Thermo aquatuner cooling loop stopping..

[maestro]

I copied this setup from YT. The cooling pipe goes as long as the aquatuner is going but stops when the tuner stops and a piece of insulated granite pipe is now taking damage. (The tutorial told me to use this kind of pipe here.)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2899762273

Is the cooling loop supposed to stop like that? It also DOES keep going when the Aquatuner is off but only sometimes. I have no idea what's deciding whether it keeps going or stops...

Lastly, where does the water output on the steam turbine go? In all the tutorials, this was never explained.

[cswiger]

No, cooling loops should always keep moving. You want a double-bridge by the aquatuner for complete reliability, but you might be able to fix your setup if you remove the bridge on the left which was used to fill the loop.

Water from the turbine needs to be dumped back into the steam chamber. The bridge on the upper right side is backwards. Reverse it and connect the output of the turbine to the bridge.

The right material to use for the insulated pipes is ceramic, or igneous rock in a pinch.

[gimmethegepgun]

It might be overfull. For all outputs, if the pipe segment it's trying to output into is full, then it can't output. If they're all trying to output into a full pipe, and the only way for it to not be full is for it to get taken up by an input whose output is blocked, then it won't be able to move. Empty a pipe segment, either by using a dupe with Plumbing or by deconstructing one.

Originally posted by cswiger:

but you might be able to fix your setup if you remove the bridge on the left which was used to fill the loop.

It's not causing any problems as-is. The inputs and outputs are set up correctly for there to be no confusion. Should still get rid of it anyway since it's in the way and might cause problems if you try to change things.

[Bravo]

The bypass loop is 1 pipe shorter than the regular loop. As soon as the bypass needed to be used, the pipe circuit is entirely full, this is why the double bypass is more useful as it makes the max bypass circuit longer than regular loop.

Coolant that is being cooled will take 1 second to go from input to out (through the aquatuner), 1 second to go from that ouput to the next pipe, 1 second to go from that pipe to the bridge output. Currently, coolant that bypasses the aquatuner takes 1 second to go from the input of the aquatuner to the input of the bypass bridge, then 1 second to go to the output of the bridge. If you had the bypass where the vent is currently (keeping everything else the 'same'), then it would take 2 seconds for coolant going through the aquatuner to reach the bypass exit, whereas bypassing coolant will take 3 seconds to reach the bypass exit.

EDIT: Unless you need temperatures below what polluted water can handle, petroleum isn't the best choice of coolant for running through an aquatuner - it has a lower SHC, which is the key number to consider when dealing with aquatuners due to the fixed temperature cooling.

The steam turbines output is fed back into the steam room, where the now cooler water (95C compared with 125C steam) can take the heat from the aquatuner to become steam again. You need to reverse the bridge so it feeds into the vent that supplies the steam room, then the output from the steam turbine feeds that bridge.

[maestro]

Well petro or oil is the best stuff I got at this point. Also why has petro leaked into the thermo aquatuner chamber? It's bad enough I can't repair that damaged pipe without breaching the thing.. there's even ♥♥♥♥ like granite debris in there when I cleaned it out completely before sealing it up..

sigh.. I really hate this part of the game. Even when the system is working, the aquatuner is actually costing more power than it's worth. My reward for even trying this is a power system with nothing but deficits now.

[gimmethegepgun]

Pipes breaking means that your coolant is changing states within the pipe, most likely because you made it too cold.

Originally posted by Maestro4202:

Even when the system is working, the aquatuner is actually costing more power than it's worth. My reward for even trying this is a power system with nothing but deficits now.

Using an aquatuner with a steam turbine is for cooling. You won't get power out of it. You can get power by using radiant pipes only to siphon heat off of something that is hotter than 125C, but anything lower than that will cost you power to cool.

[Bravo]

The steam turbines don't need to be cooled below either ~99C (sealed and insulated turbine rooms, isolated from the rest of the base) or ambient (e.g. ~25C), and the pipes in that loop are insulated while in the steam room. As such the 'best' early game coolant is polluted water, because it has a SHC of ~4.2 'units' compared with petroleum having a SHC of 1.76 'units', which makes the 'pee' water about 2.5 times as energy efficient to run through the aquatuner.

For undesired liquids in the steam room, I suspect the petroleum got too cold, leaked out of a pipe (as petroleum solid - whenever a >10% liquid packet would freeze, it damages the pipes and the solid packet 'escapes') and then melted. Double check that the pipe temperature sensor is set to only allow the tuner to cool when it is 15C (27F) hotter than the melting point of the coolant (or ~14C (25.2F) hotter than the desired temperature - whichever is hotter).

[cswiger]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by cswiger:

but you might be able to fix your setup if you remove the bridge on the left which was used to fill the loop.

It's not causing any problems as-is.

Using a bridge to fill the loop should prevent it from becoming over-full, so the other reason why it might not be flowing is ambiguous flow direction.

Removing the bridge used to fill the loop frees up the pipe section that the bridge output is landing on and ensures the cooling loop sees green to white rather than green to green.

[Bravo]

It was overfilled while the aquatuner was running though. The bypass loop is shorter than the cooling loop so when it stops cooling it becomes full and unable to move. Pipes can flow green to green, provided that there is a white beyond them (which the aquatuner and bypass bridges both satisfy and are both in the same direction from the greens).

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by cswiger:

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

It's not causing any problems as-is.

Using a bridge to fill the loop should prevent it from becoming over-full

The Aquatuner uses full 10kg packets, so whether it's using that or the bypass, it will expose the non-full segments of the loop to the output of the filling bridge, which will fill them, and overfill the loop if too much is provided.

Removing the bridge used to fill the loop frees up the pipe section that the bridge output is landing on

What?

and ensures the cooling loop sees green to white rather than green to green.

There is no pipe segment in that setup that sees both green and white in both directions, so by the rules of pipe flow in this game it's not ambiguous.

[maestro]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Empty a pipe segment, either by using a dupe with Plumbing or by deconstructing one.

It looks like some did empty out the broken pipe so maybe that's what it needed.

[XceptOne]

For future reference, you can construct a working Aquatuner bypass like this:
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/115000-thermo-aquatuner-bypassing-cheatsheet/
(thats 4 examples in that picture)
In short, you use two bridges instead of one where the packets pass the deactivated AT and are put on the output line.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but here's my reasoning why this works:
A packet entering the AT will take time being processed. During that time the bridge that fills the loop can add an extra packet into the loop.
When the AT is deactivated, after the current packet has been processed and released, there is now a packet more in the loop than actually fits, so the loop blocks and stops flowing.
The packet trying to go into the deactivated AT will flow on to the first bride, will see that the bridges output is blocked and subsequently block itself.
If there is another (normally unreachable) pipesegment with a brigde input behind the first input, the blocked packet will go there, allowing every other packet in the loop to advance one more step and making actual room for the packet still in the AT.
The packet on the second bridge will now be locked in place, while the loop can continue to flow, ignoring the second bridge path.
When the AT is activated again, a packet gets taken out of the loop, thus making room for the formerly trapped packet, which will now fill the gap and be a part of the loop again until the AT is deactivated the next time.
->The second bridge with its' extra pipesegment acts as a safe storage space for overflow packets from a deactivated Aquatuner.