HCOPU (Hydrogen cooled Oxygen Production Unit)

[Rucki]

Hi,

maybe I found a good cooling oxygen solution for the new Launch update. I searched the forum and couldnt find anything similiar.
My goal was to make something as simple as possible, so that it is doable in normal games and as early as possible.

The Oxygen gets cooled in 2-3 Thermo Regulators which are placed in Hydrogen.
The Hydrogen in the "Cooling Chamber" then gets cooled by the newly produced hydrogen from the Electrolyzer which has 55c-60c, but this is enough.

Because the coolant hydrogen has so high temperatures it only works if the Thermo Regulators and the Pump in the Cooling Chamber are made out of gold, which is doable even in early game.

With 2 Thermo Regulators it is absolutely stable at 91c (hottest Thermo Regulator, tried it for over 50 cycles) and gives ca. 30c oxygen (not perfect, but ok).
With 3 Thermo regulators I got after 30cycles 118c (125c would destroy the Thermo Regulators) and then my debug game crashed. I dont believe that this absolutely stable, but I think it is stable enough for normal games, as you can every time stop the machines (thats what the switches are for) and let the machines cool off. If needed at all, as in normal games the whole machine wouldnt run all the time, because you dont need as much oxygen with 3-8 dupes.

With 3 Thermos you get nice 17c-18c Oxygen for your base or maybe even for cooling.

In the cooling chamber you must have the the rad pipes made out of wolfram and the tempshift plates as well (Copper is absolutely fine). (You could manually stop the machine in normal games before you got the materials)

This is not the perfect template, theres much room to improve, I have the chamber way to big because I tried a lot with automatization and other things. In the end I throw nearly all the automation away for simpler solutions. The Pipe temp sensor in the cooling chamber is for letting the hydrogen make a second round in the pipes, if they are not hot enough, but this isnt needed at all, I just had it there when I tested the whole thing with copper pipes which dont have good enough thermal conductivity for the whole thing.

The Electrolyzer can power itselfe and the cooling chamber needs 720w-740w which is enough for 1 coal plus 1 manual generator.
 

 

 

 

 

[Bromster]

This is a cool idea and an interesting use of heat mechanics. I saw a YouTube video the other day by I think gearhead gaming where he used the water being sent to his electrolyzers(s) to cool the oxygen being sent out via gas pipe down to the temperature of the incoming water because the mass and specific heat capacity blows oxygen's away. I think he used a valve to limit the flow to the oxygen shc/water six which was 1.3kg/sec I think?

 

It looked super practical and is along the same train of thought as your setup. This was interesting to read thanks for writing it up.

[SkunkMaster]

If it's for oxygen for the base, i would argue a Aquatuner is better. 

It uses 5x the energy but puts through 10x the amount of matter. Also if using water or PW you will have a much higher SHC then you could get with thermos and hydrogen. 

 

For rocket fuel you can take it a step further even:

[DaveSatx]

To me, nothing beats having a pool of 70F (or cooler) water you feed your electrolyzers. the pipes feeding them are radiant so i get steady temp oxygen. Been doing that forever it seems, had interesting convo on here about how wasteful it is to cool the water but oh well,
i'm having fun and now with the ice machine I just have to drop a few temp shift plates of ice to recharge it.

I like the idea of using the gas based temp control buildings but the limited pipe capacity of the gas pipes relegates them to small applications when compared to liquid. A very creative posting, thank you.

[srvs]

7 hours ago, SkunkMaster said:

...

Off-topic but why do you have your comfy beds in separate rooms?

[Rucki]

I must correct the post a little bit.

After testing the HCOPU in an normal game where I have build it around cycle 30 (after my starting area Algae went out), I hadn´t access to wolfram or tungsten, so I build the Tempshift plates and Radiant Pipes out of Copper which was absolutely fine. Tempshift plates, even if only made out of copper are really needed.

The machine works absolutely fine for me since ca. 160 cycles and its really easy to set up, every needed material is in the starting biome on Terra. The cooling chamber is stable at 92c/93c.

Can someone tell me if I calculated the the Heat-Delete Power of this machine correct ? Ca. 37.482 DTU/s in the Setup Im using with 3 Thermo Regulators, although I bet it can cool more. I used the ONI Cooling calculator like this:

888g x 1,005 shc x (343.15K - 301.15K) / 1 seconds
The Electrolyzer is creating 888g of Oxygen at 70c per second and 3x Thermo Regulators should cool it down (3x-14c=-42c) to 28c, although in practise I see the outcoming Oxygen at 25c-26c.

If this is true then the Heat Delete power isnt that bad I think, as its worth 3,1 Wheez (in this setup), lets say the Hydrogenerator which is key here to delete the heat is producing 4000 DTU/s, then we need afterwards 0,33 Wheez to that down as well, so then the whole setup would be worth round about 2,77 wheezworts, but without any further input like phosphorite.

 

 

 

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On 17.7.2019 at 2:08 PM, Bromster said:

This is a cool idea and an interesting use of heat mechanics. I saw a YouTube video the other day by I think gearhead gaming where he used the water being sent to his electrolyzers(s) to cool the oxygen being sent out via gas pipe down to the temperature of the incoming water because the mass and specific heat capacity blows oxygen's away. I think he used a valve to limit the flow to the oxygen shc/water six which was 1.3kg/sec I think?

 

It looked super practical and is along the same train of thought as your setup. This was interesting to read thanks for writing it up.

 

On 18.7.2019 at 9:40 AM, DaveSatx said:

To me, nothing beats having a pool of 70F (or cooler) water you feed your electrolyzers. the pipes feeding them are radiant so i get steady temp oxygen. Been doing that forever it seems, had interesting convo on here about how wasteful it is to cool the water but oh well,
i'm having fun and now with the ice machine I just have to drop a few temp shift plates of ice to recharge it.

I like the idea of using the gas based temp control buildings but the limited pipe capacity of the gas pipes relegates them to small applications when compared to liquid. A very creative posting, thank you.

Its indeed a clever idea to cool the outcoming oxygen even more with incoming water. I bet as long as there is a good water source with cool water the oxygen can get out at really cold temperatures like 10c. The only question is how to cool the water for this, after the starting water is used, as this would create further heat. 

On 18.7.2019 at 3:46 AM, SkunkMaster said:

If it's for oxygen for the base, i would argue a Aquatuner is better. 

It uses 5x the energy but puts through 10x the amount of matter. Also if using water or PW you will have a much higher SHC then you could get with thermos and hydrogen. 

 

For rocket fuel you can take it a step further even:

The cooling power of Aquatuners will be much stronger. But what are you doing with the heat created from the Aquatuner + heat created for the high power need of the Aquatuner ? The Aquatuners seems to be much stronger for the endgame and might be quite hard to archieve in the early-mid game.

[flapee]

one can even improve on the idea using hydrogen cooled , pump-less oxygen generation   = HyCoPLOG 

[DaveSatx]

3 hours ago, flapee said:

one can even improve on the idea using hydrogen cooled , pump-less oxygen generation   = HyCoPLOG 

[snip]

i like the idea    any hiccup leading to the wrong gas entering the wrong area leads to element conversion/corruption  so anyone else making this keep this in mind.  the dual gaseous element sensors solve the problem here, at least for hydrogen

 

 

 

[Xuhybrid]

I was thinking about this after wheezewort change and i figured it'd be better to put the hydrogen through the regulator and use that to cool the oxygen. Not sure how viable this is but i'll be checking on release.