Question condensing gases / Therm Aquatuner

[CantBreathe]

How are you guys doing it now?

I've tried pumping O2 out of a room, cooling it, and pumping it back in.

The pipes break when the O2 condenses.

 

Would piping cooled LO2 through a room cool it better than cooled hydrogen?

The old hydrogen cooling loop does not seem to work well anymore.

Thank you!

[Kasuha]

Have a meandering pipe in a room. Have the gas you want to  freeze in the room and run cold hydrogen cooled with the regulator through the pipe. The hydrogen has lower dew point than anything else so you can freeze other gases with it without itself becoming liquid.

[Whispershade]

1 hour ago, CantBreathe said:

Would piping cooled LO2 through a room cool it better than cooled hydrogen?

Very potentially. The risk of course is the LO2 getting boiled in the pipe from contact with the oxygen gas. Thus breaking the pipe.

A cooled hydrogen radiator that Kasuha described remains one of the safest ways to liquefy oxygen. With a significant quantity of liquid oxygen you can potentially use an aquatuner to further cool it potentially more efficiently and use that to liquefy oxygen by directly dumping very cold liquid oxygen directly into the room. Sevio has toyed with this approach, I believe.

[CantBreathe]

1 hour ago, Kasuha said:

Have a meandering pipe in a room. Have the gas you want to  freeze in the room and run cold hydrogen cooled with the regulator through the pipe. The hydrogen has lower dew point than anything else so you can freeze other gases with it without itself becoming liquid.

 

1 hour ago, Whispershade said:

Very potentially. The risk of course is the LO2 getting boiled in the pipe from contact with the oxygen gas. Thus breaking the pipe.

A cooled hydrogen radiator that Kasuha described remains one of the safest ways to liquefy oxygen. With a significant quantity of liquid oxygen you can potentially use an aquatuner to further cool it potentially more efficiently and use that to liquefy oxygen by directly dumping very cold liquid oxygen directly into the room. Sevio has toyed with this approach, I believe.

 

I've gotten this system to reliably liquefy 3kg of PO2/min (50g/s).

I'm trying to create a system to freeze PH2O. I'm already able to boil it but that creates a steam problem.

Edit: The meandering hydrogen pipe method does not work as I implement it. The PH20 heats the pipes quickly 

and is very slow to cool.

 

[CantBreathe]

Is there a way to stop a freezing liquid from becoming a dig tile? 

I remember they used to turn into the ice ball items and fall on the ground.

[Grimgaw]

For one, if it freezes inside mesh/air tile it will become a ball.

[Kasuha]

1 hour ago, CantBreathe said:

I've gotten this system to reliably liquefy 3kg of PO2/min (50g/s).

I'm trying to create a system to freeze PH2O. I'm already able to boil it but that creates a steam problem.

Edit: The meandering hydrogen pipe method does not work as I implement it. The PH20 heats the pipes quickly 

and is very slow to cool.

Releasing cold hydrogen into the room, then scooping it back with a pump is waste of power - heat transfer through pipe is slow, but that can be compensated by using longer pipe.

Regarding your water cooling attempts, keep in mind that you have 1 kg of hydrogen per tile of pipe, and 800 kg of polluted water per the same tile. It's bound to be slow.

Note also that freezing polluted water will create polluted ice. It won't get rid of the pollution.

[Whispershade]

7 hours ago, CantBreathe said:

 

 

I've gotten this system to reliably liquefy 3kg of PO2/min (50g/s).

I'm trying to create a system to freeze PH2O. I'm already able to boil it but that creates a steam problem.

Edit: The meandering hydrogen pipe method does not work as I implement it. The PH20 heats the pipes quickly 

and is very slow to cool.

 

In my experience this method of liquefying polluted oxygen has two primary problems. Oxygen getting into the pump that's close to liquefying and that state changes in the pipe. This can even happen when using a gas filter, I've found, if the temperature of the oxygen is right at the dew point when getting drawn into the pump. The other is I've found there is a lot of gas destruction and you end up having to push more warm hydrogen into the system over time, slowing the cooling rate considerably.

[Sevio]

If you're interested in what an Aquatuner based oxygen liquefier could look like, I just happened to post about that on another Aquatuner thread, pictures in that post:

To use this, you would of course need an initial supply of liquid oxygen made with the above mentioned hydrogen radiator loop in a Thermo Regulator.

[CantBreathe]

These are all very good points, i'm moving back to closed loop hydrogen and will take a look at Sevio's Aquatuner cooling.

How are you guys cooling your thermo regulators?

 

[Sevio]

15 minutes ago, CantBreathe said:

These are all very good points, i'm moving back to closed loop hydrogen and will take a look at Sevio's Aquatuner cooling.

How are you guys cooling your thermo regulators?

 

Covering it in a small layer of water helps a great deal.  This is made easier now by the bottle emptier, which you can set to Allow Auto-bottling to get one bottle delivered and then turn it off. It helps if the water is touching sandstone or granite tiles, which conduct heat fairly well.

[Whispershade]

7 hours ago, CantBreathe said:

How are you guys cooling your thermo regulators?

I would often stick them into hydrogen filled rooms with wheezeworts thermally isolated with abyssalite. Three wheezeworts in a pressurized hydrogen atmosphere are enough to induce a negative temperature delta to a thermo regulator processing 1kg/s hydrogen packets (maximum thermal transfer). Less wheezeworts are often necessary in circumstances that do not require a constant active process rate. Two wheezeworts is usually more than sufficient.

Currently I am running my colony on a kind of self-induced no wheezewort usage challenge. So I cool all my current regulators with polluted water produced by a bank of seven Natural Gas generators chilled to between -20c and -15c. Right now I am cooling 1 regulator to cool the Natural Gas Generators, 3 regulators in series to process electrolyzer oxygen, 1 regulator to keep my bank of fertilizer factories cold enough to be habitable to hatches that eat the fertilizer produced and 1 regulator to power a primed by unused oxygen condenser plus over 20 batteries and 7 or so transformers. (The water leaves at about 18c)

I actually managed to herd 3 pufts into a room with a shallow floor of water and chlorine gas which gets pumped my polluted oxygen. And they can process polluted oxygen into mushroom fertilizer faster than I could ever liquefy it.  They easily match 500g/s of a single pump, and they might manage more if I pumped it in faster.

 

[Coolthulhu]

On 8/29/2017 at 6:02 AM, CantBreathe said:

Would piping cooled LO2 through a room cool it better than cooled hydrogen?

It would logically seem so, but it isn't actually the case.

Transfer rate is not affected much by the amount of fluid passing through the pipe. That is, 1kg of water in a pipe works almost as well as 10kg of water in the same pipe. The only real difference is that 10kg will retain its own heat 10 times as well.

What matters is temperature, temperature density (raw, not counting mass!), LOWER of conductivities between pipe and contents of pipe, and LOWER of conductivities between pipe and environment. This means that wolframite pipes with liquid oxygen will not help you much - you're actually better off using sandstone or granite.

Still, you can boost your cooling/heating by using both gas and liquid pipes at the same time.

[Reaniel]

4 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

It would logically seem so, but it isn't actually the case.

Transfer rate is not affected much by the amount of fluid passing through the pipe. That is, 1kg of water in a pipe works almost as well as 10kg of water in the same pipe. The only real difference is that 10kg will retain its own heat 10 times as well.

What matters is temperature, temperature density (raw, not counting mass!), LOWER of conductivities between pipe and contents of pipe, and LOWER of conductivities between pipe and environment. This means that wolframite pipes with liquid oxygen will not help you much - you're actually better off using sandstone or granite.

Still, you can boost your cooling/heating by using both gas and liquid pipes at the same time.

The thing about liquid oxygen cooling system is that the pipes (and the liquid oxygen inside) can stay cold after running through my sublimation room, and this makes the system much more power efficient.  The only problem I've had is to design a temperature switch for the system without leaking too much heat (since you are required to run heavy wires for the switch, both my oxygen room and my aquatuner/PH2O boiler room had to be open and connected somehow).  However, now that everything's running, my aquatuner is off more often than on compare to my regulators, and I have my regulators turned off now.

[Jcheung]

...try a wire bridge for your heavies

[Reaniel]

9 minutes ago, Jcheung said:

...try a wire bridge for your heavies

Wire bridges can only handle 1kW iirc... Or did they change that?

[Jcheung]

I had 4 thermo aquatuners running on a bridge... (down to 2 now) never had it break on me. Thats a little over 1k if i did my addition right.

[Reaniel]

Just now, Jcheung said:

I had 4 thermo aquatuners running on a bridge... (down to 2 now) never had it break on me. Thats a little over 1k if i did my addition right.

Good to know, time to redesign

[Jcheung]

Not saying they won't change it at some point, but if it does... just run several normal wires into transformers on the other side and merge the output. Eats space like crazy, but hey.

[Cilya]

I personnally prefer a vacuum airlock: a pump between two automatic doors. The heavy wire can go through the doors and power the pump. Since the doors are (almost) always closed, the pump (almost) never consumes energy. Plus, the enclosed area is still accessible if you want to change something to your design.

[Coolthulhu]

5 hours ago, Reaniel said:

Wire bridges can only handle 1kW iirc... Or did they change that?

There is a hidden bug/feature where wire bridges work for the 10kW wires without blowing up. It may totally be a bug since the bridge blows up as soon as you add a single regular wire to this part of the network (ie. directly connect 1kW wire to 10kW wire without using a transformer) and looks rather unintended, but everyone uses it and devs didn't patch it despite it being well known for a longer while.

It seems to be one of those bugs that stay in game because they make life easier.

[Jcheung]

First, don't heavy wires bring 20kw?

Second, attaching a single 1kw wire to heavy wire circuit makes the whole circuit 1kw. For some reason, the bridges blow before wires (or at least in my experiences), either by design or accidental occurrence. 

 

I also feel like there's far more pressing issues than eliminating a method to bridge heavy wire (which we should have anyways, even if it's more expensive than current) like thermal exploits.