantanious temperature decrease/ exchange, but it seems like a huge waste of energy if I can just cool a large body of liquid for the same energy using an aquatuner?

Is there ANY use for Thermo regulators in the mid to late game?

[MadCre8tor]

I pump my 95°C water coming from steam turbines through igneous rock isolated pipes. I'd like to use ceramic but I don't have the materials for that yet. So by the time it reaches the electrolyzers it loses some heat.

The electrolyzers will actually delete a lot of the heat, so pumping hot water into them is very good. That's because the gases will be around the same temperature of the water, but obviously have much lower heat capacity.

From the Wikipage.
*"Consider cooling water as little as possible or even dump some heat into it before delivering into Electrolyzer. The input kilogram of water is more heat-dense than output kilogram of gasses, which is convenient, as it makes gasses easier to cool down afterwards.

But it gets better – 1 kg mix of oxygen and hydrogen at 70 °C carries as much heat as 1 kg of water at 19.45 °C, which means that with 19.75 °C input the electrolyzer starts destroying heat and becomes net heat negative. It will destroy 4.179 kDTU (1kg * the specific heat of water) per every degree above that, until reaching 70 °C where the outputs also begin to rise in temperature and the efficiency drops to around 3kDTUs/degree. With near-boiling 96 °C water it will stack up to 288 kDTU/s in absolute numbers, which is comparable to 3.6 AETNs.

Note, that Electrolyzer will not process water and release steam into the environment if the intake is too hot.

As a corollary, feeding water colder than 19.8 °C will create heat."*


I remember playing the game a year ago when they hadn't even released the critter update and I felt super robbed cuz the electrolyzers created so much heat.
It's a bit stupid there are some of those 'artifical' threshholds, like the outputs always being at least 70°C hot. Really, ONI is one of those games where I feel using the wiki is very much recommended just to supply yourself with information.

The machinery setup and overall system is something I enjoy building myself then.

[Frai]

I see. so it's video game science

[Strygald]

Obviously the aquatuner is far superior, but if you are playing on a hot world early to mid-game they have some use, if you need to cool down your farm room(s) with minimal effort then a thermo regulator with radiant pipes just through the farm does an effective job at keeping crops cool while needing only relatively low power.

Later on, before you get supercoolant you can use thermo regulators with hydrogen to make LOX.

[Frai]

Originally posted by Strygald:

if you need to cool down your farm room(s) with minimal effort then a thermo regulator with radiant pipes just through the farm does an effective job at keeping crops cool while needing only relatively low power.

if you want to get a quick boost of cooling around your farms i suggest insulating it with igneous/mafic rock first, then make tempshift plates out of ice with the ice you get from an ice maker, that way you can delete(a minimum amount of) heat while transfering the rest of the heat to where the ice maker is, since tempshift plates have a 800kg mass it's very effective at cooling down the (at most 4000g, since you don't want popped eardrums) gas atmosphere down even if gas has a way lower thermal conductivity. after you cooled it down you can mop up the water from melted ice so it's recycled.
more effective way of doing it and less than 20% the power consumed(with thermo regulators you also need a gas pump, be it mini version or not)
if you can't be bothered by the slow process of ice maker making ice for tempshift plates you can also build park signs out of ice although it's less effective as it has 16% the mass tempshift plates have

[Angpaur]

Making any building out of ice and melting it means losing 4/5 of cooling power in that ice. In heat transfers only 1/5 of building's mass is considered. If someone wants to get water fast it is good to melt tempshift plates. But if you want to get cooling from that ice then you need to melt ice chunks either on rails or put it to container with limited storage capacity to speed up melting.

[Frai]

In room temperature 0.8t of ice can melt almost instantly, before the duplicants even finish building the tempshift plate. when i said building a tempshift plate out of ice it means I generate an errand of delivering 0.8ts of ice to a specific area, it will actually melt before being built(that was on my part) so it's just delivering cooling to an area. plus ice coming out of ice maker is always -20C so you can always get cooling. if you put it into a compactor you're forced to get rid of plants which you may or may not want to, but with tempshfit plate it's a background building so you don't need to get rid of anything. conveyor rails are a bit too endgame for when you need quick farm cooling. (well tbh i personally just eat hatches so i'm not that experienced with farm air conditioning)

[Angpaur]

It is not possible to melt ice in unfinished building. So you need to cancel the build order so ice is dropped and then it will melt. But you said "make tempshift plates out of ice", so how could anyone forsee that you ment it to melt before it is unfinished? Even of that was possible you would lose that 4/5 cooling from ice as it will still count as a building.

[Frai]

I know. it was bad on my part.

[Angpaur]

There is something bad on my side too ;-) It is possible to melt ice in unfinished building, but if in gas it will take lot of time. But if such building is placed in hot water it will take shorter time, but won't be instant like melting finished tempshif plate for example. If that happens you end up with inifinitely unfinished building so you can only cancel the build, but you wont get back the ice as it is already melted. And looks like it is treated as debris not building so you don't lose any cooling power. So best solution is to start building something out of ice, let dupes deliver it to build site and then cancel the build so ice is dropped. Then you just wait for it to melt.

[Strygald]

Originally posted by Nuke Fishron:

Originally posted by Strygald:

if you need to cool down your farm room(s) with minimal effort then a thermo regulator with radiant pipes just through the farm does an effective job at keeping crops cool while needing only relatively low power.

if you want to get a quick boost of cooling around your farms i suggest insulating it with igneous/mafic rock first, then make tempshift plates out of ice with the ice you get from an ice maker, that way you can delete(a minimum amount of) heat while transfering the rest of the heat to where the ice maker is, since tempshift plates have a 800kg mass it's very effective at cooling down the (at most 4000g, since you don't want popped eardrums) gas atmosphere down even if gas has a way lower thermal conductivity. after you cooled it down you can mop up the water from melted ice so it's recycled.
more effective way of doing it and less than 20% the power consumed(with thermo regulators you also need a gas pump, be it mini version or not)
if you can't be bothered by the slow process of ice maker making ice for tempshift plates you can also build park signs out of ice although it's less effective as it has 16% the mass tempshift plates have

on hot worlds your dupes will probably be dead of starvation by the time you produced enough ice to make ice tempshift plates and where is all the heat from the icemakers going? also, insulating your rooms on a hot world is a given, so no need to mention it.