SPOM Trouble?

[nookii]

Hello, I am a relatively new player to the game and I'm trying to make a spom. In games like this, I like to test things out, learn from my mistakes and make my own designs instead of using perfect designs from the internet but now I'm pulling my hair out because I don't know whats wrong with my spom. Supposedly its making less than 300kg of oxygen per cycle. I have 7 dupes so one electrolyzer should be working fine, so i don't know whats wrong. 

Here's what it look like:

it uses electrolyzer to power hydrogen generator. hydrogen generator automatically turn off when battery is full, then excess hydrogen get moves to aetn for free cooling. I made it to have a "turbo" mode in case I want to fill up my atmos suits faster but if my math is correct then i shouldn't need it to be always active to have good sustain oxygen. 

heres gas overlay

iirc a gas pipe channel can handle 2 pumps at most so i have 2 pumps on main channel and one pump on auxiliary channel. then i route my oxygen to these tanks

and then divide it between atmos suit and my base. 

 

if a cycle is 600 seconds and 1 electrolyzer makes 888g/s oxygen then don't I have almost 533 kg oxygen supposed to being made every cycle? why is it reporting less than 300kg? i thought it may be because of atmos suit dock but if dupe is in suit that means they are not consuming oxygen from base and yet both my base oxygen and dock oxygen is low too. so what is going on here?

 

any help would be appreciated thanks

[Angpaur]

Click your electrolyzers and go to last tab and check what is their up time - this will epxlain why you get so little oxygen.

Then think how to rearange your oxygen pumps position, so you can pump more oxygen in same time and thus allow for higher uptime of electrolyzers.

 

Also connecting 2 pumps to one pipe like this will cause to only one of them to work, the other will report blocked pipe.

[OxCD]

Is your cooling system working ? How cold is your oxygen out ?

An AETN uses surrounding gas to cool the atmosphere. But the design goal is to pump gas as soon it's out. So your AETN may not have time to cool a lot.

Also, I'm wondering if, like wheezewort, an AETN isn't it cooling more efficiently when surrounding atmosphere is hydrogen ? (but I may be wrong, since AT/ST is out I've never used a single AETN, so it's far away in my head).

[Gurgel]

I don't do SPOMs. But I find that for a base with 7 dupes to get nicely flooded with Oxygen, you should put at least 2 electrolyzers in there.

[Prince Mandor]

11 hours ago, nookii said:

any help would be appreciated thanks

If you don't like to copy some existing designs, let's think how you can debug this.

Some basic improvement. Pump cannot work if pipe filled with gas. So, if you turn on additional pumps, second pump can not work -- pipe always will be filled with some gas from first pump. This can be remedied if gas from both pumps go to some input (bridge or valve).

Another thing is top hydrogen pump. It is pumping small amounts of hydrogen. Possibly you can play with sensor value or hydrogen chamber to make it pump 500g packets. This improve energy efficiency. Pump consume same energy, no matter how little gas it is pumping

 

Now lets look at your main problem. If you turn off turbo mode you will have only one pump, pumping oxygen. this is 500 g/s, or 300 kg/cycle in perfect condition. This is your numbers. Solution -- add second pump for oxygen. If you pumping out too little oxygen, electrolyzer stops. It "overpressurize" if you don't pump oxygen away quick enough.

But. Here will be next problem. You use oxygen as cooling media (AETN cooling air oxygen, air oxygen cooling pipes). If you pump gas quickly, there will be too little gas to conduct warmth from pipes to AETN. If you pump gas slowly, electrolyzer became overpressurized. Possibly it will be good idea to separate cooling chamber? And then you can use more thermally-conductive gas, than oxygen (hydrogen is best)

 

Or we can go another way entirely.

Of course we can trick electrolyzer. You can think about it as some clever way blocking electrolyzer sensor. Or just understand it like ONI quantum physics -- we have quantum of elements, better known as tile.

Speaking in game term, just put small amount of liquids over electrolyzer, and it will think there are not enough gas around to overpressurize. In this case you need some better way to separate tons of oxygen from hydrogen

[Thanatos994]

As others have mentioned, the downtime from the electrolyzer being over-pressured is the problem. Specifically, your hydrogen pump is the problem. Each air pump moves 500g/s, you have two pumps active for one electrolyzer, and one pump is moving only hydrogen. Well, only 112g/s hydrogen is being created, so that pump is pumping about a fifth of its capacity, but your other pump is trying to move 888g/s O2 and can only move 500g/s, ergo you are causing the room to over-pressure and your electrolyzer to have a lot of downtime. 

 

The most energy efficient way to handle this is to lose the fancy filtration method and get thee a gas filter. Your hydrogen pump you'll notice pulls 240w even though it's pumping at a small portion of its capacity. If you add an extra O2 pump, it will be trying to move 333g/s O2, but it will have downtime as it runs out of O2 to move thanks to the other O2 pump, thus it will have an average draw of less than 240w. However that average draw is roughly proportional to 333/500, meaning it draws 160w. Thus a 120w gas filter is more efficient. 

 

An extra edit: in order to have 0 downtime with two air pumps and a gas filter you do have to be clever though. If you hook it up the wrong way, your gas filter will cause your air pumps to shut down intermittently and your electrolyzer will over-pressure. Pay careful attention to what's happening then and you'll figure it out tho. 

[sheaker]

Maybe You can find useful my design from here. It is not using Anti Entropy Thermo Nullifier but You can cool oxygen with WW. (Included in design)

[nookii]

Thank you for all the help guys. Some of you said aetn didn't get a good chance to cool so i decided to separate generation and cooling. I also changed it so it is always "turbo" mode. I also figure out how to use automation better to stop generation if I have too much oxygen, so now I save water. I also add another hyrdo gen to deal with load of having all those pumps on at once. I also use water valve at 1500g/s to stop max gas pressure. I set atmos to 500g for more efficent pump activation.

All combined now i have alot of excess oxygen and excess hydrogen

 

The canister bottler and emptier is for trying to evactuate oxygen out of aetn room so i can dump hydrogen in there for better cooling, but it doesn't seem to be working too well... (is there better way of removing old air and pushing hydrogen in?)

 

i also reorganized buffer tanks so atmos gets its own dedicated supply

even without hydrogen in aetn room, oxygen coming out at a brisk -50 F (-45 C) 

lol the design is really messy but im glad it works now

[Prince Mandor]

9 hours ago, nookii said:

All combined now i have alot of excess oxygen and excess hydrogen

Couple more ideas.

Try to evade T-shaped pipe connections. It may working perfectly for thousand cycles, but one day in a future, seven screens away from this place you connect your pipes in some specific way -- and gas stop flowing because game cannot calculate proper direction of this flowing. So if in some local area you can make it "one output way" -- do it. In this design You can connect output from third pump directly to the input of bridge over second pipe, so each segment of pipe has only one input and one output. This is not needed and not mandatory in any way, but it can save a lot of headache in far away future, because as you can see all this pipes very quickly became some monstrous spaghetti.

 

Another one. Now you "have alot of excess oxygen and excess hydrogen". What happens to this system if there are too much hydrogen and it overfills chamber and go into oxygen pipes? What happens if there are too much oxygen and it overfills and go to hydrogen pipes?

There are tons of things you can do to make it safe, but the simplest of them all -- just add a Gas Pipe Element Sensor on pipe and connect simple Automated Notifier to it -- this way you at least will know about problem.before things get really messy

 

You have broken Electrolyzers. This means some wrong liquid come to them. It can be easily avoided. Just add a liquid pipe element sensor to detect water and put Liquid Shutoff just after it, So, if water in pipe shutoff is open.

And make pipe to pass by this shutoff to liquid vent, so if there are something else in pipe, then shutoff stay closed and this other liquid just pass by it and drop on a floor