Liquid Oxygen?

[rottielover]

So I've seen a couple of youtube video's where folks use the heat exchange things to cool contaminated O2 down to the point where liquid oxygen drips from a vent.  A liquid pump then pumps that into the base where it drips onto the floor and blooms into a whole bunch of clean O2 gas...

Problem is that I've tried to duplicate these methods but my gas never cools below about -50C (+- 5)  ...

Thoughts?   atm I'm wondering if my intake gas isn't cool enough to start with, but I'm at a loss on how to cool it other than with those heat exchangers...

[chestnutcute]

Try addressing the issue by going into the "gas view" you can check your contaminated oxygen temperature as it runs through your gas pipes.

A roughly estimated of 15 coolers ( 15*14= 210 )   is needed to cool it down to -183C ( roughly estimated ).

 

[Automatonnn]

The method that is used to cool down the air further is to make the air go through coolers multiple times. The most straight forward method is to put 16-18 of them in a line to get the contaminated oxygen cold enough. It might also be usefull to show a picture of how you tried to make it so we can see where the issue lies. For a better explanation and some more ideas you can look at this video: 

 

[AlexRou]

Also there is a bug where if you cool it down to solids it won't turn back into liquid/gas so watch the temps always.

[heckubis]

the looped closed systems have a problem with frozen or not cooled enough . a series of 15-20 depending on the temp of the incoming contaminated coolers will have to cool the air the same number of times using the same amount of energy on the air. getting it between -184 and about -200 is your safest bet but use a separate room unless you really like the cold

[Lothalin]

I think the issue with this is that in order to get enough power to run this it takes more dupes than the amount of clean oxygen you get will support.  

[SniderThanYou]

You don't have to run it 100% of the time. Connect it to a switch, and only turn it on when you need it. 3 dupes on hamster wheels, with lots of batteries, can produce enough electricity to produce enough clean oxygen with this method. See the discussion here.

[rottielover]

2 hours ago, Automatonnn said:

The method that is used to cool down the air further is to make the air go through coolers multiple times. The most straight forward method is to put 16-18 of them in a line to get the contaminated oxygen cold enough. It might also be usefull to show a picture of how you tried to make it so we can see where the issue lies. For a better explanation and some more ideas you can look at this video:

 

The 3rd method in her video is what I setup.  In fact I duplicated her 3rd method by taking screenshots of the video and making a room to match the layout of hers in a giant contaminated oxygen chamber I had on this map.

The idea is this:  Gas starts at temp X, runs thru the 4 coolers to get to temp Y,  you then start at temp Y (in theory) and should arrive the next run at Temp Z  until you hit the critical temp and then the liquid drips from the vent to get pumped away....

However what I'm finding in this setup is that it's pulling in more "room temp" gas which is heating the gas that went through a loop enough to keep the temp up...

 

No idea how to fix that

 

[Lothalin]

38 minutes ago, SniderThanYou said:

You don't have to run it 100% of the time. Connect it to a switch, and only turn it on when you need it. 3 dupes on hamster wheels, with lots of batteries, can produce enough electricity to produce enough clean oxygen with this method. See the discussion here.

Right, I am aware of that post, but unless you want your colony to stay at 3 dupes forever it just does not work.  Also, to get that many morbs right now requires a lot of wonkyness with either killing 10 dupes or starting stopping the game over and over to abuse the morb respawn.  With the 3 dupes that the setup in that thread can sustain, I am not sure how often they need to be generating power, but the limiting factor seems to be P-O2 density rather than power, so if someone can come up with a way to keep that high enough to generate more O2 that would help.

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, SniderThanYou said:

You don't have to run it 100% of the time. Connect it to a switch, and only turn it on when you need it. 3 dupes on hamster wheels, with lots of batteries, can produce enough electricity to produce enough clean oxygen with this method. See the discussion here.

The problem is that when you put the numbers together with all the infrastructure that is needed then under the most ideal circumstances you end up with 1 dupe able to supply enough oxygen for ½ dupe, so it's not something that is sustainable on it's own.

[Lothalin]

So this is easy enough to test, I decided to do it real quick.

Start with 20 fully charged batteries, just to see how much total power this all takes.  Base state, everything built with no power inputs.  Pump disabled, P-O2 at ~23C.  17 Thermo regulators just like in the referenced thread.  100KG of P-O2 loaded in pipe.  For simplicity here I will remove the 1 gas pump power from the equation because I could not get it to pull in 10kg chunks.

Now lets run the P-02 through the regulators and see how much power it takes and how much O2 we get out of it.  Taking it through all the regulators got it down to -214C, pretty much perfect.

Had to go back and make the room we were dropping the O2 into bigger, still a vacuum and same setup, just made room bigger because it would not dump all the O2 in there.

So here we are again with it at -214C right before it drops into room, great so far.

All gas out of system, so we are done with power consumption at this point.  What we have left is 20 batteries at 22387, or 447740 total left.  Which means we used 352260.

Once all the liquid O2 turned into gas and normalized pressure I had roughly 100Kg O2 gas, pretty nice conservation there, no loss at all.

 

 

So in summary, in a perfect setup where gas pressure is never a problem it took 352260j power to process 100kg of P-O2 into O2.  It would take 880 seconds of dupes running on wheels to generate enough power to convert this 100kg of O2.  From what I have read each dupe uses 0.1kg of O2 a second, so in theory there are 12kg of O2 left over after this whole cycle.  So I think it is possible, just not likely to ever actually work.

 

I cannot get a gas pump to pull in 10kg blocks of gas, no matter the density around it, so that is 1 definite roadblock, any loss in density is a loss in overall O2/1j power usage so I think in a real situation this will never actually make enough to sustain a base by itself.  The amount of power to convert the P-O2 to O2 is just to high right now.

[Automatonnn]

@rottielover I have not used that design myself but it might help if you make the intake longer and thinner to reduce the airflow.

Regarding viability of an optimized system. With this setup it is possible to create 130 g/s of -185 to -190 degrees celsius using only one thermo regulator. It is a bit complicated to understand how it works and it needs a constant supply of power and cont.-O2. It also needs to cool down and stabilize for 10 cycles. But if you have some dedicated dupes and morbs to supply the requirements it is definitely possible to incorporate it into a base and gain a decent profit. It is possible to scale this up to reduce the time it takes to stabilize, I might work on those if this still works after the update.

Spoiler

 

[AlexRou]

1 minute ago, Automatonnn said:

@rottielover I have not used that design myself but it might help if you make the intake longer and shorter to reduce the airflow.

Regarding viability of an optimized system. With this setup it is possible to create 130 g/s of -185 to -190 degrees celsius using only one thermo regulator. It is a bit complicated to understand how it works and it needs a constant supply of power and cont.-O2. It also needs to cool down and stabilize for 10 cycles. But if you have some dedicated dupes and morbs to supply the requirements it is definitely possible to incorporate it into a base and gain a decent profit. It is possible to scale this up to reduce the time it takes to stabilize, I might work on those if this still works after the update.

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Is the bridge really necessary? 

[Automatonnn]

Yes, it is necessary. Without it the gas will try to flow from the input to the output without going through the cooler in a loop.

[AlexRou]

16 minutes ago, Automatonnn said:

Yes, it is necessary. Without it the gas will try to flow from the input to the output without going through the cooler in a loop.

Ahhh so its a one way valve thing, makes more sense now

[AlexRou]

The new update has a heat sucking plant so try your setup with pipes going around that thing, might make it cool down faster.

[Saturnus]

2 hours ago, Lothalin said:

So in summary, in a perfect setup where gas pressure is never a problem it took 352260j power to process 100kg of P-O2 into O2.  It would take 880 seconds of dupes running on wheels to generate enough power to convert this 100kg of O2.  From what I have read each dupe uses 0.1kg of O2 a second, so in theory there are 12kg of O2 left over after this whole cycle.  So I think it is possible, just not likely to ever actually work.

Two things. Dupes can't produce more than 240-266W/s on average on a hamster wheel when you take necessary breaks (sleep, bathroom, and eating) into account. And you need more pumps to supply a steady flow through the system. Minimum 2 pumps, and 3 pumps to be on the safe side so that adds more power used.

[Lothalin]

Yeah I don't see how it could ever work in practice.  

Even looping it through the same regulator multiple times does not save any power.  You still have to process the air the same number of times so net power used would be the same, possibly more because of the mixing of gas over time.

[alcurad90]

5 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Two things. Dupes can't produce more than 240-266W/s on average on a hamster wheel when you take necessary breaks (sleep, bathroom, and eating) into account. And you need more pumps to supply a steady flow through the system. Minimum 2 pumps, and 3 pumps to be on the safe side so that adds more power used.

Batteries can store energy, gas pipe can store gas.

[Saturnus]

42 minutes ago, alcurad90 said:

Batteries can store energy, gas pipe can store gas.

Not sure what your point is or would be? Dupes breathe even when sleeping or having breaks.

[alcurad90]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

Not sure what your point is or would be? Dupes breathe even when sleeping or having breaks.

Your colony could store O2 pal

 

Basically the cooling system produce liquid O2 1kg/s, that's enough for 10 dupes

[Octyabr]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

Not sure what your point is or would be? Dupes breathe even when sleeping or having breaks.

You can store gases inside pipes at a maximum of 10kg per packet if you don't interpolate different gases.

Trying to feed a thermo-regulator with packets of 10kg will make it split into 10 packets of 1 kg each, effectively making it run at its max efficiency level, as the thermo-regulator will spend the same amount of energy cooling down a packet of 1kg or a packet of 1µg.

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, Octyabr said:

You can store gases inside pipes at a maximum of 10kg per packet if you don't interpolate different gases.

You still need to get it into the pipes. If your air pumps can't provide minimum 1kg/s output you're not running at optimum efficiency. That takes 2-3 air pumps.

Under absolute ideal circumstances, ie. bed, food, toilet is right next to hamster wheel, dupes can produce 266J on average. It takes 352½J to produce 100g of O2 which is enough for one dupe, so you're 86½J in deficit.

 

[AlexRou]

Looking through the bug list and I saw this