Very compact SPOM - produces extra energy? (insights needed)

[carralas]

Hello everyone! As I dive more and more into this game I get more and more excited. I work as a developer so I really like the automation part of the game.

I guess I came up with a very compact auto sustaining Oxygen engine that even overproduces energy and I would like some insights. That's the layout (I also made it on blueprint not included for a more detailed view):

Would it work? The key here is the timer sensor and the ratio between the default gas pump and the mini one. The electrolyzer produces 112g/s of Hydrogen and 888g/s of Oxygen. That's a ~7.94 ratio. If you set the timer to work for 7.94s and rest for 2.06s you probably pump the same amount of gas on both devices every 10s.

Any opinions would be very much apreciated.

[degr]

[Fradow]

Would it work? I don't see any reason why not.

Would it be energy positive? Possibly.

On the other hand there are a few apparent design flaws that make this less than optimal:

• using a Mini-pump. Mini-pump are less power-efficient than regular pumps
• pumping partial packets: the design doesn't have any atmospheric filter, and gases do NOT separate quite as neatly as what's shown on the screenshot, which means either the Electrolyzer will spend most of its time overpressured, or you are going to pump partial packets of oxygen/hydrogen
• double pumping: since the "wrong" gases are ejected on the other side, they are pumped twice
• missing Oxygen pump: since an Electrolyzer outputs 888g/s but a pump only pump 500g/s, you need 2 Oxygen pumps to keep up. Otherwise you'll severly reduce the Electrolyzer uptime. It seems like it's intended, so it's the least important feedback.

All those issues are solved in the well-known "Rodriguez" and "Hydra" designs. Of course it doesn't mean you HAVE to use those designs, I'm perfectly happy myself to use less than optimal designs, but if you want optimal designs, those are the reference.

 

[zach123b]

the issue i see is the thing has no way to stop overpressurizing.  if you have too much hydrogen/oxygen, it'll start to have a bad time

is it producing extra power?  50g/s in a generator = 400w which electrolyzer (120w) + gas pump (240w) + mini gas pump (60w) = 420w so no, it is not self powering and will run dry eventually, this isn't considering partial packets of hydrogen but i don't think that'd be an issue as the mini gas pump should never stop pumping

imo, make it like a hydra and make the hydrogen pump into a full gas pump.  a hydra setup makes it so it is always filtered (unless one pulls a vacuum).  this is by layering 2 liquids overtop of the electrolyzer and the top-left tile of said electrolyzer outputs the gasses, they self filter to tiles already with o2 or h2 so it's pretty easy filtering.  it will never over pressurize as well

[Ntr1cate]

Good job and keep up the good work, I'm glad to see there is still creativity in the community towards SPOMs

[carralas]

9 hours ago, Fradow said:

Would it work? I don't see any reason why not.

Would it be energy positive? Possibly.

On the other hand there are a few apparent design flaws that make this less than optimal:

• using a Mini-pump. Mini-pump are less power-efficient than regular pumps
• pumping partial packets: the design doesn't have any atmospheric filter, and gases do NOT separate quite as neatly as what's shown on the screenshot, which means either the Electrolyzer will spend most of its time overpressured, or you are going to pump partial packets of oxygen/hydrogen
• double pumping: since the "wrong" gases are ejected on the other side, they are pumped twice
• missing Oxygen pump: since an Electrolyzer outputs 888g/s but a pump only pump 500g/s, you need 2 Oxygen pumps to keep up. Otherwise you'll severly reduce the Electrolyzer uptime. It seems like it's intended, so it's the least important feedback.

All those issues are solved in the well-known "Rodriguez" and "Hydra" designs. Of course it doesn't mean you HAVE to use those designs, I'm perfectly happy myself to use less than optimal designs, but if you want optimal designs, those are the reference.

 

I've let it run for some ingame days in a sandbox world (4~5 days) and it seems to works just as fine.

I'm using a mini pump here to make it really compact (and I wanted to try using it). Although it's not as power efficient I guess I don't need the bigger pump here and then I can save energy to power something else (like the liquid pump or a thermo regulator to cool down the oxygen).

After some time running the gases *seem* to stablish in some way (the lower pump never gets hydrogen, the higher one gets one oxygen pack every 3 or 4 packs). It always had energy so self sustain even with the wrong packages.

Having a downtime on the electrolyzer is also OK as the main reason I've designed this is to feed ATMO stations and not the entire base (I run few duplicants so I guess that would also work).

I'm really not sure of anything, just trying things out.

 

6 hours ago, zach123b said:

the issue i see is the thing has no way to stop overpressurizing.  if you have too much hydrogen/oxygen, it'll start to have a bad time

is it producing extra power?  50g/s in a generator = 400w which electrolyzer (120w) + gas pump (240w) + mini gas pump (60w) = 420w so no, it is not self powering and will run dry eventually, this isn't considering partial packets of hydrogen but i don't think that'd be an issue as the mini gas pump should never stop pumping

imo, make it like a hydra and make the hydrogen pump into a full gas pump.  a hydra setup makes it so it is always filtered (unless one pulls a vacuum).  this is by layering 2 liquids overtop of the electrolyzer and the top-left tile of said electrolyzer outputs the gasses, they self filter to tiles already with o2 or h2 so it's pretty easy filtering.  it will never over pressurize as well

I've let it run for some ingame days in a sandbox world and it produced more energy than it consumed (not sure why but the battery was full for full time). I'd make it like a hydra (I use one to feed the base oxygen) but then it wouldn't be as compact and that's the reason why I started the design on first place. As noted above overpressurizing is okay as I planned to use this setup to feed ATMO stations that don't need 100% uptime oxygen flow.

 

6 hours ago, Zerohayven said:

Good job and keep up the good work, I'm glad to see there is still creativity in the community towards SPOMs

Thanks! Even though most problems in the game already have a solution it's always nice to try some new setup. I'm trying to figure out how to get around things mostly by myself. 100% efficiency is nice but I rather make something original that works on the first place (accomplishment?)

[carralas]

On 9/22/2021 at 11:59 AM, zach123b said:

the issue i see is the thing has no way to stop overpressurizing.  if you have too much hydrogen/oxygen, it'll start to have a bad time

is it producing extra power?  50g/s in a generator = 400w which electrolyzer (120w) + gas pump (240w) + mini gas pump (60w) = 420w so no, it is not self powering and will run dry eventually, this isn't considering partial packets of hydrogen but i don't think that'd be an issue as the mini gas pump should never stop pumping

imo, make it like a hydra and make the hydrogen pump into a full gas pump.  a hydra setup makes it so it is always filtered (unless one pulls a vacuum).  this is by layering 2 liquids overtop of the electrolyzer and the top-left tile of said electrolyzer outputs the gasses, they self filter to tiles already with o2 or h2 so it's pretty easy filtering.  it will never over pressurize as well

I remade the calculations and discovered why it overproduces (very simple tbh). As the normal gas pump only runs around 80% of the time due to the automation timer, this contraption consumes around 370w vs the 400 it produces. It won't run dry even though 30w isn't very useful... maybe you can feed some lamps

[WhiteWind36]

I'd rather go for 'hydra' version. You could power a lot of everything for example water pump and atmosuits docks. I was using 'hydra' setup electrolyzers to power up my entire base up to cycle 200... And it is still providing maybe about half of energy I'm using and producing in my starting base. (Cycle 850+)

Although I'm using natural oxygen movement instead of pumping where it's possible, and I do use mod 'gas vent input' - it allows gasses with high pressure enter a pipes, starts working from 2kg/tile gas pressure and pumps like 6g/s, but get better with higher pressure. At pressure above 5t/tile it will pump full pipe without any energy consumption. You could achieve something like this with airflow tiles and mechanized airlock to control the flow. Free energy pumping of oxygen using only excess pressure created by 'hydrolyzers'

[psusi]

Sitting in that insulated box, your hydrogen generator is going to overheat.

 

[gabberworld]

16 minutes ago, psusi said:

Sitting in that insulated box, your hydrogen generator is going to overheat.

 

that setup is bad anyway because it generates more gas than it able pump out, there is much better solutions in this forum

electrolyzer generates exactly 1000 g/s gas that means you need 2 gas pumps for fully work all the time.

[NewWorldDan]

On 9/21/2021 at 6:21 PM, carralas said:

If you set the timer to work for 7.94s and rest for 2.06s you

The game physics tick 5 times per game second.  The result of that is that increments that aren't a multiple of .2 seconds don't really work out the way you think they should.  

[Yobbo]

guys this thread is 3 months old...

[Isidoro]

why go with all the bother to separate electro chambers horizontally? can't you just strap 2 pumps to an electro chamber and filter out gases with a regular bridge filter?

I honestly never found the appeal of rodriguez or any other spom project that would involve more than 5 components (b4 cooling the hot o2 ofc). I'm that lazy, I know.

[fredhp]

I never build any SPOM - IMHO it is useless. I just build the electrolyzer where needed, and deal with heat/hydrogen later.