Sharing my Lox+ LH2 setup. Processes 2 Kg/s of both hydrogen and oxygen.

[Lilscratchy]

Hello guys,

 

After a long streak of asking questions and looking at other people's questions for my own benefit i decided i'd try and give something back to the community. I've spent a long time fiddling with it, but i've made my very own design for producing liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. To start off: at the end i've included the save file. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:

Note: Yes, i am aware that this is sandbox. I have rebuilt it, taking screenshots along the way for the purpose of sharing this, the first time i actually built this was in survival. So to anyone wondering: yes it's perfectly doable in survival

In my opinion, its really not that much of a complicated build. its just two small loops of supercoolant running in oposite directions, and a thermal injector to condense the oxygen. i've been using it for about 400 to 500 cycles in my current world and ever since i got it working, i havent had to tinker with it.

Quirk(s) of this build:

Every now and then some hydrogen freezes in the condensing room, but i've found it to reliquify shortly after, its never been a problem for me thus far.

 

Materials used:

(for those not keen on using too many expensive materials) first iteration i made in survival:

Liquid pipes: granite and tungsten.

Insulated liquid pipes: insulation (ceramic would work too, but compromises efficiency)

Radiant pipes: Gold

Mechanized airlocks: Steel

Insulated tiles: Insulation

Aquatuners: steel

Window Tiles: Diamond

*This is not really capable of processing an inflow of 2kg/s of both hydrogen and oxygen. Maybe only if severely prechilled, but i havent tested that.

 

Current iteration in this 'tutorial':

 

Liquid pipes: granite and tungsten.

insulated liquid pipes: insulation (ceramic would work too, but compromises efficiency)

Radiant pipes: thermium

Mechanized airlocks: Thermium

Aquatuners: steel

Window Tiles: Diamond

 

If it looks interesting to you, i will, from here on try to explain how to build this thing. 

First off, im going to start with the heart of this thing: Two Aquatuners and a steamturbine. We start off with a 7 wide, by two high steam room. Then a liquid vent in the middle of the steam room. On the left and right side are two aquatuners with their output ports facing towards the centre. of course the traditional bypasses in these systems are facing towards the centre as wel.

Hook up some automation wires running 1 tile down from the ports, and to the outer walls of the steamroom so that you can connect them to liquid pipe thermo sensors ) set to: Above -259C from the outside. Use Heavy Watt conductive joint plates to run heavy watt Wire out of the steam room. Run wires. 

finish by running a couple pipe segments up and out of the steam room, parallel to eachother and passing the liquid vent on the left and right side. The first two segments that run behind the steam turbine are to be made of regular granite pipes. These will be more than enough to keep the turbine cool when everything runs. Lastly, run a pipe from the turbine output to the liquid vent.

Dont forget to fill the steamroom with water, i filled it with a total of about 1000 kg of the stuff. Surround the turbine with tiles, and put a heavy watt conductive joint plate somewhere so that the turbine can be hooked up. Before you close off this area, fill it with somewhere around 2 kg per tile of hydrogen.

It should end up looking something like this:

 

Our next step is to build the little 'U shape holding the liquid pump you see, run some piping and wiring out so that it can be hooked up later. line the tiles the pump occupies with drywall.

 

Now you set up the frame for the area where hydrogen condensates. put  2 diamond window tiles 1 tile up, and two tiles to the left and right of the pump. put insulated tiles on the corners and place two 6 tile vertical rows of diamond window tiles, and 6 tile horizontal row at the top. Then, place 2 horizontal rows of 4 diamond window tiles, leaving a 4x2 gap in the middle. (dont forget to leave a gap for dupe access as shown in the picture. This is what you end up with:

Next were going to fill in some space. fill in the outer edges with diamond tempshift plates. In the 4x2 centre rectangle, only the bottom left and right tiles are made up of tempshift plates. The rest of the 4x2 rectangle is made of drywall made of sandstone. chuck in some high pressure gas vents (with pipes running out so they can be hooked up from the outside) and thats it for this step.

Now we're going to do some plumbing. The two loops make use of regular, insulated, and radiant piping. take a look at this picture of the regular pipe segments first.

:

The two pipe segments on the bottom left and right of the 4x2 square, (as well as two segments running directly over the liquid pump which by accident are not included in the screenshot, but are visible in the next one). are to be made of granite. The other regular pipe segments are to be made from tungsten. The output of the left liquid brige, and the input of the right liquid bridge of the pair, are fitted with insulated pipes. 

This next step is simple:

Dot the corners of the condensing chamber with insulated pipes.

next up: the radiant pipes.

Simply connect everything with thermium (or gold, risking less efficiency) radiant pipes.) it should come out something like this:

\

As you can see, in this screenshot ive taken the liberty of  completing the inner loop already. The way this is set up, it runs clockwise, make sure the outer loop, runs the opposite direction. (counter clockwise).

Now connect the outer loop to the left most aquatuner, so that it runs counter clockwise. it should come out looking like this:

NOTE: i havent put these in until later, because dumb me forgot, but place some liquid reservoirs connected to the loops. The outputs of which run through the liquid pipe thermo-sensor and into the AT (as per usual with steamturbine- AT setups). Also: in the end you'll suddenly see hydrosensors pop up in the condensing room for the hydrogen and oxygen, they serve to shut off gass flow when ive collected a certain amount of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. i'm not really dedicating any room to them in this tutorial

This is the most complicated of things done. Close everything up, except the right most row of vertical diamond window tiles. Were going to put together the thermal injector for condensing oxygen now.

Chuck in 3 vertically stacked mechanized airlocks next to the diamond window tiles. I've used steel, and thermium, the latter of which conducts heat/cold better. run automation wire down through all 3 airlocks and run it horizontally to the right from the bottom tile of the bottom door for 2 tiles, where there will be a temperature sensor. I recommend powering the airlocks.

stack another row of diamond window tiles next to the airlocks, encasing them in diamond window tiles. make sure to put insulated tiles both above and beneath the row of window tiles and airlocks.

Now, vertically stack 6 diamond tempshift plates. and put a temp. sensor on the bottom tempshift plate, where you previously already placed an automation wire. set this temp. sensor to Below -189C.

Now, one tile to the right of the temp senor, you should place some drywall, and directly beneath that a 2x2 patch of drywall. This is where the liquid oxygen will run into, and where your liquid pump will pump it out.

Lets go back to the top of the row of tempshift plates, go one tile to the right, and put down another diamond tempshift plate, and a high pressure gas vent on top of it. Then take the second tempshiftplate from the top, and put a high pressure gas vent there as wel. Run some pipes out for later connection, do the same for the liquid pump. Encase the thing in insulated tiles and you should have something like this.

Everything is pretty much ready now! All thats left now is to fill the loops with supercoolant. Now i'd say its optional to add the hydrosensors as explained earlier, but it makes the thing a little controllable from the outside. i filled up the loops until the liquid reservoirs had a little under 200 kg of supercoolant in them.

Now let the AT's run until the supercoolant comes close to its target temperature of 259C. In the meantime your turbine will heat up, but after everything is running it will cool gradually.

I had a lot of unused wort seeds, so that allowed me to pre-chill the oxygen and hydrogen to below -10. For the purposes of showcasing this build i used hydrogen and oxygen at -10C.i dont know if the system can handle 2kg/s of oxygen and hydrogen at say 30C. If anyone chooses to test this, feel free to let me know!.

So, after the super coolant is at around the right temperature, start feeding the system your gasses and voila, you've got liquid oxygen and hydrogen!

Here are some complete overviews to summarize:

Thanks guys! Hope some of you like it, and better yet, find a use for it. If anyone has any questions, comments or suggestions i'd be happy to hear!

 

 

 

 

HERE'S THE SAVEFILE.

Antfarm.sav

[Denisetwin]

Love your step by step photos, super easy to follow, congrats!

[SkunkMaster]

Not trying to be elitist, but you are aware that your system is not that efficient, right ? 

Using gas pumps generally is very bad when it comes to liquid hydrogen / oxygen setups. 

 

Spoiler

 

[Lilscratchy]

6 hours ago, SkunkMaster said:

Not trying to be elitist, but you are aware that your system is not that efficient, right ? 

Using gas pumps generally is very bad when it comes to liquid hydrogen / oxygen setups. 

 

  Hide contents

 

I mean it's likely far from as efficient as can be. I don't doubt that for a second. However those pictures actually the first build I've seen not using gas pumps to get hydrogen and oxygen into their condensation spaces. 

I would love to know how though... My first instinct would be to not have electrolyzers in them since they create some heat, my guess would be more than Gass pumps but I could be wrong. This game has punished me many a time for relying on instincts. 

Efficiency wasn't an exceptionally high priority for me but improvement is always welcome. I shared this mostly since it was to me a relatively easy build that works reliably. 

Now I could try eliminating gas pumps if it provides significant enough benefits. However my current colony has recovered from a long streak of being really tight on water usage. My supply couldn't afford just chucking in some electrolyzers solely for liquid oxygen and hydrogen production. Right now I'm using any runoff hydrogen and oxygen for it

Nevertheless it's something I could implement if I'm going to try and improve my build.

Are there by chance any posts on the forums on these builds you showed? Would love to see 'em. 

Thanks for the feedback dude

[suxkar]

12 hours ago, SkunkMaster said:

Not trying to be elitist, but you are aware that your system is not that efficient, right ? 

Using gas pumps generally is very bad when it comes to liquid hydrogen / oxygen setups. 

 

  Hide contents

 

I can't say anything about the first setup, but the second deletes large quantities of hydrogen. I've made a post with many tests, you can lose as much as 80% of the hydrogen. Mesh tiles seemed to be the worst among the various setups. I since then abandoned the idea of directly freezing the output of electrolyzers. I personally prefer to waste power rather than water.

[SkunkMaster]

On 6/13/2020 at 4:49 AM, Lilscratchy said:

Are there by chance any posts on the forums on these builds you showed? Would love to see 'em. 

Nah, they're just examples from my own games. 

 

On 6/13/2020 at 10:40 AM, suxkar said:

 you can lose as much as 80% of the hydrogen. 

Never noticed that, that said the second setup is way older then the first... shipping still took some energy and the first build cut even that out...