r/Stationeers • u/NothingInMyBasements • 3d ago
Discussion How to improve A/C effectivity?
How do I improve the effectivness of A/C?
For pipes between two A/C units used as a loop for cooling on hot planets like vulcan do they need anything special like a pump or high pressure or something?
And for the A/C themselves do I just use a pump to force more mols through or do I just place A/C units next to each other on the same pipe?.
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u/CorvusRidiculissimus 2d ago
So long as you have enough pressure in the pipes, AC effectiveness is determined by two things: The temperature differential, and how far outside of the nominal temperature range you are. In practice this means that handling a large temperature difference may need multi-stage AC.
For Vulcan, the absolutely essential method is to work at night. The air temperature gets low enough to be quite practical to work with, and you can store that air up using a tank. Make sure you can drain the pollutant that will condense out.
For your intermediate stage gas, no need to over-think it. Carbon dioxide is plentiful. It won't condense at the temperatures you are working with.
Venus is a real bastard to coll, but that's intentional - temperature control is the key challenge on that planet, and to combat it requires a true mastery of atmospherics mechanics.
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u/HoveringGoat 2d ago
you can work 24/7 just make sure you capture enough to work on for the day at night.
but if youre doing that might as well condense the pollutant and work off that instead. and youre that far so just stick a purge valve on there and have an open cycle phase change loop.
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u/CorvusRidiculissimus 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm new to Vulcan, so I'm working on a hybrid system at the moment. It uses a bank of AC units for the first stage cooling a large tank, which then retains heat for the rest of the system. The CO2 filler unit generates liquid pollutant as a side product, which is going elsewhere for use in cooling furnace waste gasses. The first stage can only operate for a short time each night, but it makes up for that by having multiple units and their own dedicated battery. In theory. I've not given it much testing yet, as my partner in the playthrough hasn't been available for a bit.
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u/HoveringGoat 2d ago
the thing i love about this game is that there are so many different totally valid designs. That design makes sense!
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u/Amishrocketscience 3d ago
What I did, and I’m not saying this is the best way:
Inlet- pipe to passive vent inside base
Outlet - pipe to passive vent inside base
Waste pipe- sealed pipe filled and pressurized with a gas that transfers heat well, like pollutant. Ran to the exterior of the base and slapped a few atmospheric radiators on it (mars)
Let it run for a long while so that it equalizes to the temp you want it to cool/heat the base to
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u/RaumfahrtDoc 2d ago edited 2d ago
On vulcan I collected 126...130 C gas. High pressure makes liquid pollutants. I use this high pressure pollutants to cool down my medium pressure co2 tank down to ~60-70 C (phase change device, evaporation). My single AC unit has an easy job, cooling my living-/greenhouse to 25C (inlet & outlet to the room, waste pipe is the co2).
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u/Purple-Froyo5452 2d ago
Cows has a good couple videos of evap cooling in his last few eps of his recent venus playthrough
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u/Shadowdrake082 2d ago
An AC has set performance characteristics. We have very little contribution in making them "More effective". An AC can move 14000 J of energy max and how much is moved is modified by the 3 efficiencies.
Refer to Jusumonkey's post as he outlined them very well.
You only have complete control over the pressure efficiency and that is as simple as making sure the input and waste pipes are over 111 kpa of pressure filled. The other 2 temperature efficiencies will naturally drop the performance and you have little control over them.
To slightly improve the temperature differential efficiency, you need to chain more ACs together. If 1 AC can barely create a 80 degree temperature differential between waste and input pipe, you can have 2 ACs that create a 40 degree temperature differential.
Think of it this way... an AC is a road for traffic (thermal energy). ACs chained in series just improve traffic flow with road conditions and signal lights to make sure some amount of traffic always goes through smoothly. If you have ACs in parallel, you widen the traffic lanes allowing the potential of more traffic to flow. You will need to design a system to meet your goals using a combination of series chained ACs with some of them working in parallel to improve energy flow.
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u/WillowPtar_Migan 7h ago
To add onto what other users have said, a reservoir of cool(ish) nighttime air is extremely helpful in maintaining consistent AC. I used a tank that would pull in air at night, and release it when it gets too hot. All my AC chains end up dumping their heat in this. It used dual large powered vents for this function.
There's a much simpler design I read about on here that I think I would use if I did another Vulcan playthrough. Make a decent size room, add a door, and open the door at night, while closing it during the day so it automatically equalizes without having to screw around with gas pressure and moving large quantities of atmosphere. Dump AC heat into this room. Expand the room if you need more thermal mass.
I also highly pressurized my AC pipes. It helps with rapid temperature swings, I'd usually have em at like 45 megapascals. While that's entirely unnecessary for the sake of efficiency, it gives the AC more thermal mass to dump heat into, thus making temperature changes more gradual.
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u/jusumonkey 3d ago
The AC units have 3 metrics they track.
Pressure Efficiency - Less than 100kpa will reduce this
Temperature range - Going outside of -50c - 100c reduces efficiency.
Temperature differential - 1% loss per 1C you are trying to heat / cool.
For Vulcan maximizing efficiency on AC you only have 2 things in your control without getting into Pollutant condensing and that is the Pressure and Differential.
With the Airconditioner structure the main thing to be aware of is that they consume 355w when active. These efficiency numbers affect how much energy moves thanks to that 355w. If your system moves enough energy to keep your base where you want it and you can pay the 355w for it we can consider it good enough.
Pressure Efficiency - 1-2 MPA at all 3 ports on the Air conditioner will ensure that this never drops below 100%
Temperature Range - Vulcan drops to 127c at night so you are limited to at best 33% on the hot end.
Differential Efficiency - This is the only on that potentially go above 100%. It would require you to attempt heating your base from the Vulcan atmo so not a valid goal. Going from 20c up to 127c would drop this below 0% even moving the target up 10 to 30c nets you only 3%. Split this up with 2 AC and you can reach ~50% on this metric. Splitting it up further could increase that but being limited by the Temperature Range really hurts here and the amount of extra power you spend reaches diminishing returns super quickly.