Engine Cooling: Your Experiences

[Ghost259]

Hello Steam! Thanks for reading

So I am curious to know how everyone is doing with engine cooling? what do you find works best for you?

I am also trying to figure out how water affects heat when it is used in combination with radiators and heat syncs?

Example
A tank filled with water, A fluid port on each end of the tank, an inlet and an outlet. you plumb the "Hot" coolant out of an engine to the tank. and the radiator or heat sync to the tank, and the other end of the cooling system to the coolant in or cold side? does that actually do anything to the heat of an engine?

I guess I am trying to ask
Does water in a tank have a temperature?

[Host]

No, water in custom tanks do not appear to have any temperature, which is why it is extremely effective and some people are using it since engine overheating became more of a concern recently. I consider it a cheat and hope it will be addressed in a future patch, as it renders radiators and heat sinks null and void.

Speaking of heat sinks, they appear to have the exact same effectiveness as radiators currently. Which means that radiators are better because they're more space-efficient. Heat sinks would only be an aesthetic choice at this point, if you can afford it.

If you do use radiators or heat sinks (rather than sea water cooling, or custom tanks) I recommend you put pumps between each two radiators, as well as one pump for each coolant connection on the engine. It seems to help a lot (pumps between radiators especially). You may be able to get away with using fewer or no pumps, perhaps by using extra radiators instead, and in fact I have a design that's fairly compact and achieves this, with very good cooling performance, but the fluid simulation is fraught with some pretty major bugs right now (like this one http://mcro.org/issues/view_issue/16167 for example), so it's not certain whether going this route is future proof.

Using pumps in a serial configuration is the safest way to go in my opinion. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/k18liG1.png Parallel configurations (where you split the flow with T-pipes, cross-pipes or omni-pipes, then recombine after the radiators) can work, but are more prone to weird flow problems I think.

Also, keep in mind that the option to increase engine max RPS and max power doesn't mean you should just because you want more power. It's more intended for temporary boosts. It will also chug absurd amounts of fuel. Try to stay near the default 20 RPS max, or even lower for more fuel efficiency. You won't have any difficulty cooling your engines then.

[Ghost259]

Thanks for the information omo. I have multiple safety checks in place to prevent catastrophic failure, Engine Rps Limiter although in the game I still prefer to have it in my logic as well and a Heat Limiter as well that will shutdown engine and allow it to cool before restarting again, I mostly build utility type engines that start up at full throttle, run for awhile and shutdown. Such as generators. I have horrible building capability, sometimes my builds work but most of the times not so i stick to what I know.