Temperature

This article is dedicated to the very basics of the game, and describes measures for dealing with temperature. You may be more comfortable with the articles "Water cooling" and "Oxygen Cooling".

"The scariest thing in this game is the temperature" - a phrase Sf_abuser from correspondence.

That's right! The game has no problem with energy - enough manual generator and at least a coal generator (many go through the whole game on them). There is no problem with food - for starters enough of what your dupes dug up, and then a simple Mealwood farm will be able to feed the entire colony. The same with water and oxygen (here you can read about getting seads, energy, water and oxygen).

Heat is another matter. You can't just put a Thermo Regulator or a Thermo Aquatuner (AT). They work on the principle of a domestic refrigerator - by taking heat (cooling the liquid or gas in the pipe) they heat the atmosphere around them, and even a little more than they cooled the liquid/gas.

In this article we'll look at options for dealing with heat, from the simple to the complex. It will also look at some game mechanics, using the example of a not simple "Free Cooling" scheme.

1. Separation of rooms
Many buildings in the game emit heat when they work, some more than other. So a normal battery heats the atmosphere around at a rate of 1.25 kDTU/s, coal generator at 9 kDTU/s, and Liquid Tepidizer as much as 4064 kDTU/s. You can find out how much heat a building generates in its menu.

When reaching the temperature of overheating (75°C on the screenshot), the building will start to get damaged and will eventually break down. Moreover, the building will heat up the surrounding atmosphere and over time the temperature at the base will become uncomfortable for dupes and farms.

When planning the base, it is necessary to separate the residential and farm areas from the industrial areas. After learning the "Temperature Modulation" technology, the industrial zones can be fenced in with insulating tiles. The Insulated tile (left in the screenshot) has a much lower heat transfer coefficient than the conventional (medium) one. It also matters what material it's made of.

A mafic rock insulated tile transfers heat worse than any other (of the available materials), and a regular granite tile transfers heat better than others, which is very bad for heat isolation.

The one on the left in the screenshot is metal tiles. Their purpose is the opposite - they are needed to transfer heat well.

2. Temporary fixes
If you have already managed to overheat the rooms, you can try to save (such as the farm on the screen) with the Ice-E Fan (upper screen) or by building a thermal plate of ice or snow.

The Ice-E Fan will bring the ice (it must be dug in the ice biome) will start twisting its knob, which will cool the air around it. The ice/snow Tempshift Plate will melt, and the resulting water will cool the farm blocks, tiles, and air around them. When the water heats up (taking heat from the tiles), it can be wiped away. You can view the temperature on the Temperature Overlay (with the mouse or the F3 shortcut key).

3. Cooling contour
The cooling loop transfers heat between cold parts of the map (such as an ice biome) and the places that you need to cool. If there is an ice biome nearby, you can run a radiator pipe between it and your farm. The screenshot shows different kinds of pipes. Yellow - Radiant Liquid Pipe - best transfer heat from the fluid that moves in them to the surrounding atmosphere. Blue - Insulated Liquid Pipe - serve to insulate the liquid in them, from the environment. White - Liquid Pipe - something in between the first two types.

The materials from which the pipes are built, differently conduct heat (transfer it to the environment). The best metals: copper, gold, aluminum. Between these two zones (the cold zone and the one we are cooling) you need to use an insulated pipe, so that the cold gas or water does not get hot on its way to the base.

It is important what kind of gas will circulate in the pipe, because gases have different heat capacities (carry different amounts of heat). The best coolant (gas filling the pipe) is hydrogen. Oxygen is slightly worse, and carbon dioxide and chlorine are not suitable at all.

A cold water circuit will be much more efficient than a gas circuit, because water has not only better heat capacity than gases, but it enters the pipe much more (10 kg) than gases (1 kg). Another option is to use a cold pool (ideally with a Cool Slush Geyser). If there is no such geyser nearby, you can throw ice in any cold puddle or in a constructed pool.

All these options are not very effective, but in extreme cases can help.

4. Thermal conductivity
How well a tile conducts heat depends on its property - thermal conductivity (shown above in the tile screenshot). You can see this number in the properties of an already built tile. You can also give a task to build it, but without building see this number.

The lower this number, the slower this tile will transfer heat from a heated room, to a colder room. Metal tiles are designed to transfer heat perfectly. They do it tens of times better than conventional tiles and thousands of times better than insulating ones.

The same rules apply for pipe materials (liquid and gas).

This table shows the thermal conductivity coefficients for different types of tiles made from different materials:

5. Heat Removal
Only 2 "builds" can remove heat around them: the Wheezewort (-12 kDTE/s) and the AETN (Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, -80 kDTE/s). A Wheezewort grows in an ice biome, from which it can be dug up and planted in a place that needs to be cooled. It does not produce seeds, so it cannot be bred in the right quantities, and its seeds fall out of the printer very rarely.

In the wild, its productivity is 4 times lower (like all plants).

It also requires Fertilizer (phosphorite), which requires either dupes work or delivery by Auto-Sweeper. It is possible to make it grow on the base without feeding, but it is not that easy with bug.

Its performance is not great: for example for every 4 coal generators (4 pcs x 9 kDtu of heat), 3 Wheezewort (3 pcs x 12 kDtu) are needed. But it can help to cool the farm.

The AETN does a much better job of cooling. All it takes is a tube of hydrogen, and it starts to cool everything around it. But it's much more efficient to build a room out of a insulated tile, fill it with hydrogen, and run a cooling circuit pipe inside.

In a hydrogen atmosphere its efficiency will be maximal, because hydrogen has the best heat capacity of all the gases. The same is true for Wheezewort.

The door on this circuit opens on the signal of the temperature sensor if the temperature has dropped too much. Without this sensor, if the oxygen consumption is low, too cold oxygen can go to the base (each dupe) consumes 100 g/s, a colony of 3 dupes 300 g/s, and the circuit is designed for 1 kg/s).

A door that opens under the AETN unit "shuts it down". There are no other options to quickly disable the AETN, as it has no control port.

But you can do it without this automation, if you run the pipe through the industrial area first, and then to the living areas and to the farms.

6. Obtaining cold oxygen
To solve two problems at once: getting oxygen and partial cooling of the base (at least the farms) will help to build a proper Electrolyzer. The electrolyzer consumes 1 kg/s water and releases oxygen (0.89 kg/s) and hydrogen (0.11 kg/s) into the surrounding atmosphere, which can be pumped out, separated by a gas filter. Then the oxygen is sent to the base, and the hydrogen is burned in the generator.

But this approach would not be efficient. As soon as the pressure of gases around the electrolyzer reaches 1800 kg/cell, the operation of the electrolyzer will stop. In addition, pumping small portions of hydrogen and using a filter, increases the consumption of the unit.

It is much more effective to fuel a electrolyzer. Pour 2 kinds of liquid - crude oil and water on top (each in a volume of about 20 kg). Oxygen will go into the left chamber and hydrogen will go up.

The gases cannot be pumped out completely, so the top pump has a Atmo Sensor, with a setting greater than 500 g. Also this measure prohibits pump operation at small gas volumes (such operation would be ineffective).

The circuit uses a filled pipe sensor. Its point is that when the oxygen consumption is low, the pressure at the base will reach 1800 g/s, the Gas Vent will stop, the oxygen will stand in the pipe, which will register the sensor and turn off the electrolyzer. This will save you water and energy.

You can do without this sensor by turning off the electrolyzer manually, for example with an electric switch.

You can also simplify the circuit by removing the gas bridge and the hydrogen pipe from the circuit (to an external compressor or hydrogen liquefaction circuit).

The output of this circuit is very cold oxygen, as it is cooled by both the incoming water and the AETN. It remains to deliver it to the base in Insulated pipes, and in the right places to use the Radiant pipes.

7. AT (Thermo Aquatuner)
The first versions of the circuits are for explanatory purposes only, you should not assemble them.



But to cool a large number of industrial buildings (and other heat sources) can only AT. The principle of its work is as follows: it passes a liquid through itself, cooling it by 14°C. At the same time it heats the air around him by the same amount of heat, which removed from the liquid, plus some more (+59 DTE/s).

The more heat capacity of the liquid - the more heat it will remove, so the best option to fill its circuit from available: water or dirty water (4.179 DTE/g/°C).

Sooner or later it may happen that very cold water, below 14°C and water with a temperature of -1 ° C will appear at the outlet, which will immediately turn into ice. Changing the aggregate state of the liquid in the pipe (for water cooled below 0°C or heated above 100°C), will lead to its failure.

Therefore, it is highly desirable to use a pipe temperature sensor. It will prohibit the operation of the AT if the water temperature falls below its setting (14°C): above - works, below - waiting for the water to warm up.



But when the AT does not work, the water in the loop does not circulate, and you can wait until it heats up at the sensor indefinitely. This problem is solved by the bridge. When the AT is working, the water passes through it, and when it is not working, it bypasses the bridge. On the right screenshot, the bridge is slightly moved to the side, so that it would be better to see the pipes.



It remains to add cooling of the AT itself. To do this, it is necessary to pour water on the floor of the chamber. Heating from the hot AT, it will turn into steam, which will be further absorbed by the turbine. There can be as much water as you want, but not too little - otherwise there might not be enough steam to run the turbine. I usually use about 200 kg of water per floor cell.

Excess gases from the chamber must be pumped out with a pump. After that it is necessary to disassemble the Gas Vent, so that the pump would not pump out the steam afterwards. The pump can be sacrificed (it will break from high temperature) or dismantled by building airlock.

It is also customary to close the turbine chamber. Its temperature will usually be higher than the ambient temperature, and it is not necessary to heat everything around it.



The turbine absorbs steam with its lower holes, if its temperature is higher than 125°С, it passes through itself and releases water (with temperature 95°С), in the same volume as it absorbed (2 kg/s). This water, back to the AT, will be returned by the Liquid Vent, it will be heated, absorbed by the turbine and so on indefinitely.

In other words, the turbine cools the steam from 125°C to 95°C water, i.e. by 30°C (in practice the steam temperature will be even higher).



The turbine itself heats up to 10% of the absorbed heat and it also needs to be cooled, because when it gets to 100°C it will stop working. This is easily accomplished by running the pipe coming out of the turbine through the floor on which it stands.

The 95°C water (coming out of the turbine) will cool the turbine, and only then enter the AT chamber.



Many buildings give off heat to the environment and to the tiles they stand on. But they do not do it quickly. You can increase the rate of heat transfer from the buildings by flooding them with a small amount of water (or crude oil, for example). Water has a much better heat transfer coefficient than gases, so the turbine will be cooled more efficiently.

The heat will be transferred from the turbine to the water, and that will transfer the heat to the water flowing in the pipe itself. Thus the turbine will be cooled by itself, by its own water (self-cooling turbine principle). Water should not be more than 300 kg/cell, but also not too little, because of its volume will depend on the coefficient (speed) of heat transfer from water to the turbine and from pipe to water.

The principle of self-cooling works up to a certain threshold. The turbine, as we already know, removes the amount of heat as the difference between the steam it has drawn into itself and the leaving water (permanently 95°C) and releases 10% of the destroyed heat. The AT, working all the time, will emit a lot of heat.



As a result, the turbine can emit much more heat than can be absorbed by the water coming out of it. In this case, it is necessary to build the turbine scheme not on self-cooling, but on forced cooling by the AT circuit.

For this purpose, it is enough to run a small segment of the AT circuit on the floor, and arrange the discharge of exiting water in a heat pipe directly.

In all the screenshots this scheme cooled the atmosphere next to itself. In reality the cooling circuit (incoming and outgoing pipes from the AT) should be extended with insulated pipes, to the part of the base that needs to be cooled.

The circuit is much more complicated than the other methods because it requires steel for the AT, plastic for the turbine, vacuum in the AT chamber, and automation. In addition, the AT consumes 1200 watts, and needs better wiring. But it is the only long-term and efficient option.

Here is the classic version of the turbine construction. The same can be built much faster and more compact.

In addition to the ways of cooling described here, there are ways of cooling with geysers, materials (including throwing unnecessary ones into space), Gulp Fish, some buildings and even bug-using ways. You can read about them in the relevant articles.

Continue this article here.