Thermal Update - Hydrogen Bubbler (Liquid Oxygen)

[k2trix]

Man, you are thinking like a god, i played 200h to this game trying failing devices. I can't even imagine how many time you spent to make this perfect. thanks for sharing

[Beowulfe]

13 hours ago, xbeo said:

I tried it out, works like a charm.

But I had to pour water over the whole damn thing when starting it to prevent the air coolers from overheating. Did you use isolated pipes behind the coolers?

Then I had to find the right type of material for the pipes because granite broke sometimes

And then I tried to boil the liquid oxygen and pump it back into my base... which cooled my whole base it down to -50C on average, much colder on certain spots.

Then I tried some heating methods and my game started to crash, which almost never happens.

10/10, would build again!

 

I see you ran into some of the same problems I did! You reminded me that I forgot to include a few notes in the writeup... Sorry about that.

Few notes, which have now been added to the original post:

-The regulators (at least the central three) need to be built out of Gold Amalgam, or they'll overheat (or you can use a different cooling system, like you did! Nice :))

-Two pipes in particular need to be built out of Abyssalite, the pipe leading out of the liquid pump, and the pipe going from the white output on the F1 filter to the vent, otherwise the temperature exchange in the pipe can cause state changes and make it break

-Warming the liquid back up is a whole different bag of worms. Haha. There's a few ways to do it, I'm still working on finding the most efficient method. I'll likely post back once I've found it.

Glad you built it and had fun doing it! A few problems due to my hurriedness in writing the post, but glad it turned out well in the end.

 

7 hours ago, darkflames9 said:

Finally, an oxygen liquifier that works!  It's a shame we have to resort to such convoluted and precise contraptions just to clean contaminated air.  Compared to the ease of an electrolyzer, it's just not worth it.  However, the ocd in me dictates that I must use up every single resource!  Anyway, your machine works, but I had to replace the liquid pump at the bottom with a gas pump; for some reason, every time liquid o2 is sucked up, it immediately boils, even if the pipe is insulated.  Therefore, I expanded the bottom bucket by 1 row of tile to collect the liquid o2 and placed a gas pump where the liquid pump is.  Now, liquid o2 collects at the expanded bottom bucket, quickly boils, and the gas is then sucked up by the gas pump.  Now the next issue to solve is how to warm up the o2...

To continue my comment from above, I forgot to include an important detail in my original post, the liquid pipe (as well as the gas pipe from the white output on filter F1) should be insulated and made from Abyssalite, to prevent as much temperature change as possible. I didn't have any issues once I used that as a material, but if you continue to have issues, let me know!

In the meantime, glad you got the gas pump working, good alternative solution.

[darkflames9]

Oh wow, I had no idea that temperature could pass even in insulated pipes.  Abyssalite might be the answer here haha.  Keep up the good work!

[xbeo]

I tried to pour the liquid oxygen into hot water made by a geyser.

Water temperature before was 80C - 90C.

After a few cycles it went down to 20C - 30C and some ice blocks formed on top of the water.

Gas pressure within the room is now 20kg - 25kg (steam) with a 54kg blob of oxygene which you can collect at the top of the room. Plus a 115kg blob of polluted oxygen from before the test which I will promptly send to the bubbler

Only problem: the oxygen now has a temperature of over 100C

 

[thebebinator]

I'm trying to figure out a way to combine this with a series of electrolyzers. if my calculations are correct and the tooltips are correct if I can get it working, it might be a way to make sustainable power. Previously the electrolyzers just output too much oxygen pressure to make the hydrogen power work well. But liquefying the oxygen would solve that problem really well. 

According to the tooltips

the electolyzers spit out 112g/s of hydogen costing 120W

the hydrogen reactors eat 100g/s of hydrogen putting out 800W.

So theoretically the 12g extra of hydrogen would slowly build up in the chamber which could be the coolant, while the hydrogen reactors each spit out 680W free electricity minus the cost of pumps and electrolyzers. you could periodically release the excess hydrogern with a valve.

I was thinking that I could just extend your design vertically and add a row of mesh tiles with electrolyzers on it in the center of the chamber. My first attempt failed because my dupes got bugged out and got stuck moving back and forth and suffocated. Going to try a new base and test this out. Do you guys see any flaws in my logic?

[Voideka]

So if I understand the way back-flow prevention works in this game, you do it by forcing liquid/gas through something with an input, like a bridge or a valve. Looking at your plan in the gas overlay, the output from the bridge on the last regulator is connected directly to the central bypass line connecting all the valves, instead of going directly to an input. Doesn't this mean that the output could choose to go left, back into the valve leading to the last regulator, instead of right, causing over cooling?

[GreatGameDota]

Can someone link or post a video of this thing in action? Couldn't find any...

[Beowulfe]

On 3/28/2017 at 10:31 PM, Voideka said:

So if I understand the way back-flow prevention works in this game, you do it by forcing liquid/gas through something with an input, like a bridge or a valve. Looking at your plan in the gas overlay, the output from the bridge on the last regulator is connected directly to the central bypass line connecting all the valves, instead of going directly to an input. Doesn't this mean that the output could choose to go left, back into the valve leading to the last regulator, instead of right, causing over cooling?

You're correct - I had a 6th regulator in there initially, but due to circuit limitations had to pull it out. Got rid of one too many valves during cleanup, before I took the screenshots, it looks like. Good catch.

I'll fix that up later tonight, when I get home.

 

Can someone link or post a video of this thing in action? Couldn't find any...

I can post a brief video of it later tonight, sure!

[QuQuasar]

So, I built one of these. I took one shortcut, which I'm going to tentatively assume was the cause of all my problems: rather than pumping out all the gas and filling it with a set amount of hydrogen, I just pumped a pile of hydrogen in on top of the polluted oxygen and hoped it would work.

It... didn't.

 

Firstly, during priming, the Thermoregulators overheated in spite of me building the entire thing out of gold and abyssalite (this thing is the most expensive structure in my base).

 

So I had to take steps to cool them down.

#IMAKEGOODDECISIONS

 

Secondly, once I stopped being an idiot, fixed the flooding, installed proper drip-cooling for the regulators and the temperature in the hydrogen chamber reached liquidation level, this happened:

That's despite that pipe being an insulated liquid pipe, made of abyssalite. I wasn't aware anything could change state in those, but apparently something in this setup causes it to.

I gave a few dupes severe freezer-burn and got them to repair the pipe, and it promptly broke again with two separate messages saying the liquid had both frozen and evaporated. So clearly I'm doing something wrong. I think it's physics. I'm doing physics wrong.

All I can think to do now is pump all the gas out of the chamber in order to freeze my base and give everyone severe hypothermia before they die a horrible slow death. 

And then maybe re-prime the device as instructed, I guess. Will that work?

[Kasuha]

3 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

That's despite that pipe being an insulated liquid pipe, made of abyssalite.

It's because the pipe was warm and when the oxygen started condensing, there were just a few drops of it at first. So a few grams of liquid oxygen just below boiling temperature entered a warm pipe - and they immediately boiled. And that broke the pipe.

You can pump 1 kg of liquid oxygen through warm pipe but you cannot do so with a few grams. Put the pump on a switch and only turn it on when there's enough liquid oxygen in the chamber.

 

Edit: I tried similar design in my previous save, except I wasn't pumping cold hydrogen into sea of polluted oxygen, instead I was pumping polluted oxygen into cool hydrogen. It was breaking all over the place exactly for these reasons - a valve made too small blob of polluted oxygen, it broke the pipe. The machine ran out of power during night and there was a small blob of polluted oxygen ingested by pumps, it broke the pipe. First drops of liquid oxygen entered the wall, it broke the pipe.

Now I'm thinking about almost completely passive design, just circulating cold hydrogen in a pipe (you can keep the circulation with no power, just propelled by a valve) cooled on demand with single regulator, the chamber has just polluted oxygen in it, nothing else, and the oxygen flows or drips to warm room by gravity, without a pump. Nothing breaks if there's nothing to break.

[Ravengyre]

4 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

That's despite that pipe being an insulated liquid pipe, made of abyssalite. I wasn't aware anything could change state in those, but apparently something in this setup causes it to.

Try having your liquid pipe go left instead of right. Having that one extra bit of pipe in the bubbler instead of going straight into the wall seemed to stop my pipes from breaking.  Like that.

Also, if anyone knows, about how long does it take to prime the system?

[Kasuha]

22 minutes ago, Ravengyre said:

Try having your liquid pipe go left instead of right. Having that one extra bit of pipe in the bubbler instead of going straight into the wall seemed to stop my pipes from breaking.  Like that.

That doesn't really help. Even insulated pipe exchanges heat with its contents and the pipe in the wall stays warm. In my design the pipe was going through about five cells of the chamber and along that whole length it was colder than the boiling temperature of liquid oxygen but as soon as the drop entered the piece of pipe in warm wall it broke. It's about size of the blob you send through the pipe. If you let a pool of liquid oxygen to form there before you start the pump, you'll have no problems.

[QuQuasar]

Actually, I'm not certain it's got anything to do with the pipe at all. It's made of Abyssalite: in theory, it should have 0 thermal conductivity.

I just noticed this sentence in the OP:

Quote

Oxygen will freeze at -219 degrees (very bad), and liquefy at -183 (very good), so we need a temperature in the middle that ensures the oxygen will liquefy quickly, but not freeze or turn back into a gas once it's entered the liquid pump (which breaks the liquid pipes). For the settings for these specific ones, see the following:

I suspect that's my problem: the liquid pump itself is warmer than -183 (you can even see it in the screenshots above!), and if a small enough quantity of liquid is pumped in, it causes it to evaporate in the moment before it reaches the pipe.

Priming with hydrogen alone would give the pump a chance to cool to less than -183 before the liquid oxygen started getting generated. Alternatively, I might be able to just put it on a switch and not turn it on until it cools down completely. I might give that a try before I flash-freeze my entire base...

[Kasuha]

1 hour ago, QuQuasar said:

It's made of Abyssalite: in theory, it should have 0 thermal conductivity.

Abyssalite doesn't have zero thermal conductivity, it has just great tolerance to heat. Natural abyssalite tiles around geysers get pretty hot over just a few tens of cycles after discovering the geyser. And pipes don't share all thermal properties of the material they're made of, otherwise insulated pipes would have no point as they would be exactly as good as normal pipes. Sadly even insulated pipes are still plenty thermally conductive.

[Evillevi]

1 hour ago, Kasuha said:

Abyssalite doesn't have zero thermal conductivity, it has just great tolerance to heat. Natural abyssalite tiles around geysers get pretty hot over just a few tens of cycles after discovering the geyser. And pipes don't share all thermal properties of the material they're made of, otherwise insulated pipes would have no point as they would be exactly as good as normal pipes. Sadly even insulated pipes are still plenty thermally conductive.

Techincally Abysallite has a thermal conductivity of 0.00005 units. 

Which means that it transfer almost nothing in terms of heat. s

[xtrasyn]

I'm using this with great joy and admiration. Great design. 

There's one downside, which is the freezing liquid oxygen. It's turning bases into giant deep freezers. 

I was thinking, and before I build it, i wanted to gather some thoughts.

I want to use the design of the regulator manifold (the part with the bridges and valves above the regulators) with a set of space heaters in enclosed spaces. 

I was thinking to build a series of rooms with a vent, a gas pump and a space heater in it. Using the manifold layout and a few well placed thermal switches, you could control the number of 'chambers' your gas has to pass through to make sure it comes out at a nice comfy 12 degrees C. 

Since I'm not impressed muchly with the heating capacity of a space heater I think it needs to pass through quite a few rooms, though. 

To avoid pumps, and make it more energy friendly, it may be possible to just use a vent in room 1 and end in room 1+n with a pump, just relying on a few gas permeable tiles to control the flow of cold air. It wouldn't need the gas pipe manifold then and since you more or less know the temperature of the liquid oxygen it could work as well.

I also tried dropping the O2(L) in water using a fluid warmer to keep the water at 80C but all that does is guarantee the O2(L) evaporates into O2, it doesn't affect the temperature of the gas much.

Anyone here that catches my drift and has thoughts on it? 

[xtrasyn]

SO this is what I came up with. It's working pretty solid. Airflow isn't what I hoped it would be but it suffices. At least it's not coming in freezing anymore and the power use isn't that bad.

[Kasuha]

10 hours ago, xtrasyn said:

Airflow isn't what I hoped it would be but it suffices.

The air has hard time to pass though 1 tile wide openings. Make it two or three tiles and it gets better.

Also tepidizer is limited to some 34 C, it won't work above that (major bummer for me when I was trying to warm some hydrogen up to 120 C) so you maybe don't need those thermal switches around them.

[xtrasyn]

It's just there to keep ice from forming in the water where the O2(L) drops in. It's not set to a massive temperature, just enough to keep it nice and fluid. 

I actually took one tile off every opening shortly after posting that and it indeed becomes a lot better, but still there is an amazing difference in pressure. Above the evaporation pool I can have density as high as 6-9kg per block, and around the pump it's just around a few hundred grams. That is rediculous obviously. I tried natural convection but it won't even flow without a pump which is equally rediculous. 

I may tinker around with is some more and see if I can get some decent flow out of it. One would expect the density to decrease with rising temperatures but the mass still has to go somewhere so you'd expect a gas blowout. I tried just gas perm tiles but the gas wouldn't move at all so I needed the pump. 

[xtrasyn]

On 4/7/2017 at 10:45 AM, Kasuha said:

Now I'm thinking about almost completely passive design, just circulating cold hydrogen in a pipe (you can keep the circulation with no power, just propelled by a valve) cooled on demand with single regulator, the chamber has just polluted oxygen in it, nothing else, and the oxygen flows or drips to warm room by gravity, without a pump. Nothing breaks if there's nothing to break.

This sounds crazy appealing to me. Are you still working on this? I see some big challenges in this idea, but it could be really awesome. 

[Kasuha]

5 minutes ago, xtrasyn said:

This sounds crazy appealing to me. Are you still working on this? I see some big challenges in this idea, but it could be really awesome.

Done, working like a charm. Heavy on the exploit side, though.

 

[k2trix]

Here is a little movie of it running
Hydrogen bubbler - YouTube

[k2trix]

Hi everybody !

Here's the new hydrogen blubber, bigger, faster, never overheats.
T6   Wt -188.2°C

T1   Wt -208.2°C --> Min H2 output temperature is -228°C. Still far from -256°C
T2   Wt -203.2°C
T3   Wt -198.2°C
T4   Wt -193.2°C
T5   Wt -183.2°C

TP   Ct -193.2°C --> Bubbling happens faster and PO never goes upside half building height, increasing efficiency.
TF   Wt -213.2°C --> Liquid oxygen stays colder( -190°C/-210°C) making it easier to transport in my opinion.

I decided to put down gas vents in corners, where liquid oxygen will stay (few grams), allowing gas vent to work without Max Gas Pressure restriction.

I saw that seperating both PO gas vents from each side of the cold finger increases the bubbling process efficiency.

Max PO conversion was among 855g/s

Special thanks for the guy witch started this topic and created this device, i spent like 80Hours to try these bubblers

Movie HERE

[Beowulfe]

Awesome setup k2trix!! Great to see people improving on my work.  Looks like we're gonna have an amazing community of creators going forward, can't wait to see what else we can create!

(P.S., I think you edged out my time investment on the original bubbler, I'm impressed! Didn't think there were many people that could rival my problem solving drive. )

[heckubis]

you bubbler taught me a lot and thanks. My super simple  thermal regulator dose not overheat now but its from using a valve after the regulator to prevent it from firing partial loads and automatically bypasses the regulator when its at temp. its only firing about once every 5 seconds with a valve at 200g the over flow regulator is set to 400g to allow for system to cycle when its at mass about 500-600g per tile. with a small compression pool( the denser section of the pipes on the in flow side.

the things you taught me with your design taught me throttle control you don't expect your car to last long and efficient if you have the gas pedal pinned all the time. you going to get over heating slowing the flow rate out of the regulators and they never over heat in the first place