The Cryonic Combustor

[hackcasual]

What originally started as a way to neatly handle the pWater output of natgas generators, I've now built a monster of physics defying power production.

It's based on the property natgas generators have, that their products leave at the temperature of the building itself, and that the internal storage of buildings interacts only at a single tile. Mesh tiles are inserted in the thermium flooring right below the center tile of the generators, so they don't heat up from the internal NG reservoir.

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The generators are cooled to -250C with an aquatuner using super coolant, and then fed ~400C natural gas

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Each generator has individual exhaust piping, to keep the CO2 packets small enough to avoid damage due to phase change.

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They dump solid polluted ice at -250C, which is swept and used to cool the aquatuner. Shipping is on the floor to simplifying its cooling and is limited to 3% of the day so it's not constantly grabbing small chunks of ice.

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All in all, an absolutely disgusting abuse of the heat mechanics, and I love it.

[Tenedas]

It is a great idea even if probably a bit expensive in terms of space material (supercoolant). I'd like it more if it's doable with petroleum even if at an higher stable temperature ( i.e. -150/-100 instead of -250).

Have you calculated the ratio between the power consumed on acquatuner and sweepers against the generated?

[Craigjw]

You can do this with oil or petroleum and about 12-15 Weezes instead of the aquatuner. 

However, this failed for me, as I made the mother of all fu's and assumed that it'd be running close to 100% of the time and therefore, only placed 4 of the Weezes on temperature controlled doors.  On a particularly power efficient day, the temperature plumetted and froze everthing up.  I should have placed all Weezes on doors ideally.

[hackcasual]

On 5/22/2019 at 6:01 AM, Tenedas said:

It is a great idea even if probably a bit expensive in terms of space material (supercoolant). I'd like it more if it's doable with petroleum even if at an higher stable temperature ( i.e. -150/-100 instead of -250).

Have you calculated the ratio between the power consumed on acquatuner and sweepers against the generated?

For sure, you can get it down to -55 pretty easily with petroleum. 

Unfortunately I've lost the save, so I can't record exact duty cycles for the aquatuner, but once it had gotten everything down to -250C, it was running very rarely.

Shipping runs for 18 seconds a day, so power draw is minimal, at ~8W/s on average a cycle for 2 generators. Heat generation is similarly minimal, just to measure something let's call it 1kDTU per generator. Natgas gens according to the wiki produce 10kDTU while running, so 11kDTUs of heat that need to be removed per generator. A super-coolant aquatuner can move 1,181kDTUs, so basically each generator takes 12W/s per cycle of aquatuning for cooling. So all told it's 16W/s of overhead, or just 2% of their output.

 

On 5/22/2019 at 3:07 PM, Craigjw said:

You can do this with oil or petroleum and about 12-15 Weezes instead of the aquatuner. 

However, this failed for me, as I made the mother of all fu's and assumed that it'd be running close to 100% of the time and therefore, only placed 4 of the Weezes on temperature controlled doors.  On a particularly power efficient day, the temperature plumetted and froze everthing up.  I should have placed all Weezes on doors ideally.

Wheezes will only get you down to -60C, but a good option for pre-space material. 1 wheezewort in hydrogen will handle slightly more than the heat output of a single natgas gen, so pretty easy to do the math. The key to this type of cooling though is that the generators are running in a vacuum, so their contents don't interact with the coolant.

[avc15]

Another person used this concept to make LOX with his powerplant a while back.

If you had even a little supercoolant you could use it to make liquid hydrogen with 1 AT that's utilized less than 20% of the time.

Just some hints for future advancement for your design.

[hackcasual]

On 5/24/2019 at 9:51 AM, avc15 said:

Another person used this concept to make LOX with his powerplant a while back.

If you had even a little supercoolant you could use it to make liquid hydrogen with 1 AT that's utilized less than 20% of the time.

Just some hints for future advancement for your design.

My current plan is to use the ice to help liquify sour gas.