Help with Electrolysers

[DigiFort]

Hello Everyone, I am new to these forums I know I am kinda late to the game so I don't know if people still frequent the forums but I need help with electrolysers.

I am around 600 cycles in and I have abundant water and geysers in my map and I was thinking to use electrolysers to generate a lot of hydrogen for power or fuel for rockets eventually as well as oxygen for my base. But with the setup I have I am losing a lot of Hydrogen and some Oxygen. So can you guys please help out whats the cause of this and can I fix it with some changes. Also my electrolysers only run at around 70% uptime so if any improvement is possible there that will be nice too. Better des igns are always appreciated.

So if you see my uploaded images I am trying to run 4 electrolysers with a bead pump setup to constantly keep the central room at low pressure(or at least trying to). There are 4 bead pumps for the oxygen room and 2 for the hydrogen. The flow at each valve is set to 0.1g/s. The hydrogen is collected at the top and oxygen at the bottom. Both room sizes are 51 tiles. Now after running with 4000Kgs of Water I am left with 5.4kg per tile of hydrogen meaning a total (5.4*51 = 275.4kg) and 66Kg per tile of Oxygen (66*51 = 3366kg total). The ideal amounts for 4000kg of Water are 448Kg of Hydrogen and 3552kg of Oxygen. So yeah I am losing a lot of Hydrogen and was hoping some help to Increase its efficiency. Thanks in advance for taking the time to look into it.

[mathmanican]

You're losing hydrogen and oxygen because a gas deletion mechanic that your build does not account for.  If you want to avoid gas deletion, one way to ensure it is to make sure the upper left corner of the electrolyzer is one tile below the hydrogen layer (image credit)

Your bypass pumps (not bead pumps) are only activating once a second, rather than every other tick. To improve their efficiency, you need them to fire every 0.4 sec (every other tick), rather than every 1 sec. You can accomplish this using a design I engineered here. 

A simpler option, that would solve all your problems, is to just use flooded electrolyzer, with automatic gas separation at creation. You'll get 100% uptime, and perfectly separated gasses. @nakomaru has a great explanation here

 

[Gurgel]

10 hours ago, mathmanican said:

You're losing hydrogen and oxygen because a gas deletion mechanic that your build does not account for. 

Hmm. I seem to at least have gotten almost all or all Hydrogen with my anti-SPOM:

 

Can you elaborate on the deletion? 

[DigiFort]

12 hours ago, mathmanican said:

You're losing hydrogen and oxygen because a gas deletion mechanic that your build does not account for.  If you want to avoid gas deletion, one way to ensure it is to make sure the upper left corner of the electrolyzer is one tile below the hydrogen layer (image credit)

Your bypass pumps (not bead pumps) are only activating once a second, rather than every other tick. To improve their efficiency, you need them to fire every 0.4 sec (every other tick), rather than every 1 sec. You can accomplish this using a design I engineered here. 

A simpler option, that would solve all your problems, is to just use flooded electrolyzer, with automatic gas separation at creation. You'll get 100% uptime, and perfectly separated gasses. @nakomaru has a great explanation here

 

Much Much thank you for the help. I couldn't recall the actual name for those pumps and called them bead pumps. My bad . I will look into your article (so much work done by you ) and try your tips right now. Much appreciated fellow dupe with 99 points in science. Also I have known some legends and faint rumours like tricking electrolysers with low pressure liquids. I fear no man but that thing(electrolysers with low pressure liquid setups), it scares me. Once again, thank you for your help.

[DigiFort]

@mathmanican Can you please explain to me how your advanced bypass pump work. I don't get why it is working every 2 tics rather than 5. Also i don't get the gas movement in the setup. How does it push the gas up? Sorry for the trouble but I like to understand what I am working with.

Also I seem to get that for some reason having the layer of hydrogen above the upper-left tile of electrolyser causes the hydrogen to escape safely and quickly to the upper layer without chance for deletion while if it is surrounding by lots of relatively high pressure oxygen in a small space the oxygen generated by the electrolyser eventually bully the tiny hydrogen around until deletion. Is that right?

[DigiFort]

3 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Hmm. I seem to at least have gotten almost all or all Hydrogen with my anti-SPOM:

 

Can you elaborate on the deletion? 

I don't have access to space yet and I also want to use the oxygen. But it looks like a nice setup that I will try to use late game for some extra hydrogen.

[Vadir]

I'm using this design its a bit cheezy but if u fine with that than I can share the full schematics.

[mathmanican]

2 hours ago, DigiFort said:

Can you please explain to me how your advanced bypass pump work.

You will have to increase the amount of liquid going through, and will need a place to collect it (rather than losing 0.1g). You also have to vent the liquid to the side, and let sideways flow be the thing that puts the liquid at the top of the bypass pump.  Flooding your electrolyzer will be simpler.  If you scroll through that thread I pointed to about electrolyzers, you will find a single electrolyzer that runs via a bypass pump (same as what you use).  Without a very careful design, you won't be able to extra gas fast enough to keep it running full time. 

[DigiFort]

@mathmanicanSo what is the minimum flow required for the valve to efficiently do the bypass every 2 ticks and use the water pump for the least amount of time. I know you have an article about horizontal tile flow but can you just please tell me  ? And also I know flooding Electrolysers will be simpler but I am in too much love with your bypass pumps.

5 hours ago, Vadir said:

I'm using this design its a bit cheezy but if u fine with that than I can share the full schematics.

Mathmanican did link me to a similar design posted.by nakomaru and yeah as you said it is a little cheesy. So I am trying to find something that can work with bypass pumps.

[SamLogan]

You don't need to destroy the water with the bead pump, even it's a small amount, just use a waterfall :

(Autor : Marco)

[DigiFort]

57 minutes ago, SamLogan said:

You don't need to destroy the water with the bead pump, even it's a small amount, just use a waterfall :

(Autor : Marco)

Interesting this also uses the natural flow of water which is updated by the game every tick. So will the bypass happen every other tick with this setup as well? Or will it not because it is a vertical fall rather than horizontal movement? @mathmanican

Also what is the flow per second on the valve? Will 1kg work or less? Also I am confused regarding how the gas seperation works in this case. Is there any gas deletion? Is this even a bypass setup cause it feels it uses just water. Am I stupid?(Don't answer I already know that one).@SamLogan

[KittenIsAGeek]

50 minutes ago, SamLogan said:

You don't need to destroy the water with the bead pump, even it's a small amount, just use a waterfall :

(Autor : Marco)

That's a creative design. I like it.

[mathmanican]

4 hours ago, DigiFort said:

what is the minimum flow required

Short answer: Start at 100g, and start dropping the value till you're happy.

Long answer, it's the solution to a linear difference equation, and several variables can affect the minimum valve time. The result I linked assumes you'll have flow every tick (to keep a waterfall going).  You only need it every other tick, so the minimum value will be smaller. 

2 hours ago, DigiFort said:

Interesting this also uses the natural flow of water which is updated by the game every tick. So will the bypass happen every other tick with this setup as well? Or will it not because it is a vertical fall rather than horizontal movement?

The design shared by @SamLogan uses the same "flooded" electrolyzer mechanic that I shared at the top. The flooding is just done with a stream of running water, rather than liquid that stays in place. The oxygen is pushed upwards, and the hydrogen pushed right (from the upper left corner of the electrolyzer). In terms of ONI principles, it isn't any different than the flooded electroylzer (but does look cool). 

[DigiFort]

Thank you @mathmanican @SamLogan @Gurgel @Vadir for all the help and explanation and build suggestions.

Especially my thank goes to mathmanican for taking the time to explain things and have patience with me through my barrage of questions.

And finally my gratitude goes @bobe17. I practically copied his build. When I saw his build I noticed that 1 bypass pump was enough to push the oxygen in a separate room with 95% uptime (Don't know how he got more than 99% though) while I was using 2 per electrolyser which took way too much space. This made the build much smaller for a single electrolyser and I also found that it was also very easy to stack the units vertically.

So this is the design I am currently using.

 

I tested it for a decent amount of time and with 40000Kgs of Water got around 95% uptime. For 40000kgs of Water I ended up with 35495.6kgs of Oxygen and 4477.2 kgs of Hydrogen totaling to 39972.8Kgs. So around a loss of 0.068% which I am fine with. I can finally go back to playing the game with this lol. I will post the build once I complete it with some adjustments.

[SamLogan]

On 10/19/2020 at 9:36 PM, DigiFort said:

Also what is the flow per second on the valve? Will 1kg work or less? Also I am confused regarding how the gas seperation works in this case. Is there any gas deletion? Is this even a bypass setup cause it feels it uses just water. Am I stupid?(Don't answer I already know that one).@SamLogan

No gas deletion, 300g/sec.