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CoolRod - An Early Game Cooled Rodriguez SPOM


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Guys, I wanted to make a cooled Rodriguez SPOM with early game materials. The design owes a lot to psirrow, Jahws, and Majiir for the O2 chiller. Credit to John Francis for popularizing the Rodriguez. I know lots of people have a cooled Rodriguez but most of those I've seen use Space Age materials like supercoolant, and most aren't setup as a true SPOM. The hamster wheels are just to kick start the device, after the coolant is chilled down it is self sustaining and energy/hydrogen positive.

After 20+ cycles to reach thermal equilibrium, over a 300 sec period this thing puts out an average of 5.57 kg/s of O2 at an average temp of 13.7 deg C 2.98 kg/sec O2 at average of 18.3 deg C

Original figures were off because 1) I was running cool water in to the electrolyzers, new test with 97 deg C water for 20 cycles before test. 2) I had the game on 2x speed :). These figures make more sense because people usually say the Rodriguez can supply O2 for about 30 dupes, which require 3 kg/s. Mine isn't running perfectly so it will only serve 29 dupes. The new test demonstrates this SPOM continues to be power/H2 positive under longer use, real game conditions.

The aquatuner box also has a spare aquatuner that you can hookup to cool, whatever you want.

Materials:

All wires: gold or gold amalgam (automation wires gold too)

Steam turbine: plastic and gold

Aquatuner - Steel but you can probably make it out of gold amalgam.

Machinery (pumps, electrolyzers, etc) - Gold amalgam

Metal tiles - gold for the countercurrent chiller tiles, used iron for the tiles under the hydrogen gens.

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Gases in chambers: Steam Turbine chamber, goal 5k/tile hydrogen (same for the hydrogen gen chamber but anywhere from 1kg-5kg per tile should work). Steam/aquatuner chamber 40 kg per tile water x 18 tiles. Electrolyzer chamber - need to prime it - i.e. run the electrolyzers until the top of the chamber is all hydrogen including all four squares of the hydrogen gas pump.

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If there is demand I'll put together a video of building this in survival.

Comments, suggestions, critiques are all welcome.

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Other notes: I use a medium transformer mod, but you can substitute large transformers without any changes.

Consider adding a clock automation trigger attached to the electrolyzers so you can have fine control.

I recommend not connecting the hydrogen overflow tank until the hydrogen backs up to ensure there is enough power to sustain the SPOM.

 

"They call me Calvin Coolidge / Call me chosen / I got no fridge / Cause my sh*t is frozen."

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1 hour ago, Craigjw said:

I can't believe you'd suggest hooking up an AT to a refinery, that's just nuts.

Damn right. Maybe poster's not aware of the potential of the refinery liquid loop.

Or maybe he's just suggesting to cool the refinery itself, and not the liquid output from it.

@Logiwonk didn't this architectural H/O2 filter design coming from @JohnFrancis ? The first time I've seen it was from him, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, it's a pleasure to see that hydrogen and excess heat deletion (turbine operation) is enough to power electrolyzers, pumps and the AT. If you asked me before your setup, I would have guess not enough power generation. 

So thanks for this info.

 

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@xenoborg - Thanks will run a longer test and post the results.

@OxCD - Francis John was certainly the first person I saw using a Rodriguez, I didn't know he came up with the design (couldn't find any source for that). He's an amazing ONI content producer and really has changed how I think about the game.

@OxCD and @Craigjw - I usually run a cooling loop for my industrial applications using a liquid reservoir connected to an aquatuner which also cools the output water from the metal refinery - I used the same type of setup that Jahws demonstrates in his mid-game guide. What do you guys do with your metal refinery hot coolant output?

 

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@RadWarrior - Good question, I've never had two aquatuners operating at 100% uptime but most of my steam turbine cooling builds use a ratio of 1 steam turbine to 2 aquatuners, mostly so I can dedicate aquatuners to specific cooling tasks. I suspect that with 100% uptime on two aquatuners that would overwhelm the heat deletion from one steam turbine given the performance of Francis Johns one steam turbine build for making liquid O2 / H2 (you need to start up either the O2 or H2 first on that build otherwise the steam turbine can't keep up if you start up both at the same time given the large heat output from the initial cooling of the supercoolant).

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@OxCD and @Craigjw - I've been doing some more reading on the forums and I think I get what you're hinting at, using an AT to cool refinery output is paying power for the pleasure of deleting a resource, namely the heat the refinery produces which can be harnessed for power production or crude oil boiling into petrol. When I got back into the game after a hiatus I spent a lot of time with Jahws' guides which are great overall but I tend to think his cooling solutions are over-complicated. If you guys have some favorite builds for utilizing the waste heat from the refinery please link them, I would love to stop dumping power in to ATs to cool the refinery output!

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On 14/11/2019 at 1:46 PM, RadWarrior said:

One steam turbine can delete the heat for 2 aquatuners?

I've already implemented one turbine with 2 AT using pH2O, as far as I can remember I didn't waste any power generation. But I should admit that maybe my ATs weren't used 100% uptime... Not enough meticulous observation/memory from me.

 

On 14/11/2019 at 12:23 PM, Logiwonk said:

What do you guys do with your metal refinery hot coolant output?

I use petroleum, and this one directly goes into a steam chamber below a turbine. Using radiant pipe, it's cooled by the turbine heat deletion.

It's built as a loop so if the t° into the steam chamber goes to high, I stop the petroleum input and I let the turbine peacefully to digest the excess heat (use a liquid tank as a buffer before for hot petro and another one after for cooled petro to keep the flow going on so the refinery can work at any time). Of course, sensors are automating the whole thing, there's absolutely no manual operation, excepting the refinery itself.

 

On 14/11/2019 at 2:54 PM, Logiwonk said:

@OxCD and @Craigjw - using an AT to cool refinery output is paying power for the pleasure of deleting a resource, namely the heat the refinery produces

Exactly. The more heat you can transfer into your steam chamber without using any Watt, the more Watt bonus you get from the turbine. Do not hesitate to use liquid loop to transfer the heat (gas loop is usually less effective) or rail loop (filled with conductive element in there, like refined Aluminium, or refined Gold, or steel, etc...). Rail loops are really efficient for heat exchange when it's going through tiles.

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4 hours ago, RadWarrior said:

One steam turbine can delete the heat for 2 aquatuners?

Here's a more precise answer :

1 Aquatuner with polluted water = 585.060 DTU / sec

1 Aquatuner with super coolant = 1.181.600 DTU / sec

The Steam Turbine remove 877 590 DTU / sec but produce 91 760 DTU / sec so a net heat deletion -789 830 DTU / sec

https://oni-db.com/details/steamturbine2

So yes, as @OxCD said, the turbine can handle almost 2 aquatuners with polluted water even you will generate some excess heat.

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6 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Is a rodriguez some machine translation error, or is that an actual piece of machinery, engineering concept or something else I haven't heard of?

It's the 4 electrolyzer setup shown in the first post.  John Francis credited a person named Rodriguez for the design in one of his vids.

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Do you need to use metal for the heat exchanger?  I know that metals have fairly high conductivity, but there's only 100 kg of mass in the tile.  A tile full of water holds 1000kg.  Or does mass only matter for heat transfer between gasses?

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@Radwarrior - Francis John (on YT, here John Francis) uses the Rodriguez a lot in his recent videos, he'll put one up in space and just vent the O2 through mesh tiles at the bottom and use it for hydrogen production only, wasteful sure, but if you have a good water supply it puts out more hydrogen than a H2 geyser, and the Rodriguez produces stupid amounts of O2, the one in the first post does 5.57 kg per secion = 55 dupes worth of O2 if my calculations are correct.

Just now, psusi said:

Do you need to use metal for the heat exchanger?  I know that metals have fairly high conductivity, but there's only 100 kg of mass in the tile.  A tile full of water holds 1000kg.  Or does mass only matter for heat transfer between gasses?

Good question, I'm running some tests on this tonight after work I'll try swapping out the material in the heat exchanger and see if I can find something cheaper that works as well.

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49 minutes ago, psusi said:

Do you need to use metal for the heat exchanger?  I know that metals have fairly high conductivity, but there's only 100 kg of mass in the tile.  A tile full of water holds 1000kg.  Or does mass only matter for heat transfer between gasses?

As long as you can remove the heat with the AT, using a liquid as the transfer medium is fine, it just takes longer to heat up or cool down.  A single AT can cool a LOT of O2 and 4 electrolyzers isn't close to that figure.

As a rule of thumb, a single AT will be able to cool 2000kg/s of O2 to -150c AND 2000kg/s of H2 to -250c using super coolant.   I know this, as this is my current configuration for my Lox & LH2.  I also have another configuration running, which cools 4000kg/s of O2 to 5c with PW coolant and it's not running anywhere close to 100%.

I use metal blocks to cool my O2 in 4x4 squares, which is sufficient, metal is used as it's just easier to build.  I ran another build, using perhaps 6 electrolzyers, where I was only running metal pipes around the O2 & H2 gas sections of the electrolyzers and this was fine also.

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Just now, Craigjw said:

As long as you can remove the heat with the AT, using a liquid as the transfer medium is fine, it just takes longer to heat up or cool down.  A single AT can cool a LOT of O2 and 4 electrolyzers isn't close to that figure.

Yes, but is the rate of heat transfer faster with the metal tiles than water?  In other words, to do it with water would you need a larger tank with more radiant pipes to get the oxygen cooled down?

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The transfer medium of water/pw or metal tiles isn't the issue, it's the material you use for the gas pipes that matters, as this is what limits the heat transfer between the pipe contents and the medium.  When ever I take a look at the metal blocks, they are uniformly the same temperature as the coolant from the AT.

I had perhaps 15-20 sections of metal pipes cooling the O2 gas from 6 electrolyzers, the cooling medium was O2, not liquid & not metal tiles and this was sufficient to cool the O2 to 10c. 

I would suggest that O2 is one of the the crappest mediums and this still worked, so switching between petrol, water or metal tiles for the medium is really quite a moot question.

 

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I would assume that what matters chiefly for the tile (or liquid) element is what is the thermal conductivity since those metal tiles are there to facilitate heat transfer from the radiant vents to the radiant pipes. Insulated materials only take into account the lowest TC but with radiant pipes they just double the TC of the base material, so the TC of the tiles should also be a significant factor in heat transfer.

What @Craigjw is saying makes a lot of sense, for O2 changing the materials is unlikely to have a huge impact on the cooling rate for O2.

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The transfer medium isn't or shouldn't be what you should be asking.   The total amount of heat being transferred is so small that the medium doesn't matter.

The real question you should be asking is, how many gas pipe sections do i need for a particular gas and what are the gas pipes made from. 

Anything else is moot I tell thee.

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5 minutes ago, Logiwonk said:

I would assume that what matters chiefly for the tile (or liquid) element is what is the thermal conductivity since those metal tiles are there to facilitate heat transfer from the radiant vents to the radiant pipes. Insulated materials only take into account the lowest TC but with radiant pipes they just double the TC of the base material, so the TC of the tiles should also be a significant factor in heat transfer.

Yes, the radiant pipe doubles its own conductivity, but does it then use only that, or does it still average that with the TC of the tile it is in?  If the latter than metal vs water wouldn't matter, but if it is the former then it does.

 

2 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

The real question you should be asking is, how many gas pipe sections do i need for a particular gas and what are the gas pipes made from. 

Right... so if the metal tiles are more conductive then you can use a shorter radiant pipe to exchange the same heat.  Water will still work of course, but you may need to use more radiant pipe instead if the metal tile is helping to conduct the heat better than water.

 

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if you use aluminium gas pipes, it's still going to take the same number of tiles to cool X amount of gas/s whether you use metal or liquid.  There might be some very slight difference between mediums, but this is negligible.

The metal tiles on my LOX & LH2, there are perhaps 4x20, and guess what?  they are ALL the same temperature from the hot side, right through to the cold side.  There is more SHC in the same volume of liquid, therefore, the temperature of the liquid isn't going to change either and what DOES affect the rate of cooling is what my gas pipes are made from.

1 metal tile is 100 times the mass of a packet of gas, 1 liquid tile is 1000 times the mass of a packet of gas.  Does common sense not tell you that the medium type doesn't matter?

GAS PIPES PEOPLE, GAS PIPES.

Stop discussing what medium you should use as it's negligible.

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