electrolyzer, time and output temperature

[Cablemonkey]

Hello all! Just getting back into ONI after a break, much to my wife's dismay. I'm a chronic early-game restarter, but I'm trying to get over that behavior. Anyway, I never cleared 100 cycled in my earlier games, so never really got off algae as my O2 source, and thus never built a spom outside of sandboxing. I'm finally getting ready to do that in my current game, but the temperatures I'm seeing in my sandbox aren't what i was expecting. As I understand it, the electrolyzer should be be spitting out 70 degree O2 and H, if my incoming water is below that. But the gas I'm seeing is nowhere near that warm. With the basic spom setup with zero cooling, my O2 coming out started the same temp as my water (27 degrees), and after like 10 cycles isn't even to 50 degrees yet (checking temp of packets in gas pipe). I don't know the math, but I almost want to chalk that up to the heat generated by the electrolyzer itself in such a small place (and in insulated tile). Does it take a while for the temperature of the gas produced to ramp up to 70 degrees? I'm not complaining, but it wasn't what I was expecting to see.

[nakomaru]

It's coming out at 70C, but the other stuff in your area, especially tiles which have substantial mass, are currently cooling the gas down for you. It'll keep heating up to 70C.

[Gurgel]

You can put one or two loops of radiant pipes around an electrolyzer and cool the gases with the input water feed. That is my usual solution.

[Lifegrow]

33 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

You can put one or two loops of radiant pipes around an electrolyzer and cool the gases with the input water feed. That is my usual solution.

I'd always recommend cooling your gasses after separation - it's pointless to waste energy cooling hydrogen in most cases.

If your input water is fresh from a geyser/vent at ~95º you can even dump a bit of heat into your hydrogen before burning it.

Of course, if you plan to liquefy it later for rocket fuel then it pays off to cool it as it's just energy saved further down the line. Horses for courses I guess  

[Gurgel]

6 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

I'd always recommend cooling your gasses after separation - it's pointless to waste energy cooling hydrogen in most cases.

Simplicity is never "pointless".

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Cablemonkey If I may recommend search for mechanical filter... try Google, you'll see what I mean. It splits hydrogen from oxygen without power so you can cool the oxygen only without much hassle as lifegrow suggest 

Disregard this post if you already know the principle. 

[Lifegrow]

2 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Simplicity is never "pointless".

it's no more complicated to cool a tank of oxygen instead of cooling the electrolyzers, it's still just one radiator.

The only difference is in one instance you're pissing away energy cooling something that'll end up getting burned anyway, within a build that is normally built in the first couple of hundred cycles for most people and lasts until their playthrough ends.

That small amount of energy adds up over time...

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, Lifegrow said:

it's no more complicated to cool a tank of oxygen instead of cooling the electrolyzers, it's still just one radiator.

The only difference is in one instance you're pissing away energy cooling something that'll end up getting burned anyway, within a build that is normally built in the first couple of hundred cycles for most people and lasts until their playthrough ends.

That small amount of energy adds up over time...

You assume that oxygen makes it into a tank. You assume wrongly.

Also "normally built"? Unselfconscious design is utterly boring and pointless.

[Lifegrow]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

normally built in the first couple of hundred cycles for most people

See the condition there? For most people.

Most players store a buffer of Oxygen, and most players aim to get away from algae/po2 production as quickly as they can. I know this because I've looked at hundreds of saves/screenshots and spoken to thousands of people about it. Again, not all people, most people based of a fairly strong sample group.

Regardless, miss-quoting aside, even if you're not storing your oxygen, you can still just cool the already-filtered oxygen gas piping by passing it via a liquid radiator all the same, i'm not sure what your point is. I'm just trying to save people wasted power, with no extra work...

[Nebbie]

Oxygen has such a low SHC that it's not surprising even with its low thermal conductivity that a little bit of it spat out hot will cool down to the temperature of what's in the pipes. Anyways, cool down your base's air and let the temperature diffuse, but do try to focus on the elctrolyzers in particular because you don't want them heating up and overheating, as then you've got extra problems.

Also, am I like the only one that likes to play on Verdante and just forego all this nonsense with consuming algae then making SPOMs in favor of slapping down oxyferns in a CO2 pit? I really feel like Verdante is more what the game should be, where pressure instead of constantly falling without much intervention because dupes delete gas like crazy will get too high from cycling gases and putting out extra from fossil fuel usage.

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Cablemonkey

I remembered something else as I was reading through the other posts...

Let's assume you've separated hydrogen from oxygen...and now you like to burn the h2 for energy via generators...build the generators inside a room and make this room accessible through a liquid lock (Google it if unknown)...now pipe the h2 to the room but don't connect it directly to the generators...build a vent to fill the room first with h2 (that's your cooling medium now so your gens don't overheat) the vent will stop filling the room at 2kg pressure....so now after the vent build radiant pipes behind the generators....what does this do? New h2 from your electrolyzers will run first through the radiator and cool your gens before you burn it so they never overheat (mind that you'll have to make the gens out of gold amalgam)...thats as low maintenance as possible afaik

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

See the condition there? For most people.

Most players store a buffer of Oxygen, and most players aim to get away from algae/po2 production as quickly as they can. I know this because I've looked at hundreds of saves/screenshots and spoken to thousands of people about it. Again, not all people, most people based of a fairly strong sample group.

Regardless, miss-quoting aside, even if you're not storing your oxygen, you can still just cool the already-filtered oxygen gas piping by passing it via a liquid radiator all the same, i'm not sure what your point is. I'm just trying to save people wasted power, with no extra work...

So you are promoting a non-experimental, non-learning style where optimization is the ultimate goal, and copying optimized designs from others is the core strategy? And at the same time, finding things out and trying alternate approaches is not desirable? You know, for industrial designs destined for mass-production, that is a good approach. 

I do agree that simplicity ("KISS") is at the high end of the art and not accessible to everybody. But representing mediocre approaches as ideal is not really in line with the ideas of personal advancement and personal growth either. So I am opposed to doing it.

1 hour ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

@Cablemonkey

I remembered something else as I was reading through the other posts...

Let's assume you've separated hydrogen from oxygen...and now you like to burn the h2 for energy via generators...build the generators inside a room and make this room accessible through a liquid lock (Google it if unknown)...now pipe the h2 to the room but don't connect it directly to the generators...build a vent to fill the room first with h2 (that's your cooling medium now so your gens don't overheat) the vent will stop filling the room at 2kg pressure....so now after the vent build radiant pipes behind the generators....what does this do? New h2 from your electrolyzers will run first through the radiator and cool your gens before you burn it so they never overheat (mind that you'll have to make the gens out of gold amalgam)...thats as low maintenance as possible afaik

No need to do this so complicated. Just running radiant pipes behind the generators and encasing the whole thing in insulated tiles is pretty much enough as long as there is some atmosphere of any kind. Gold amalgam or steel likely required unless you cool the H2 with the O2 for a pretty irrelevant 20% loss in cooling efficiency. Or even less, as you do not need to cool the H2 down as much.

[Cablemonkey]

18 hours ago, nakomaru said:

It's coming out at 70C, but the other stuff in your area, especially tiles which have substantial mass, are currently cooling the gas down for you. It'll keep heating up to 70C.

Thanks for direct answer, that makes the most sense, but then this is ONI so does making sense count for much? And thanks to everyone else for the resulting tips and discussion, every thread is an opportunity to learn new things.

[Gurgel]

58 minutes ago, Cablemonkey said:

Thanks for direct answer, that makes the most sense, but then this is ONI so does making sense count for much? And thanks to everyone else for the resulting tips and discussion, every thread is an opportunity to learn new things.

It does make sense, no wonky ONI Physics on this one. Wayyy back I was running electrolysers without cooling and it took quite a while to become a heat-problem.

[Lifegrow]

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

So you are promoting a non-experimental, non-learning style where optimization is the ultimate goal, and copying optimized designs from others is the core strategy? And at the same time, finding things out and trying alternate approaches is not desirable? 

Again, none of this was said nor inferred - you're reading between the lines and creating your own narrative for some (I can only assume) contrary approach to conversation. What I explained is that MOST people give themselves a buffer of clean oxygen for a plethora of reasons. Maybe they want a little on hand for a bristle blossom build, or an extra line to supply some seldom used exosuits, or piping to a remote digsite, whatever - there are many other reasons why having a bit of oxygen on hand and ready to use is incredibly helpful.

OP explained that they were having issues with output temperatures of electrolyzers, hence me advising to only worry about cooling their oxygen to save a little power. You yourself suggested cooling their electrolyzers...

By this comparison, If the OP had asked for help on cooling fairy cakes, I'd have suggested putting them on a wire rack on a window ledge. You'd have suggested hanging the entire oven out of the window.

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

But representing mediocre approaches as ideal is not really in line with the ideas of personal advancement and personal growth either. So I am opposed to doing it.

See above, you're a contradiction personified. If someone asks for help and you give them poor advice, you're the antipathy of enabling growth. Would you help a truck back into a parking spot and let the driver crash for "personal growth"  

If you'd like to discuss further feel free to PM me, as this seems mostly contrary to OPs original post now.

[degr]

Think I'm going to oxygen production using electrolyzers around cycle 20-30 (still with algae distillers). Don't know how long it take to raise temperature 50 degrees, but after it become 50C, I have enough resources and electricity to build cooling system. I put radiant pipes in floor, and it works pretty fine. Temperature fall down to 25-35C (with polluted water), and much later when I got supercoolant, it fall down to 15-25.

I never build radiant pipes around electrloysers, never separate gas. There is so many energy sources, that I assume, energy is unlimited, and better spent dupes time for digging and exploring, then for building some weird monstrous tech constructions.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

OP explained that they were having issues with output temperatures of electrolyzers, hence me advising to only worry about cooling their oxygen to save a little power. You yourself suggested cooling their electrolyzers...

Nope. I did not do that. But I begin to see the level of insight you are operating on. 

And while we are speculating what "most" players do and "most" players want, I expect for "most" players the 20% cooling wasted on the Hydrogen will not matter one bit because it requires a high overall level of optimization to even be noticeable. You however present your speculation as fact. Presenting speculation as fact is not honest. Unless you have some survey and analysis over all the bases players are building?

[Urist McPilot]

18 hours ago, Nebbie said:

slapping down oxyferns in a CO2 pit

But that's rather limited, isn't it? Of course on Verdante there is plenty of rust and salt to supplement oxyferns, but rust is not renewable.

[Lifegrow]

On 7/28/2020 at 5:58 AM, Gurgel said:

You can put one or two loops of radiant pipes around an electrolyzer and cool the gases with the input water feed. That is my usual solution.

 

18 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Nope. I did not do that. But I begin to see the level of insight you are operating on. 

Yeah, seems you're another classic ore scrubber.

[Gurgel]

30 minutes ago, Urist McPilot said:

But that's rather limited, isn't it? Of course on Verdante there is plenty of rust and salt to supplement oxyferns, but rust is not renewable.

Needs 3 per dupe. Advantage is no heat. Disadvantage is that you need to regulate pressure and keep the temperature range they require. While this does work, I found it rather tedious on the long run.

[Urist McPilot]

2 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Needs 3 per dupe.

Yes, and it drops no seeds, so it's not easy to get more than what is available at the start. Is it even possible apart from care packages?

[Neotuck]

1 minute ago, Urist McPilot said:

Is it even possible apart from care packages?

Nope

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, Urist McPilot said:

Yes, and it drops no seeds, so it's not easy to get more than what is available at the start. Is it even possible apart from care packages?

Some maps have additional ones spread over the map. Apart from that, only care packages will deliver more. Usually you get enough for 3 dupes and that should allow you to get everything running and establish an alternate oxygen source.

[Nebbie]

5 hours ago, Urist McPilot said:

But that's rather limited, isn't it? Of course on Verdante there is plenty of rust and salt to supplement oxyferns, but rust is not renewable.

It's definitely limited as far as the number of dupes you can support (I think normally you can handle 5 once you dig out most of the starting biome, and 7 is pretty likely with care packages in the first 150 cycles, but 8 is a stretch), so electrolyzers end up being required eventually, but you can completely ignore algae and rust.

[Gurgel]

2 hours ago, Nebbie said:

It's definitely limited as far as the number of dupes you can support (I think normally you can handle 5 once you dig out most of the starting biome, and 7 is pretty likely with care packages in the first 150 cycles, but 8 is a stretch), so electrolyzers end up being required eventually, but you can completely ignore algae and rust.

Pretty much. On Oassise, you basically have no choice and need to limit dupes until you can cool the oxygen from electrolyzers.