Centralized refrigeration system
Posted Nov 24, 2018, 1:11 PM UTC
1511
I'm trying to design a centralized refrigeration system and this was my initial idea:
There are two separate cooling circuits. The main circuit (red and blue) transports heat from the rooms we want to cool to the cold room.
The secondary circuit consists of a cold room filled with liquid oxygen that acts a thermal buffer, and a circuit that keeps the cold room cold (I like looping hydrogen through thermoregulators, although you can use other material as coolant and subtitute them with aquatuners).
The advantage that I see with the system is that you can simultaneously use a variety of ways to cool down the thermoregulators (or aquatuners) and pool all that refrigerating power into the same buffer (cold room), which allows you make a better use of your resources. Also, centralizing refrigeration, means that you don't need to create a new system everytime you expand your base, you can plug It in the same system.
I'd love to see your feedback and ideas on how to improve it, and start putting It into motion! Thanks.
2
Just put a wheeze on top of a mechanical door then hookup automation to the door to disable the wheeze by opening below it with thermo sensor.
2
It works. But it's not cool enough.
1
If the rooms are simply for dupes to live in, liquid oxygen is probably an overkill...
2
Furthermore I think there are various heat deletion methods that you can use so that you don't have to reuse and cool on your red side of the circuit, such as using water >70C for oxygen or Pwater>40C to sieves.
1
LOX is terrible as a cooling solution because of its narrow temperature range, it's no better than petroleum at cooling, and very few things need to be cooled low enough to make use of LOX.
Have a room of petroleum at your desired temperature, using either wheezes, aquatuer or Aetn. And just pump it round with normal pipes round your base. As long as your method or methods of cooling can keep up temps will stabilizer and you can add more things to cool.
2
My experience may be useful for you:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/9weaaj/dynamically_control_the_connection_of_a_secondary/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/9ryfxp/water_cooled_farm_feeding_geyser_water/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/9rduv1/granite_heatshield/
After 242 cycles whole frozen biome was melted by my system:
https://i.imgur.com/a4lnQx7.jpg
1
I cool my base on oxygen production. I have a sealed room with electrolyzers on the bottom and wheezeworts on top of mesh tiles on the top, one wort per electrolyzer.
On top of that there are 1 to 3 gas pumps, each with its own gas element sensor and 2 shut-off valves to separate hydrogen and oxygen.
Hydrogen merges to containers and eventually is burned off on generators or used in other cooling systems.
The pumps are attached to two sensors: pressure sensor on 1000g and temperature sensor on 0 Celsius.
When both are active it gets the oxygen delivered throughout the base, which cools everything off.
No extra energy wasted, cooling is centralized and it works.
Now, to make sure this is working properly everywhere you should seal off and keep all of your heavy machinery in a separate zone of your base. Machines like granulators, kiln, refineries, polymer press, etc.
Cool these off separately.
1
You'll probably have more headaches by overcooling things and wasting heat as your coolant warms up traveling long distances.
I imagine dedicated cooling per use is the way to go. You can dial them to the specific temperature, and the losses are manageable in the small distances they must travel.
1
I agree with this but I'm a nitpicker so I'll complain about the "T>T1" line not being red and the cold room output not being green, purple, or blue+red.
I'll also add that you can too-cold check by adding it before/after the too-hot check and running the too-hot stuff in radiant pipes next to the cold room's hot input, then put it back at the cold room's output. It should be done to avoid problems due to LOX being very cold (even though you have per-room sensors already).
1
for cooling gas, thermo regs are a waste. Just use weeze in H2 room and a closed loop radiators....it uses no power and can be controlled to an exact temperature. Works well for base cooling but running your oxygen from electros through the radiator.