The 10% liquid/gas injector

[Fradow]

While playing around with a certain building (cue upcoming write-up), I accidently discovered (or very probably re-discovered) a simple but very useful design centered around the use of the 10% pipe capacity to avoid state change

The 10% liquid/gas injector

Proposals for a better name are welcomed.

The goal of the design is to inject 10% packets into a line of known liquid/gas, without ever merging with existing packets that could already be on that line.

This is achieved by limiting the flow of an input to 10%, then using a shutoff to selectively inject new packets when no packet is detected on the line.

To do that detection, an element sensor configured to the element on the line is set up just before the shutoff output. As pointed by @wachunga below, anything that outputs a green signal can be used: Shutoffs behave like buildings and won't merge packets by default, contrary to valve and bridges.

 

With that, you can guarantee a line full with 10% packets, even with an irregular input.

 

What is it useful for?

There happens to be a certain building that can take a liquid input at exactly 1kg/s, can output another without any upper-bound temperature, creating heat in the process, and have the bad tendency of rejecting some packets, while requiring liquid packets on its input pipe at all times to work.

Spoiler

Did you guess it? It's the Oil Well! This unassuming building is about to get abused. Early designs are already available on Discord #advanced-machine-design, a write-up will follow when it's judged as complete.

 

[Saturnus]

54 minutes ago, Fradow said:

The 10% liquid/gas injector

Proposals for a better name are welcomed.

This seems fairly obvios but the latin suffix for (a) tenth is Deci- so put that together with injector, and you got the Decinjector.

[NeoDeusMachina]

2 hours ago, Fradow said:

Did you guess it? It's the Oil Well! This unassuming building is about to get abused.

Not sure how this will get abused, the issue with the oil well is that even if you provide a steady 1kg/s input, as soon as it needs to be depressurized, water will start backing up, and the pipe will eventually have its full 10kg packets, back to condensation in the pipes.

Although the mechanic itself has been know for a long time, I like the simple design you are presenting to maintain the 1kg/s in a loop! I can definitely see it being useful for liquid O2/H2 loops for rockets, for example.

 

Edit: wait, can you make a water loop past an oil well such that the 1kg packets keeps moving when the well is getting depressurized? Will that prevent it from backing up? Never really thought of it that way. If it works, that's great!

[wachunga]

A quirk of the shutoff is that it behaves in the desired fashion by default. The sensor and not gate automation is unnecessary, just have it always on via a switch or whatever. The shutoff is like most buildings where they won't output if anything is in their output pipe. Bridges and valves are the odd ducks in that they top off any small packets in their output pipe. Strange but useful in applications like this.

This behavior can be leveraged to get a precise amount of liquid or gas in a pipe segment. Do the loop with a valve from which you pull a single packet with a shutoff leading to one pipe segment. Rather niche, but I've used it on occasion.

[NeoDeusMachina]

6 minutes ago, wachunga said:

A quirk of the shutoff is that it behaves in the desired fashion by default. The sensor and not gate automation is unnecessary, just have it always on via a switch or whatever. The shutoff is like most buildings where they won't output if anything is in their output pipe. Bridges and valves are the odd ducks in that they top off any small packets in their output pipe. Strange but useful in applications like this.

The more you know! 

[Fradow]

1 hour ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Not sure how this will get abused, the issue with the oil well is that even if you provide a steady 1kg/s input, as soon as it needs to be depressurized, water will start backing up, and the pipe will eventually have its full 10kg packets, back to condensation in the pipes.

Although the mechanic itself has been know for a long time, I like the simple design you are presenting to maintain the 1kg/s in a loop! I can definitely see it being useful for liquid O2/H2 loops for rockets, for example.

 

Edit: wait, can you make a water loop past an oil well such that the 1kg packets keeps moving when the well is getting depressurized? Will that prevent it from backing up? Never really thought of it that way. If it works, that's great!

Yeah the water do loop past the Oil Well, and that prevents if from backing up. I already have working designs of that. It does output some Steam on load, but nothing a well-placed Steam Turbine can't deal with. There are a few other details that require attention, but the design already passed the proof of concept stage. As I said, a write-up is coming in the next few days

 

1 hour ago, wachunga said:

A quirk of the shutoff is that it behaves in the desired fashion by default. The sensor and not gate automation is unnecessary, just have it always on via a switch or whatever. The shutoff is like most buildings where they won't output if anything is in their output pipe. Bridges and valves are the odd ducks in that they top off any small packets in their output pipe. Strange but useful in applications like this.

This behavior can be leveraged to get a precise amount of liquid or gas in a pipe segment. Do the loop with a valve from which you pull a single packet with a shutoff leading to one pipe segment. Rather niche, but I've used it on occasion.

Good to know, I assumed it behaved like a Bridge and would happily merge packets.

Just tested it to be sure, and indeed the automation can be replaced by anything that output a green signal.

[JRup]

I'd used one of these to fill a loop in the offset copper volcano tamer I'd done a while ago. I was still on the fence about making a writeup for this specific one. But yours looks definitely better. I still need to get into making gifs

That said, let's add a little bits of other applications to it.

Filling loops with this is very useful as you've already said, as such, you can also make mini custom temperature sensing loops with gas that may have better precision than a thermo sensor because you can use fractions of a degree in gas pipe thermo sensors. Changing the temperature of 10 grams of any gas will be instantaneous...

But how about something beyond loops?

If, for example, the fill rate of the pipe before the "The 10% liquid/gas injector" (you haven't renamed it yet) is lower than the exit rate you can also integrate saturnus' inline packet stacker for great effect when you absolutely can't go lower than the valve rate:

Example: your valve injects 5010 g/s but the pipe receives 4990 g/s (as seen in the bead flaker some posts prior)

Packet stacker above, injector with stacker incorporated below:

I hope this can also be taken into consideration.

 

[Occam Blazer]

@wachunga posted this image over in this thread. It looks pretty much identical except for they keep the shutoff valve on all the time (as they explained above.)

[Fradow]

21 minutes ago, Occam Blazer said:

@wachunga posted this image over in this thread. It looks pretty much identical except for they keep the shutoff valve on all the time (as they explained above.)

Indeed, I was pretty sure I was not the first one to discover that, and I'm very bad at searching for prior art.

And I'm a naughty boy, except not with Electrolyzers.

[wachunga]

6 hours ago, Fradow said:

And I'm a naughty boy, except not with Electrolyzers.

Naughty and a tease. Tsk Tsk.

Another application is filling the cooling loop of an aquatuner that runs on small packets. Creating liquid hydrogen without supercoolant for example. The small packet mechanic gets a lot of hate, but stuff like this is why I like it and hope it never gets patched out. It creates a playground that requires a certain cleverness to get in. And rewarding players for being clever is a big part of a great game.

[Craigjw]

I've been using this for a long time for anything that I need to regulate the flow of liquid to something, as using just a linear shutoff & valve will produce uneven packet flow.

An example.  I have a passive liquid filter connected to something, ie a desalinator. the valve on the right is set to 0.1kg/s. however, I only want 999.9kg/s input flow, using a linear shutoff & valve, I'll get packets of 10kg, but using the above setup, each packet is guaranteed to be 999.9kg.

you can use either shutoff then valve or valve then shutoff, it doesn't matter the order.

I've used this for my liquid handling & storage. If a packet of 10kg/s passes any of the passive filters, it won't be filtered.

I added a cooling loop just in case, but haven't gotten round to do anything with it.  It filters salt water, brine, PW and water.  anything else gets sent to storage.