How do i cool down water?

[Dakota]

Currently trying to find a way to cool water from steam geysers, i noticed the temp of the water is BOILING. How do i make this cool enough to use commercially? Could i pump cold water into it or would the steam just make it hot?

[Angpaur]

Temperatures will even. If you have a vent outputing 5kg/s of steam and you pump there 5kg/s of water at 30C then steam will condensate and it temperature will drop to ~70C, while incoming water will also rise to 70C.

To cool down water you can use aquatuners. This devide decrease incoming liquid temperature by 14C and equivalent of that heat removed is spread around the aquatuner. So it doesn't remove heat, it just moves it from liquid to enviroment surrounding. You need to figure out a way to keep aquatuner from overheating. Tip: aqatuners can stand temperature 125C+ so look for other device, that can work with such temperature and provide cooling effect.

[Captiva]

I am no expert, and there are expert ways to do it, but...

Basically that is the game... trying to figure out how to do things that seem nearly impossible at times.

I know that is not the answer you wanted, but what I am trying to get at is there is no "easy" answer to just cooling water. The fun I have is trying to figure it out.

One key things is that energy cannot be destroyed, and heat is energy, so you will have to put that heat somewhere once you take it out of the water.

I have built massive "drop" zones where I start the water at the top and drop it down a series of falls to try and cool it as it goes...

I am currently planning on a storage tank near the surface where it is super cold and then moving it to use it once it cools enough.

Cold biomes in the game can help too, i have built storage tanks in there before. There are also Wheezeworts, but honeslty have never messed with them myself.

There is also the aqua tuner as well, but it will generate heat because as mentioned, heat cannot be destroyed.

I have never bothered to look up the expert ways to do it, and they might be best for you.
I have fun messing with it, so that is why I am just giving you a few ideas to think about. There are probably guides on steam or youtube videos that can help too.

[chaney]

Originally posted by Captiva:

One key things is that energy cannot be destroyed, and heat is energy, so you will have to put that heat somewhere once you take it out of the water.

I like your approach in general.
Another key thing is to not assume too much ;)

Sometimes you can figure out how to do things that merely seem impossible.
Play, test, read, watch ... pick your favorite!

[New Fish]

I recently came up with this idea for cooling down cool steam geysers in early phases of a new game on DLC play thru.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1807607607602078141/E1F067B03DF7E1974C8F30F806A783075705CD77/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1807607607602077822/EC41414D51745148149F9614CC9BA5F8E1197DFA/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1807607607602077428/D701DE26802D929B6DABDE0E3BCA162D209CEB99/

It works fairly well the water loops thru the upper cold biome until it hits 20c then gets pulled out the way the pipes are laid out the networks get topped off as the water comes out. After initial setup/break in I never broke a single pipe.

Much easier then trying to cool down 100 tons of hot water, and is power free minus the shut off switches and the initial pump.

[glass zebra]

Mix it with cold stuff, move the heat to somewhere where you can handle it (e.g. auqatuner), or use algae terraria (probably a bug though).

[Angelo Dante]

Pump it to a tank near an AETN in the cold biome and let it chill it down. Not as effective as aquatuner, but doable without plastic and/or oil.

[AlexMBrennan]

One key things is that energy cannot be destroyed, and heat is energy, so you will have to put that heat somewhere once you take it out of the water

That is the correct answer in a physics exam but ONI is fictional science and includes many ways to destroy energy. Specifically, the main function of the steam engine is to destroy heat.

If you want to ignore these mechanics then the only "legitimate" way to manage heat is to use aquatuners to heat some waste gas as much as possible (300C with steel, 1000C with thermium) and then vent it into space.

There is also the aqua tuner as well, but it will generate heat because as mentioned, heat cannot be destroyed.

This is also wrong. The aquatuner transfers heat from the liquid to itself but it does not by itself generate any additional heat.

[Captiva]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

One key things is that energy cannot be destroyed, and heat is energy, so you will have to put that heat somewhere once you take it out of the water

That is the correct answer in a physics exam but ONI is fictional science and includes many ways to destroy energy. Specifically, the main function of the steam engine is to destroy heat.

If you want to ignore these mechanics then the only "legitimate" way to manage heat is to use aquatuners to heat some waste gas as much as possible (300C with steel, 1000C with thermium) and then vent it into space.

There is also the aqua tuner as well, but it will generate heat because as mentioned, heat cannot be destroyed.

This is also wrong. The aquatuner transfers heat from the liquid to itself but it does not by itself generate any additional heat.

It is the correct answer still for the most part, I was not counting cheating. I personally consider wheezeworts to be cheaty too, but to each their own. I think there are legit ways to handle heat that are funner to figure out.

I was not wrong about the aquatuner either. I never said it generated additional heat, I was pointing out it does not magically destroy the heat and takes it from the water, which is why i mentioned heat not being destroyed specifically there, maybe generate was not the best word, but I did not think that the word police was going to come after me either.

Lastly, your way of "managing" heat is certainly not the only way and also not an accessible way of doing it early on when you need to.

[De Espirit]

Both steam and water have a high heat capacity, and would take a LOT more of it to cool the geyser water down. You'd only end up wasting more of your good temperate water.

Assuming this is early game and your options are limited, your best bet is to pump the hot water through an ice biome, that way you cool down the steam water and get more water from the melted ice. By the time the ice is depleted, you should have enough research to have advanced ways of dealing with the heat (i.e. steam turbines or pre-heating combustible fuel).

If there's no ice biome, you can make a hot box specifically for containing hot water and steam until you can deal with it later. Also good for keeping around batteries and power generators, even boiling water and low-temp steam can absorb a lot of heat and keep the machines from overheating themselves. Just remember to make your buildings out of gold amalgam or better.

Alternatively, you can just not bother with cooling it at all and use the water to raise tropical pacus. Easy food for minimal effort.

[cswiger]

The AETN and wheezeworts are other examples where conservation of energy simply does not apply. They provide cooling directly without moving heat elsewhere, which of course is not possible in the real world.

As for the OP and steam vents, there are two types: the (hot) Steam Vent, which outputs 500 C steam, and the Cool Steam Vent, which outputs 110 C steam.

There's a big difference between them.

The first type requires more advanced materials due to the high temperatures, but by the same token, the steam is already hot enough to be consumed by Steam Turbines directly. The major design concern with taming these is providing cooling for the turbines so they don't overheat and stop running. Even so, you can still get over 1KW of surplus power from the turbines during the eruption phases. It is not practical to condense all of the steam from a hot Steam Vent to water directly via cooling, without spending excessive power.

The Cool Steam Vent is at a much lower temperature, which makes the materials needed to build a tamer easier-- you can mostly get away with using Gold Amalgam instead of Steel or Thermium. Condensing the steam to water via cooling is practical for a CSV, although it still requires a decent amount of power.

However, I prefer a CSV tamer design which heats up the steam to just over 125C so that it can be consumed by turbines directly, because such a design can run roughly power neutral whereas condenser designs will always need ~200 W-- best case, if the player has SuperCoolant available-- to more like 700 W of input power.

[LazOfSteel]

I find the closer I get to space the colder the area gets sometimes enough that it breaks pipes even insulated pipes. so find a cool spot run the pipes back and forth . liquid will cool down and cool down everywhere you run the pipes in your base. tooo much so if you're not careful. it does take time depending on how much you pipe the area.

it's basically the same idea as a radiator in an engine.

there are devices that will cool and but they are power hungry and they transfer heat. ie. will pipe cools they spit out heat where they're at.

[Shame]

Water is usually something you use to dump heat into yourself as it has high specific heat capacity until you run out of ice that you dump in the water to add more chill.

For a long-term sustainable solution, you can use the following guide method. Except instead of cooling your base, you use the cooling loop to cool the steam into cool water. It will take time for it to cool down at first, but over time it should catch up. Basically it involves a building that deleted heat (the Steam Turbine) there aren't really many other reliable methods that don't use some exploit or quirky mechanic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v3ipOwj4Fw

[ForwarD]

By the way many water consumers in your colony will work perfectly on hot 95C water too. Oxygen generation, research on supercomputer, oil wells, and many others. Latrines can work on closed cycle water, only droppping excess somewhere.
And if you want cold water for farms, that's inefficient. Because ranching provides higher quality food with zero resource upkeep.
So while there were advices how to do that in this thread, maybe it's more wise to not do it at all in early game.

[cswiger]

A steam vent tamer is a good way of getting hot water indefinitely. Quite useful for most things, although perhaps not quite as nice as a Cool Slush Geyser.

FWIW, I consider the upkeep of ranching to be the dupes' time spent, and the resources like dirt/sand/rock/etc usually needed to feed hatches and most other critters which aren't Shove Voles. Worth doing, sure.

[ForwarD]

Originally posted by cswiger:

A steam vent tamer is a good way of getting hot water indefinitely. Quite useful for most things, although perhaps not quite as nice as a Cool Slush Geyser.

FWIW, I consider the upkeep of ranching to be the dupes' time spent, and the resources like dirt/sand/rock/etc usually needed to feed hatches and most other critters which aren't Shove Voles. Worth doing, sure.

Shove Voles are big win, because you can spam 1000 eggs via breeder and these hatched eggs will require zero dupes attention, so you just get tons of free meat from conveyor.
If there are no Voles (like in DLC) - Normal Dreckos on Balm Lilly are quite nice resource-free food too. With dupes work required tho, but farms require that too, so whatever.