Self-Powering Oxygen Module MkII - (Production-And-Cooling)

[QuQuasar]

Here we go: my second attempt at making a Self-Powering Oxygen Module, or "SPOM",

 

That's a stupid name. Note to self: never use that name for any reason ever. We can't let it catch on.

 

The goal was to not just produce oxygen, but produce it at a comfortable temperature instead of the 70 degrees it generally comes out at.

 

My first attempt ended in me realising I'd overcomplicated the build to a comical extent. Wile E. Coyote would be proud.

 

This time around, a simpler and more compact design worked out a lot better. Presenting... the SPOM! (dammit)

All insulated tiles and liquid pipes are abyssalite, all metal tiles and tempshift plates are tungsten, all gas pipes are granite, the lower pumps and airflow tiles are wolframite, and the hydrogen generator and upper pump are gold amalgam.

 

(Edit) The materials described above are optimal, but hardly necessary: it's possible to build one of these on a budget. You don't need insulated abyssalite tiles: normal abyssalite tiles are just as good, or even igneous rock insulated tiles if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of cooling power. You also don't need tungsten and wolframite: granite and copper work fine for the conductive tiles, tempshift plates and machinery.

           

You do need to use gold amalgam for the hydrogen generator and hydrogen pump to prevent them from melting.           

 

After enough cycles to reach something close to equilibrium, the oxygen from the SPOM (argh) is being emitted at a very steady 11.5 degrees Celsius. Most of the cooling happens before it's even brought into the pipe radiator: it enters the pipes through both pumps at less than 20 degrees Celsius.

 

The gas filtering mechanism on the right hand side of the build is based off of the designs over in this thread. The lower atmo-sensor is set to Above 500 grams, and the upper one is set to Above 1000 grams.

 

(Edit) You can replace the large batteries with a single Smart Battery, connected via Automation Wire to the hydrogen generator, to dramatically increase the SPOM's potential power output. Note however that this will create an externality: any hydrogen the SPOM doesn't use for power will need to be routed to a second generator or a storage room. If you don't, the electrolyzer will over-pressurize and stop producing oxygen, potentially leading to suffocation and/or death. Which is bad.

 

The build requires wheezeworts, so you can't build more than four or five of these, but each one can provide enough oxygen for 8 dupes, at a comfortable temperature, ready to be piped into your living quarters. If you're running 16 or fewer dupes, a pair of SPOM's might be just the thing.

 

That's still a terrible name, though.

[Lutzkhie]

what material did you use for radiator?

[QuQuasar]

Just now, Lutzkhie said:

what material did you use for radiator?

Granite. It's the best material available for pipe radiators, since we can't make metal pipes.

[Lutzkhie]

or its granite i was focused at the pics 

well you cooled down air, do you have any blueprint for cooling water?

what exactly is a tempshift?

[QuQuasar]

16 minutes ago, Lutzkhie said:

or its granite i was focused at the pics 

well you cooled down air, do you have any blueprint for cooling water?

what exactly is a tempshift?

Cooling water. Spoiler: It's wheezeworts again. Always with the wheezeworts. I am seriously going to have to start playing with aquatuner's, can't rely on wheezeworts for everything.

Tempshift plates. Great for sucking heat away from the electrolyzer.

[Steelflame]

Cooling water is exceptionally easy Lutzkhie, assuming you are using a basic sieve setup to convert your PW back into H20 and are not specificly aiming for just above freezing for the sake of a Sleet Wheat farm.   Simply enough, put an Aqua tuner in a polluted water pool that feeds into your sieve, and run insulated pipes from the sieve into the aqua tuner.  From the output of the aqua tuner (and ideally outside of this PW pool), lead it into a volume valve set to 5000g.  This is where the path splits.  From the tile the valve uses as an input, continue the insulated water pipe on to the clean water pool/wherever it needs to go, and from the valve's output, lead it back into the aqua tuner.

 

This does something very simple, but potent.   Because the sieve's pump is only pumping at 5000g per second, (and the sieve can handle that fine) it turns into clean water at half a pipe's capacity in the sieve.  Aqua tuners can impact a full pipe's worth of throughput, so by looping it back through, you end up with a loop of twice cycled water always looping back in, cooling the water going through the first cycle by one aqua tuner stage.   This causes the output to always be as if you sent the water through two aqua tuners, for the price of one.  Not a bad deal.  There is a chance the pipe leading out of the aqua tuner may "break" in that it will leak some water, but more than enough of the throughput makes it though fine, and the water that snuck through will tend to just turn back into PW due to how inserting clean water into dirty water will turn the clean water into dirty if done right.

 

Your clean water pool can then be used for general cooling in your base, or whatnot.  So long as you turn it into PW before returning it to the sieve, you can negate a lot of temp thanks to these interactions.

[BlueLance]

A tempshift is used to average out the temperature of an area, So lets say the left is 100 degrees and the right is 0 degrees, the tempshift will help spread the heat evenly at a quicker rate to 50 degrees. So in this case he is using it to absorb heat and has connected it to the cold area, so essentially the cold area will warm up quicker, and the hot area will cool down quicker. Depending on the material this can be a slow or fast process (Fast Isnt exactly fast but its enough)

[Oozinator]

I call mine the perlator..

 

[QuQuasar]

12 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

I call mine the perlator..

 

If the perlator is a swan, then the SMOP is an ugly duckling. Smaller, far more hideous, and with higher throughput.

 

The throughput is duck poo in this analogy.

[Oozinator]

2 minutes ago, QuQuasar said:

..The throughput is duck poo in this analogy.

Don't be so negative. Better call it the Quasiquasar. ^^

[QuQuasar]

29 minutes ago, Steelflame said:

Cooling water is exceptionally easy Lutzkhie, assuming you are using a basic sieve setup to convert your PW back into H20 and are not specificly aiming for just above freezing for the sake of a Sleet Wheat farm.   Simply enough, put an Aqua tuner in a polluted water pool that feeds into your sieve, and run insulated pipes from the sieve into the aqua tuner.  From the output of the aqua tuner (and ideally outside of this PW pool), lead it into a volume valve set to 5000g.  This is where the path splits.  From the tile the valve uses as an input, continue the insulated water pipe on to the clean water pool/wherever it needs to go, and from the valve's output, lead it back into the aqua tuner.

 

This does something very simple, but potent.   Because the sieve's pump is only pumping at 5000g per second, (and the sieve can handle that fine) it turns into clean water at half a pipe's capacity in the sieve.  Aqua tuners can impact a full pipe's worth of throughput, so by looping it back through, you end up with a loop of twice cycled water always looping back in, cooling the water going through the first cycle by one aqua tuner stage.   This causes the output to always be as if you sent the water through two aqua tuners, for the price of one.  Not a bad deal.  There is a chance the pipe leading out of the aqua tuner may "break" in that it will leak some water, but more than enough of the throughput makes it though fine, and the water that snuck through will tend to just turn back into PW due to how inserting clean water into dirty water will turn the clean water into dirty if done right.

 

Your clean water pool can then be used for general cooling in your base, or whatnot.  So long as you turn it into PW before returning it to the sieve, you can negate a lot of temp thanks to these interactions.

Just to illustrate Steelflame's proposal:

It works because the sieve outputs at a constant 40 C, and the polluted water tank should be continually being refilled with cool water from your bathrooms.

 

7 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

Don't be so negative. Better call it the Quasiquasar. ^^

Walk thith way, thir.

...

No no, thir. Walk thith way.

[TheOlz]

55 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

Don't be so negative. Better call it the Quasiquasar. ^^

How did you get my photo? I thought I'd done well hiding it!!

[Oozinator]

12 minutes ago, TheOlz said:

How did you get my photo? I thought I'd done well hiding it!!

You can't hide anything!

[Lutzkhie]

i haven't touched my PW, only water from geyser

but i got 10wheezeworts on a single ice biome area

[The Flying Fox]

14 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

Granite. It's the best material available for pipe radiators, since we can't make metal pipes.

FYI, since they changed the Specific Heat Capacity of igneous rock to 1, it is now the best material to use for pipe radiators.  It's lower thermal conductivity doesn't matter as much due to most gases and liquids being 2 or lower.  (ONI uses the lowest conductivity for thermal transfer.  This would technically mean that metal pipes don't offer really any advantage currently for thermal transfer.)

 

To get an idea how ONI uses Specific Heat Capacity and Thermal Conductivity, it's best to think of them as bandwidth verse speed.  More capacity means ONI tends to transfer more heat in bigger chunks where higher conductivity allows for more thermal transfer at smaller temperature differences between the two materials.  For example, iron ore will transfer more heat then wolframite when the temperature difference is wide.  (Which is usually the case as 'wide' this instance is less then 10C to 5C..)  This similar dynamic is pretty much the same for Iron and Tungsten.  Iron is usually better to use in most cases.  (And for "the best" bulk thermal transfer material, igneous rock would be the top although it is a fair bit 'slower' then Iron.)

 

However, Thermal Shift Plates throw a wrench into this dynamic.  A diamond plate touching a tile is basically like sharing it's thermal conductivity with the tile.  As it's been shown before, a plate touching a normal abyssalite tile suddenly turns it into a massive heat store.  So, in many cases, if you're using thermal plates, you don't need metal tiles.

[Saturnus]

35 minutes ago, The Flying Fox said:

FYI, since they changed the Specific Heat Capacity of igneous rock to 1, it is now the best material to use for pipe radiators.  It's lower thermal conductivity doesn't matter as much due to most gases and liquids being 2 or lower.  (ONI uses the lowest conductivity for thermal transfer.  This would technically mean that metal pipes don't offer really any advantage currently for thermal transfer.)

Unless you run the pipes through tiles and are transferring heat to those.

That is btw how you make an effective radiator now. Run the pipe through a tile, doesn't need to be metal but can't hurt, and then smack temp shift plates next to the tile.

[The Flying Fox]

47 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Unless you run the pipes through tiles and are transferring heat to those.

You're still limited by the conductivity of the fluid in the pipes, however.  I decided to double-check this:

 

The only difference between these two chambers is the pipes within the left chamber are made of igneous rock and the pipes in the right chamber are made of tungsten.  The metal tiles in both chambers are both tungsten.  I made sure that the tiles/pipes/plate were roughly the same temperature by running petro through them for a good while, then stopped the flow, I then created filled the chambers with 20k hydrogen at 1000k and let the temperatures start to balance out.  This is the result after a little while.

 

The things to note here are: 1)  The left chamber is noticeably cooler then the right.  Why?  Because the igneous rock pipes do require more thermal energy to heat up then the tungsten pipes, of course.  2)  The more important thing to note, however, is the temperature difference between the tiles and the pipes embedded within them.  The fractional difference between the petro and the pipes themselves is almost exactly same.

 

If the tungsten pipe was marginally better, in this case, in transferring it's heat to the petro inside of it, then the temperature difference between the pipe and the petro would be smaller then in the igneous pipe.  That is not the case, however, as the petro in the igneous pipe has heated to the same fractional percentage.  Considering the huge difference in conductivity between tungsten and igneous rock, one might expect that the petro would be in lock-step with the temperature of the pipe, but it is not.

 

The only conclusion that can be drawn from this, that I can see, is the thermal transfer is limited the same in both cases by the conductivity of the petro.  Since, at the moment, oil and petro have the highest conductivity of the fluids we can work with.  (That being 2)  That means there is very little difference between using metal verse igneous for pipes.  The igneous pipes will certainly take longer to heat or cool down due to their higher specific heat, but otherwise transfer heat at the same rate to the fluid inside of them once they're up to temp.

[Cypher-7]

20 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

 

My first attempt ended in me realising I'd overcomplicated the build to a comical extent. Wile E. Coyote would be proud.

Haha I love this! 

Now is it pronounced ES-POM? Or should it roll off the tongue more and be sssspom. I want to make sure I’m getting this right if the SPOM is going to be a thing.

 

Great work by the way, love the design.

[Lacost]

On 13.2.2018 at 9:26 AM, QuQuasar said:

 

The build requires wheezeworts, so you can't build more than four or five of these, but each one can provide enough oxygen for 10-11 dupes,

 

One Electrolyzer can produce 888g/s of oxygen which is enough for only 8 Dupes. The optimal setup is 2 Electrolyzers and 3 oxygen pumps. This provides 15 Dupes with oxygen (not accounting for mouth breathers), limited by the pump capacities.

You also don't have a temperature regulation system build in. If your oxygen supply overpressurizes it might run the risk of undercooling.

 

2 small changes that won't increase the size of your system dramatically but would increase efficiency and reliability by a fair amount.

[Terzsian]

7 hours ago, Lacost said:

One Electrolyzer can produce 888g/s of oxygen which is enough for only 8 Dupes. The optimal setup is 2 Electrolyzers and 3 oxygen pumps. This provides 15 Dupes with oxygen (not accounting for mouth breathers), limited by the pump capacities

On paper yes, in reality, no. One electrolyzer can easily produce enough o2 for 11 dupes (or even more), depending on base layout. Strange, but true.

[Oozinator]

36 minutes ago, Terzsian said:

On paper yes, in reality, no. One electrolyzer can easily produce enough o2 for 11 dupes (or even more), depending on base layout. Strange, but true.

 

[QuQuasar]

10 hours ago, Lacost said:

One Electrolyzer can produce 888g/s of oxygen which is enough for only 8 Dupes. The optimal setup is 2 Electrolyzers and 3 oxygen pumps. This provides 15 Dupes with oxygen (not accounting for mouth breathers), limited by the pump capacities.

Ah, the dupe I got my numbers from must have had Divers Lungs without me realising it. That explains it. You are correct, 8 Dupes per SPOM not including mouthbreathers.

 

10 hours ago, Lacost said:

You also don't have a temperature regulation system build in. If your oxygen supply overpressurizes it might run the risk of undercooling.

If the oxygen over-pressurizes it'll overcool, not undercool (since the wheezeworts will still work but the heat-producing electrolyzer won't). 
         
But you're right, I don't have temperature regulation built in. I could easily add it if I increased the height of the system to 10 tiles (and put the thermo sensor where the topleft-most metal tile is), but then I've got a bunch of extra spare interior tiles I'm not using for anything. And I don't wanna do that 'cos it's so pretty and compact at the moment.
         
Although... if I lower the cooling chamber one more tile, maybe I could fit a battery in above the electrolyzer. Ooh! Smart battery, to make better use of the hydrogen generator!

[toddles off to rework the thing again]

[Terzsian]

14 hours ago, Oozinator said:

 

The dupes are not in the base full cycle, they hold their breath a lot of the time when outside of base and even inside like in co2 food storage room etc. Oxygen consumpotion is lower than base value (i.e. 100g/s). Just numbers.

 

Edit: And don't forget o2/po2 pockets on the map they will breath while digging, building, delivering etc. outsiflde of base. So yes, in reality one elctrolizer can service more than 8 dupes.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/13/2018 at 1:26 AM, QuQuasar said:

Here we go: my second attempt at making a Self-Powering Oxygen Module, or "SPOM",

 

That's a stupid name. Note to self: never use that name for any reason ever. We can't let it catch on.

<SNIP>

That's still a terrible name, though.

You could also call it "SOaP": Sustainable Oxygen and Power.  Granted, the power goes back into sustaining the oxygen generation, but.. 

[Roboson]

On 2/14/2018 at 5:15 AM, Lacost said:

The optimal setup is 2 Electrolyzers and 3 oxygen pumps. 

Do you have a blueprint for this handy? My current design uses 3 pumps and 4 electrolizers (while a blast to build, and seemingly efficient), is perhaps is a bit unbalanced.