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How to Bristle Blossom Farm


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So I built this Bristle Blossom farm as a proof of a few concepts and I think it works rather well even though it's not yet settled down in long term production which I believe will only improve its parameters.

I chose to use CO2 as the gas filling the farm since it's abundant and relatively well insulating, preventing plants to lose their initial 20 C heat too fast to the atmosphere and reducing requirements on cooling. Even with that, by my measurements a freshly planted plant releases about 540 W of heat and that needs to be fixed with a regulator - using hydrogen as cooling medium, one regulator can theoretically handle about 60 freshly planted plants. And that's exactly the size of the farm I used.

Here's the farm:

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and its thermal view:

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irrigation uses about half a steam geyser production, i.e. 2 kg per second. I feed it water at 95 C straight from a geyser using abyssalite pipes

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Cooling runs on one regulator and closed hydrogen loop using countercurrent radiator. That means each plant gets approximately the same amount of cooling from the circuit. I also decided to keep the colder pipe at the upper tile because cold propagates down more readily than up. All pipe segments inside the farm are made of granite, any pipe segments in walls and towards the regulator are abyssalite.

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And finally here is the power circuit. There are two thermal switches, one preventing overheating the regulator, the other preventing it overcooling the farm. The switch in the middle of the farm is set to "above 0" to try and keep the temperature approximately in the middle of the range since it is not perfectly even all over the farm despite my attempts.

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Since the farm is relatively new, it is not perfectly settled yet. Even with that, most plants are promising excellent yield already, some occasionally switching to good yield if the temperature around them drifts out of the ideal range.

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How do you like to charge the H2 into the loop?  When I use a pump in a closed loop, I end up filled and it stops flow.  I do not see any space the in the H2 room for a pump so how did you charge?

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1 hour ago, chemie said:

How do you like to charge the H2 into the loop?  When I use a pump in a closed loop, I end up filled and it stops flow.  I do not see any space the in the H2 room for a pump so how did you charge?

If you look at his regulator, you'll see two intakes and two outputs in the area.  I think he has a pipe beyond the regulator intake, that goes to a bridge.  I imagine so that blockages clear themselves by bypassing the regulator intake, going through the bridge, and being merged back into the line?

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49 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

If you look at his regulator, you'll see two intakes and two outputs in the area.  I think he has a pipe beyond the regulator intake, that goes to a bridge.  I imagine so that blockages clear themselves by bypassing the regulator intake, going through the bridge, and being merged back into the line?

The bridge by the regulator is to allow a bypass for when the regulator stops.  It'll keep the flow in the loop going.  Whatever means he decided to use to fill the loop he's disassembled, it would appear.  I haven't noticed gas loss in closed loops, though.  Generally just rooms where wheezeworts eat gas.

 

Thanks, Kasuha, this is precisely what I was looking to do and though about switching to bridges from your previous example in my other thread to keep the colder one on top. It is good to see you had that idea too. It makes me feel more confident about my approach.  I am somewhat disheartened that the temperature spread isn't more even but it definitely looks like this example of yours is definitely my plan going forward.

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10 hours ago, chemie said:

How do you like to charge the H2 into the loop?  When I use a pump in a closed loop, I end up filled and it stops flow.  I do not see any space the in the H2 room for a pump so how did you charge?

A reliable way to fill a closed loop is to use a bridge with output right on the loop. It will keep adding packets as long as there are gaps or packets that are not full, but will not stop the flow. In this case I also made sure the regulator did not switch on  while filling because it usually causes some hiccups in packet flow and may result in overfilling the circuit.

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49 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

A reliable way to fill a closed loop is to use a bridge with output right on the loop. It will keep adding packets as long as there are gaps or packets that are not full, but will not stop the flow. In this case I also made sure the regulator did not switch on  while filling because it usually causes some hiccups in packet flow and may result in overfilling the circuit.

Plumbing question: Doesn't adding packets of (whatever) to an existing loop cause the substance to move both ways on the pipe? What I call the bouncing packet because a new packet added to a pipe will not know which way to travel.

Is there anyway to force a packet to flow in the direction you want in a pipe?

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3 hours ago, ScottFree said:

Plumbing question: Doesn't adding packets of (whatever) to an existing loop cause the substance to move both ways on the pipe? What I call the bouncing packet because a new packet added to a pipe will not know which way to travel.

Is there anyway to force a packet to flow in the direction you want in a pipe?

Generally not. After entering the loop, packets will generally flow toward the existing exit point.

The only situation where I've seen packets getting confused is when they enter a pipe in between two exit points. I'm not entirely clear what causes this, but in the piping example above it should work just fine.

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On 7/8/2017 at 6:39 AM, Kasuha said:

I chose to use CO2 as the gas filling the farm since it's abundant and relatively well insulating, preventing plants to lose their initial 20 C heat too fast to the atmosphere and reducing requirements on cooling.

I'm confused by this. Wouldn't you want the plants to give up their heat faster? The plant's temperature is what matters for calculating yield points, not the air around it, right?

Either way, CO2 is still probably better, since it sinks and heat rises.

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1 hour ago, Buldric said:

I'm confused by this. Wouldn't you want the plants to give up their heat faster? The plant's temperature is what matters for calculating yield points, not the air around it, right?

Either way, CO2 is still probably better, since it sinks and heat rises.

The temperature of the plants doesn't matter. What matters is the air temperature.
By having insulating gas, the plants can't ruin the air as quickly.
 

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I've tried this, but I can't get my regulator itself to stop overheating without drastically reducing the flow rate to something tiny. As a result, it's not cooling enough to cool the farm.

How do I keep the regulator itself cool? I notice you've filled the chamber around the regulator with what looks like hydrogen. What does that do? I gather it helps dissipate the heat from the regulator, but I don't get how you get the heat out of the regulator chamber.

I also notice another regulator in the chamber. I take it that's not actually related to your farm cooling loop, though, and is for cooling something else?

Also, what's the little loop for connecting the output back to the input? Stopping the pipe getting overpressured and jamming the regulator?

e: ah, filling the chamber with hydrogen works muuuuuuuuuch better. Still not sure why, but the regulator seems to be holding at around 50-60 degrees instead of overheating.

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2 hours ago, Buldric said:

Wouldn't you want the plants to give up their heat faster?

When the plants are planted, they appear in the farm as 400 kg of "genetic ooze" at 20 C temperature. They carry way too much heat. Some time ago I calculated that the amount of extra heat with which they are planted can be compensated with 150 kg of liquid oxygen at -183 C dumped on each plant. But there's no need to do that. It's much easier to let the plants keep their heat, or at least most of it over their whole lifetime, and just cool the air around them since that's what they need for ideal harvest. And to minimize energy spent on such cooling, you need to minimize heat dissipated by plants. That's why I use CO2 as that's the gas with second lowest thermal conduction (after chlorine which is not renewable).

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10 hours ago, Kasuha said:

When the plants are planted, they appear in the farm as 400 kg of "genetic ooze" at 20 C temperature. They carry way too much heat. Some time ago I calculated that the amount of extra heat with which they are planted can be compensated with 150 kg of liquid oxygen at -183 C dumped on each plant. But there's no need to do that. It's much easier to let the plants keep their heat, or at least most of it over their whole lifetime, and just cool the air around them since that's what they need for ideal harvest. And to minimize energy spent on such cooling, you need to minimize heat dissipated by plants. That's why I use CO2 as that's the gas with second lowest thermal conduction (after chlorine which is not renewable).

This is why I just run them at 20C once I have seeds.  75% without much energy seems like nice place to be

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2 minutes ago, chemie said:

This is why I just run them at 20C once I have seeds.  75% without much energy seems like nice place to be

Cutting on irrigation saves more resources than cutting on cooling. Those 2 kg/s of water represent way more power than the 240 W needed to run the regulator.

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On 7/10/2017 at 6:02 PM, Kasuha said:

Cutting on irrigation saves more resources than cutting on cooling. Those 2 kg/s of water represent way more power than the 240 W needed to run the regulator.

All my water is on a single pump (showers, lavs, scrubbers, plants) so it is free power.

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2 hours ago, chemie said:

All my water is on a single pump (showers, lavs, scrubbers, plants) so it is free power.

He means the opportunity cost of not using water in electrolyzers and getting power from the hydrogen. 2kg/s is close to 1600watts (not counting running the equipment to produce it.)

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4 hours ago, Whispershade said:

He means the opportunity cost of not using water in electrolyzers and getting power from the hydrogen. 2kg/s is close to 1600watts (not counting running the equipment to produce it.)

Better yet, using the water for scrubbers in natural gas loop. One gas geyser, 16 fertilizer makers (compensating polluted water generation), 7 NG generators, and two air scrubbers (~2 kg/s of water) generate about 3 kW of extra power, besides powering themselves.

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On 10. 7. 2017 at 1:23 PM, Hyperlynx said:

How do I keep the regulator itself cool?

There's hydrogen atmosphere around the regulator, and there are two wheezeworts planted right beside the regulator. Wheezeworts cool the atmosphere by 5 C so using hydrogen makes them most efficient (most heat removed by that 5 C change of temperature). That cold hydrogen then cools down the regulator.

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CO2 is also a good choice because dupes entering and leaving won't leave little pockets of CO2 messing up the pressure.

On 7/10/2017 at 5:35 PM, six_demon_bag said:

Kashua, how do you get the gas to use the bypass pipe only when the TR is off? For me, some of the gas enters the TR and some takes the bypas. Cheers in advance

What's your setup? The way Kasuha has it, it has to pass the input of the thermo regulator to get to the overflow bridge. Packets always enter an input if they can, so they should always enter the thermo regulator unless it is stopped. Although perhaps if you are a bit over-capacity then some may bypass it because the output of the thermo regulator may be blocked.

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On 7/12/2017 at 9:49 AM, Whispershade said:

He means the opportunity cost of not using water in electrolyzers and getting power from the hydrogen. 2kg/s is close to 1600watts (not counting running the equipment to produce it.)

There is no opportunity cost.  Water is free (geyser) and pump is already pumping to scrubbers so the water to the plants is free (unlike a regulator for cooling).

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15 minutes ago, chemie said:

There is no opportunity cost.  Water is free (geyser) and pump is already pumping to scrubbers so the water to the plants is free (unlike a regulator for cooling).

Opportunity Cost is a specific concept of the cost of doing one thing rather than another. While the geyser output is infinite in infinite time, the geyser outputs a finite amount of water per second, approximately 4kg/s. If you spend all 4kg/s of that water irrigating a farm, you can spend none of it on other feeding scrubbers.

The water you could have spent irrigating your farm could rather have been spent furnishing (more) scrubbers or electrolyzers. Which both could then be used to power energy production.

Now, you may have more water than you know what to do with.  In this case there is little opportunity cost as you've no other opportunities to spend that water differently.

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13 hours ago, chemie said:

There is no opportunity cost.  Water is free (geyser) and pump is already pumping to scrubbers so the water to the plants is free (unlike a regulator for cooling).

2 kg/s of water can be turned into 3 kW of power. If you chose to use that water for irrigation instead, you have given up on 3 kW of power. That's definitely more than 240 W you give up on if you cool the farm with thermal regulator.

The 'pump is already pumping' statement does not make piped water free. Its cost is at least 24 J per kg (10 kg packet for 240 J). The more water you use from the pipe, the more power does the pump consume.

Similarly geyser water is not free. It costs time needed to generate it - 0.25 s per kg. It gets cheaper if you have more geysers. And you still need to spend power on pump to get it in the pipe.

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7 hours ago, Kasuha said:

2 kg/s of water can be turned into 3 kW of power. If you chose to use that water for irrigation instead, you have given up on 3 kW of power. That's definitely more than 240 W you give up on if you cool the farm with thermal regulator.

The 'pump is already pumping' statement does not make piped water free. Its cost is at least 24 J per kg (10 kg packet for 240 J). The more water you use from the pipe, the more power does the pump consume.

Similarly geyser water is not free. It costs time needed to generate it - 0.25 s per kg. It gets cheaper if you have more geysers. And you still need to spend power on pump to get it in the pipe.

So you are saying the pump electrical consumption is a function of how much it pumps?  I did not know that. I had assumed it was a fixed 120W.

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