You can definitely tell something is still wrong. The first system to overheat is the one with direct cooling, which pumps cold ocean water through the engine. Logically, the cold water should remove so much of the heat. I think the same happens with the liquid-liquid heat exchanger, where the seawater doesn't cool the coolant side properly and it's merely acting like a heatsink. It's as if the seawater became incapable of taking any heat at all. That may be worth a test, does a totally uncooled engine overheat faster than an engine cooled by seawater?
A 5x5 rad with 1 impeller pump has done me well. One thing I've learned too is that engine room temp makes a huge difference as well. If you use heat exchangers that take air from the engine room in and are cooled by sea water then released back into the engine room like an HVAC unit, you can drop about 20 or so degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn reduces engine temps
@dawn_darklight I'd have to make a video showing my results. I built a pretty good-sized Great Lakes freighter with 12 5x5 modulars. I've tried a plethora of setups and what I described has been about the only thing that's worked and worked well
Looking at this with my engineers eyes, here is my assumption : In a previous hotfix, the developpers stted that they made the water "compressible" in order to "facilitate" the flow. This would mean that in a system that sucks water in such as the engine's coolant pump, the low pressure will cause the water to "stretch". This "stretching" (help me find a better word 🙂) will itself cause the density of the water to drop. Here is the problem. One needs to use the density of the water in order to write the equations describing heat exchange in a phisics model. Water density dropping is directly equivalent to water cooling power dropping. I think water compressibility has been implemented as a workaround in order to roll hotfixes after the update. Now that the game is more stable, what needs to be done is reviewing all the parameters of the physics simulations to get a true fix that will give a more predictable model. If you have other ideas, I am all ears.
Yeah I managed to pressurize the water in my heat exchangers and have noticed a better heat transfer. The setup is quite simple actually, the internal loop needs to be able to be pressurized, so use a threshold to activate a pump. you can use a tank pressure number output or a pressure meter to feed the threshold. Once the operating pressure is met, on the internal loop you can begin circulating the external loop. Give that a whirl.
I have a gas bleed, and coolant pressurization from a external tank, I have been using large pumps and a radiator, to radiator cooled liquid to liquid loop. Ps two large pumps move coolant in and out of engine, those run into a radiator, and into a liquid to liquid and out with a pressure sensor, pressurization pump from external tank, and gas relief all before the coolant goes back into the engine, I use a small pump to love some coolant between a radiator and the liquid to liquid as the second input. It has been working great for me!
So much content and community around this game but for me every time I restart a campaign the missions just break after about 2 hours and I can’t play anymore. Game is totally ruined as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to build massive complex creations in sandbox, I just want the missions to work ☹️
The air and fuel flow of the engines on your ship look suspiciously low. That is where i would start to investigate. I read multiple times on reddit that people got problems with the fuel pressure, But your fuel pressure looks ok (40Atm). Did you made sure to place a liquid relieve valve in front of the fuel pump? edit: Btw.:The prefab engines don't need any cooling below 12 rps and their most fuel efficient rps is 7.5. I know that they don't produce much power at that rps, but they will use less than half of the fuel per power at 7.5 rps than at 15 rps. Perhaps running more engines at a lower rps could be a temporarily workaround.
The greater issue is that this setup has been working flawlessly for over a year, with my using this system in many ships - and only now has this problem materialized, with no valid solution! Reducing the speed and throttle is an option, albeit one I do not really like :)
Not gonna lie, I feel that cooling effectiveness has always been pretty unreasonable in Stormworks and I usually play with it off for this reason. Cooling completely failing like this is probably just a symptom of a larger problem with that part of the game.
I've had issues with cooling as well and got bent out of shape with NJersey over it calling him out on all of his cooling videos about it. I did start to dig into it again but that was right before this update so it threw everything I was doing down the toilet. I found out you can boost cooling with modular engines by adding a tank and drain the system of the excess water until the fluid level in the tank started going down. The valve needed to be above the tank and a filter to only allow water through and only one way.
i made a 12 cylinder diesel generator and tried to cool it with a 2x2 heat exchanger. i used to serve on a ship with similar generators and heat exchangers for cooling. and yet i still needed 2 5/5 radiators to keep it cool
12:13 It is also interesting to see that the engine with two radiators heated up the slowest; but the engine second from the left maxed out on the temp last.
I have at times gotten extremely engrossed in this game, but the unintuitive/unrealistic/inconsistent/broken way the fluid/heat/electricity/power/etc. mechanics work is just SO frustrating. I have in the past had a fluid system work differently after deleting and re-placing the same fluid port type in the same spot. It just has killed my desire to put time into the game. I love doing tests like you're doing in this video but it kills my interest when things don't work how they should, or aren't consistent, etc. I don't know if or when I'll ever try getting into Stormworks again because of this.
I’ve had issues with the prefab engines overheating but I learned how to do modular engines and haven’t had any overheating issues and my ship is also waaay more fuel efficient now. I play classic career and run two 8 cylinder engines and do about 30 knots at full throttle but (not great but reasonable) but I usually coast at 85% throttle. I’m still chillin in my starter boat though, not trying to power such a beast 😬
Is the problem maybe that since a radiator needs air, unless a room is ventilated you eventually run out of air? Other than that idk and I look forward to your advice! Great video as always!
I put 6! 3by3 radiators on every small engine (there is 2 on my boat) at first they were in the hull of the boat, and at 20 rpm without any load they-re climbing to 90c and all was good, but at the moment I begun thinking that too, and put all of them on "fresh air", and that not helped, but made situation waay worse, they've started climbing and exploding. Soo idk if that's the case
I had just figured out a way to increase the cooling capacity of the cooling system for modular engines right before the update. It had to do with the pressure in the system so I'll have to see if it works when I get home which won't be until Saturday. I'm an OTR driver so I don't have much time.
Hadn't watched the whole video yet, but I done heat transfer tests, and it seems that the amount of heat transfer is governed by the amount of coolant flow L/min, because of that I opted to keep my cooling circuit at 20atm. As summary now that I finished watching your tests, you should give the pressurization a try, I haven't tested engine cooling as you did, but I was messing about with the heat exchanger to build my Enclosed HVAC Heating Unit, and while I built it I have noticed a difference in heat transfer with greater liquid pressures.
@454ss_stormworks I used fresh water to pressurize the internal "hot" loop. Using a simple pressure meter and threshold gate to activate the pump to pressurize the pipes. If you're going to use sea water cooling, i'd similarly set up a pump to pressurize the "cold" loop and make sure that the outlet pipe has a valve that opens only to maintain constant pressure and flow. You feed both loops respectively into the appropriate liquid, to liquid, or if you want to harness the engine heat for interior heating, you can do that also with the liquid to air heat exchanger. The engine has its own pump, it will do, but i like adding a small pump to increase the flow rate. Flow rate is your friend, low pressure your enemy.
I should probably add that the number of sequencially linked heatsinks and the size of them also matters. It really depends on how much heat you need removed and how fast. Some variables to test: - Multiple sinks - Fluid Pressure - Air and Liquid Efficiency - Flowrate Efficiency (is too much flow inefficient) - Different pressures in hot/cold loop Priming the cooling system prior to ignition? I do that with my HVAC heating unit. When you pump coolant out of the engine and create a vaccuum in the pipe, you're dramatically starving the engine of coolant, and heat transfer is heavily penalized, just as if you'd remove the refridgerant from your car.
They had fixed cooling in one of the hotfixes. The following was checked in a modular engine's radiator: At first it refused to flow, then it would only flow at (in my engine) 30l/s out of the 50l/s it would usually do), then it got to 50L/s and was okay, but then it's at.... 100l/s? The number is soo insane it's hard to read, but yeah. It's not 50l/s. Also, it'd suck if that's what the developers intended. Modular engines were already pretty weak for their size as they trade power for efficiency compared to prefab engines. (in my opinion) They also produce more heat for the power they generate.
8-12 rps has previously been the golden zone of fuel and cooling efficiency. The only difference I've noticed is they now run hotter, but well within what I've always designed for. I did a similar test as you with small engines and everything worked fine as long as I kept everything geared down to around 12 rps, even with max throttle. I haven't tried large engines yet, but with the smalls electric radiators with an extra tank of water helped best, with increasing benefits with larger tanks.
your seawater coolant system wasn't working properly, it was too far to the sea and pumps should've lift it all throught. But small pumps is pretty slow at such height difference, you should lower your build or place big electric pump, because mostly sea water should be most effective until calcination cut the efficiency. You should check flow rate on them
I got the game like a month ago. Built my ship with 3x3 engine inline 4. I did everything to cool it down and nothing. I was enjoying the game a lot, but now I don't want to play it anymore
You can definitely tell something is still wrong. The first system to overheat is the one with direct cooling, which pumps cold ocean water through the engine. Logically, the cold water should remove so much of the heat. I think the same happens with the liquid-liquid heat exchanger, where the seawater doesn't cool the coolant side properly and it's merely acting like a heatsink. It's as if the seawater became incapable of taking any heat at all.
That may be worth a test, does a totally uncooled engine overheat faster than an engine cooled by seawater?
A 5x5 rad with 1 impeller pump has done me well.
One thing I've learned too is that engine room temp makes a huge difference as well.
If you use heat exchangers that take air from the engine room in and are cooled by sea water then released back into the engine room like an HVAC unit, you can drop about 20 or so degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn reduces engine temps
Any proof of that system working? I hear this the first time, also his Engines where on a platform, outside so, not sure if this is valid.
@dawn_darklight I'd have to make a video showing my results.
I built a pretty good-sized Great Lakes freighter with 12 5x5 modulars.
I've tried a plethora of setups and what I described has been about the only thing that's worked and worked well
Looking at this with my engineers eyes, here is my assumption :
In a previous hotfix, the developpers stted that they made the water "compressible" in order to "facilitate" the flow. This would mean that in a system that sucks water in such as the engine's coolant pump, the low pressure will cause the water to "stretch". This "stretching" (help me find a better word 🙂) will itself cause the density of the water to drop.
Here is the problem.
One needs to use the density of the water in order to write the equations describing heat exchange in a phisics model. Water density dropping is directly equivalent to water cooling power dropping.
I think water compressibility has been implemented as a workaround in order to roll hotfixes after the update. Now that the game is more stable, what needs to be done is reviewing all the parameters of the physics simulations to get a true fix that will give a more predictable model.
If you have other ideas, I am all ears.
Sounds like they just broke cooling with this new update then
Yeah I managed to pressurize the water in my heat exchangers and have noticed a better heat transfer. The setup is quite simple actually, the internal loop needs to be able to be pressurized, so use a threshold to activate a pump. you can use a tank pressure number output or a pressure meter to feed the threshold. Once the operating pressure is met, on the internal loop you can begin circulating the external loop. Give that a whirl.
I have a gas bleed, and coolant pressurization from a external tank, I have been using large pumps and a radiator, to radiator cooled liquid to liquid loop. Ps two large pumps move coolant in and out of engine, those run into a radiator, and into a liquid to liquid and out with a pressure sensor, pressurization pump from external tank, and gas relief all before the coolant goes back into the engine, I use a small pump to love some coolant between a radiator and the liquid to liquid as the second input. It has been working great for me!
So much content and community around this game but for me every time I restart a campaign the missions just break after about 2 hours and I can’t play anymore. Game is totally ruined as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to build massive complex creations in sandbox, I just want the missions to work ☹️
The air and fuel flow of the engines on your ship look suspiciously low. That is where i would start to investigate. I read multiple times on reddit that people got problems with the fuel pressure, But your fuel pressure looks ok (40Atm). Did you made sure to place a liquid relieve valve in front of the fuel pump?
edit: Btw.:The prefab engines don't need any cooling below 12 rps and their most fuel efficient rps is 7.5. I know that they don't produce much power at that rps, but they will use less than half of the fuel per power at 7.5 rps than at 15 rps. Perhaps running more engines at a lower rps could be a temporarily workaround.
The greater issue is that this setup has been working flawlessly for over a year, with my using this system in many ships - and only now has this problem materialized, with no valid solution! Reducing the speed and throttle is an option, albeit one I do not really like :)
Not gonna lie, I feel that cooling effectiveness has always been pretty unreasonable in Stormworks and I usually play with it off for this reason. Cooling completely failing like this is probably just a symptom of a larger problem with that part of the game.
I've had issues with cooling as well and got bent out of shape with NJersey over it calling him out on all of his cooling videos about it. I did start to dig into it again but that was right before this update so it threw everything I was doing down the toilet. I found out you can boost cooling with modular engines by adding a tank and drain the system of the excess water until the fluid level in the tank started going down. The valve needed to be above the tank and a filter to only allow water through and only one way.
i made a 12 cylinder diesel generator and tried to cool it with a 2x2 heat exchanger. i used to serve on a ship with similar generators and heat exchangers for cooling. and yet i still needed 2 5/5 radiators to keep it cool
12:13 It is also interesting to see that the engine with two radiators heated up the slowest; but the engine second from the left maxed out on the temp last.
it's because the fire from another engine got engine 4 on fire
Did something happen to your mic 454ss? Love your vids regardless.
My throat is still a little shot :S
@@454ss_gaming oh no! Feel better 🤕
I have at times gotten extremely engrossed in this game, but the unintuitive/unrealistic/inconsistent/broken way the fluid/heat/electricity/power/etc. mechanics work is just SO frustrating. I have in the past had a fluid system work differently after deleting and re-placing the same fluid port type in the same spot.
It just has killed my desire to put time into the game. I love doing tests like you're doing in this video but it kills my interest when things don't work how they should, or aren't consistent, etc. I don't know if or when I'll ever try getting into Stormworks again because of this.
I’ve had issues with the prefab engines overheating but I learned how to do modular engines and haven’t had any overheating issues and my ship is also waaay more fuel efficient now. I play classic career and run two 8 cylinder engines and do about 30 knots at full throttle but (not great but reasonable) but I usually coast at 85% throttle. I’m still chillin in my starter boat though, not trying to power such a beast 😬
I'm curious is the choice for the premade engines an aesthetic choiche or functionality? Since I'm always told to use modular engines for everything.
Thanks for the information .
i think its happening with modular engines as well, a WS marine engine i have has like 5 radiators on each side and still overheats
Is the problem maybe that since a radiator needs air, unless a room is ventilated you eventually run out of air? Other than that idk and I look forward to your advice! Great video as always!
I put 6! 3by3 radiators on every small engine (there is 2 on my boat) at first they were in the hull of the boat, and at 20 rpm without any load they-re climbing to 90c and all was good, but at the moment I begun thinking that too, and put all of them on "fresh air", and that not helped, but made situation waay worse, they've started climbing and exploding. Soo idk if that's the case
I had just figured out a way to increase the cooling capacity of the cooling system for modular engines right before the update. It had to do with the pressure in the system so I'll have to see if it works when I get home which won't be until Saturday. I'm an OTR driver so I don't have much time.
Hadn't watched the whole video yet, but I done heat transfer tests, and it seems that the amount of heat transfer is governed by the amount of coolant flow L/min, because of that I opted to keep my cooling circuit at 20atm.
As summary now that I finished watching your tests, you should give the pressurization a try, I haven't tested engine cooling as you did, but I was messing about with the heat exchanger to build my Enclosed HVAC Heating Unit, and while I built it I have noticed a difference in heat transfer with greater liquid pressures.
Sweet, great point! How did you pressurize the cooling system? Compressed air?
@454ss_stormworks I used fresh water to pressurize the internal "hot" loop. Using a simple pressure meter and threshold gate to activate the pump to pressurize the pipes.
If you're going to use sea water cooling, i'd similarly set up a pump to pressurize the "cold" loop and make sure that the outlet pipe has a valve that opens only to maintain constant pressure and flow. You feed both loops respectively into the appropriate liquid, to liquid, or if you want to harness the engine heat for interior heating, you can do that also with the liquid to air heat exchanger.
The engine has its own pump, it will do, but i like adding a small pump to increase the flow rate. Flow rate is your friend, low pressure your enemy.
I should probably add that the number of sequencially linked heatsinks and the size of them also matters. It really depends on how much heat you need removed and how fast.
Some variables to test:
- Multiple sinks
- Fluid Pressure
- Air and Liquid Efficiency
- Flowrate Efficiency (is too much flow inefficient)
- Different pressures in hot/cold loop
Priming the cooling system prior to ignition? I do that with my HVAC heating unit.
When you pump coolant out of the engine and create a vaccuum in the pipe, you're dramatically starving the engine of coolant, and heat transfer is heavily penalized, just as if you'd remove the refridgerant from your car.
It would be even easier if stormworks had Boyle's Law.
You are building very beautiful ships)
Is there some weird glitch where maybe you need to purge air out of the cooling system?
Can’t believe they broke the game again. Maybe they need to fork space and nonspace physics
before or after a radiator, that is
They had fixed cooling in one of the hotfixes. The following was checked in a modular engine's radiator:
At first it refused to flow, then it would only flow at (in my engine) 30l/s out of the 50l/s it would usually do), then it got to 50L/s and was okay, but then it's at.... 100l/s? The number is soo insane it's hard to read, but yeah. It's not 50l/s.
Also, it'd suck if that's what the developers intended. Modular engines were already pretty weak for their size as they trade power for efficiency compared to prefab engines. (in my opinion) They also produce more heat for the power they generate.
Is this fixed by now?
It is fixed!!
Just watched the second part after the update fix.
Great work on your videos by the way!
Need help cooling my cpu on my PC is there a hotfix for that?
Pog
8-12 rps has previously been the golden zone of fuel and cooling efficiency. The only difference I've noticed is they now run hotter, but well within what I've always designed for. I did a similar test as you with small engines and everything worked fine as long as I kept everything geared down to around 12 rps, even with max throttle. I haven't tried large engines yet, but with the smalls electric radiators with an extra tank of water helped best, with increasing benefits with larger tanks.
cooling was already very difficult so i dont see why the devs needed to complicate it more than it already was
your seawater coolant system wasn't working properly, it was too far to the sea and pumps should've lift it all throught. But small pumps is pretty slow at such height difference, you should lower your build or place big electric pump, because mostly sea water should be most effective until calcination cut the efficiency. You should check flow rate on them
I got the game like a month ago. Built my ship with 3x3 engine inline 4. I did everything to cool it down and nothing. I was enjoying the game a lot, but now I don't want to play it anymore
you just need a pump in your cooling systems now
before or after a radiator, that is
make a testicle-istic nukes tutorial pls!
this isnt a vaild test need to do this while moving pretty sure air flow plays a roll in cooling now too
heat sink doesnt work well unless your moving