Jump to content

Direct HydroLox Liquification


Recommended Posts

I give you the direct HydroLox Liquidifcation Unit:

5dcf86eca8cde_DirectLiquidification.thumb.png.46fc7c289822ca06307e68a03ef564c5.png

Why waste energy and space pumping around hydrogen and oxygen when you can just liquify them in place? 

Design is scale-able to however many electrolyzers you'd like. They don't quite run at full uptime: Over 10 cycles this averaged 0.89kg/s of hydrogen vs. the 1.12 kg/s you'd expect of 100% uptime. Not bad though. 

Oxygen production can be split between pumping air (for your atmo-suit docks), and liquification (for rockets). If you don't want the oxygen, you could even just open the bottom of this to space and vent it. 

Whole thing seems obvious enough I'm guessing someone's done it, but I haven't seen it...

4 hours ago, biopon said:

How many ATs do you have cooling the hydrogen? If just one, it won't be able to liquify 1120g/sec. That may explain why your output is lower than expected. You could probably do 15 electrolyzers with 2 ATs.

 

I’ll post the fluid overlays when I get back to my computer. Not limited by AT power: if I go colder I start solidifying the hydrogen. The area directly above the electrolyzers is cooled to beyond oxygen solidification to pre-cool the hydrogen extensively. The lower area is set to a higher temp to make sure you don’t solidify the oxygen. 

I haven’t looked at exactly how much power it’s taking, but there is very little thermal leak: the gas side oxygen is still ~70C when we’re pumping it out. 

7 hours ago, wronny said:

I have been tinkering with a similar setup, though I'm still pumping the Hydrogen as gas and only liquify the Oxygen in place. That way I can use the Hydrogen for means other than rocket fuel.

Ahhhh- once I’ve got Hydrogen rockets all my H2 goes there. Even this monster would take a cycle and a half to fill a single liquid fuel tank. What else do you need hydrogen for at this stage of the game?

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...