Methane / Oxygen coolant - machine

[Carnis]

Built a coolant system for pre-cooling polluted oxygen - In debug mode. The final throughput was -162 degrees Celsius cold polluted oxygen at about 130kg/cycle rate. System can be tweaked to handle a lot more oxygen by increasing pO2 pressure and by optimising door-pump timing. Doubling pressure to 4k from 2kg should yield 260kg/cycle. Theoretical upper limit is the aquatuner capacity: 10 000 g * 14K * 2.191 J/g/K = 306.740 kJ/s = 306,7kW

If we are aiming at 180K delta-T then we could pre-cool 1.7 litres/second .. 306.7kJ / 1,01 J/g/K / 180K = 1687 g/s => over a cycle this would be 1012 kg/cycle

I have:

Aquatuner in polluted water at -10 degrees (slush geysir source)

Liquid pump in 600kg methane/natural gas, set to pump when liquid is -167.5 or warmer for 20seconds (thermosensor + filter gate). Starting at -173 Celsius (easy to acquire via AETN-device).

Tempshift plates, tungsten wall and polluted oxygen via gas pump.

0 Watts doorpump to a potential hydrogen/radiator room.

I set the doorpump to start at -152 degrees and above 1kg pressure, the doors eventually cooled to -166 degrees (I cant explain it), cooling the polluted oxygen being pumped.

 

Severe problems/bugs encountered during the testing.

 

1) Automation gates, such as an AND gate taking 2x2 square, that are partly built under abyssalite function as a tempshift plate and delete massive amounts of transferred heat. Enough to completely stop the cooling process.

2) If the cooling chamber got too hot material too quickly, the entire 600kg methane pool would vaporize, killing the machine.

 

Here's what we built, and it worked:

[crypticorb]

Do you mind uploading your save file? It's difficult to tell what exactly you've built with no overlays.

Also, I don't believe methane is available outside of debug, does your build rely upon it to function?

[Kabrute]

cool nat-gas you get methane

[Carnis]

Here's the savefile.

Adjusted it and increased the amount of tempshifts and tungsten metal tiles. Increased the volume of the gas chamber. Got it to run constantly on 500g/s single gaspump yesterday, but not anywhere near to the theoretical upper limit of 1600g/s.

 

Setting the temp sensor on the gas chamber to run warmer, will increase throughput, but this will boil some of the methane increasing system instability. Setting the temp sensor on the liquid chamber lower will slightly increase throughput, with the risk of bursting liquid pipes. Theres a 2 degree temperature gradient between the 3 liquid tiles.

 

You can tweak the volume of methane and see what happens, lower volume basicly makes the system more unstable but also more viable in survival mode. Getting 6000 kilograms of spare natural gas -> methane would take a lot of time.

 

The atmo sensor atm does nothing, it should actually be on the receiving side, to avoid the (not included) hydrogen radiator from overfilling.

 

For now it seems like its not really a very viable LOX plan. Maybe with next patch and radiating pipes methane radiators can be made to work, if they are implemented in a useful way. On the other hand, if the heat can be made to transfer instantly, 1600g/s can be achieved. Cooling -160 degrees oxygen with hydrogen would be very useful and cheap.

Methane aquatuner experiment 2.sav

[Carnis]

Runs smoothly at 1kg/second now. End product is -162 Celsius pO2. Moved the gas input to the bottom left. Can further improve by snaking the gas inside the methane chamber. I think it can even run the 1.6kg/second eventually.

[Yoma_Nosme]

@Carnis

First. I like your Build! 

Second. Please Build the whole sha-blam. You can use the l-o2 in a heat exchanger to precool the po2 and/or the methane as well resulting in a even higher efficiency coefficient! 

I can't play atm that's why I am asking. Would love to see the whole thing

Cheers

[Carnis]

Here's the system finished. The only thing I could not build was the LOX storage room.

Input is 1000g/s po at 20 degrees

Methane precools it to -162-163

The doors soak cold from both methane, and hydrogen and they cool it to about -166- -168.

Hydrogen does the rest.

Output is 1000g/s LOX at -184-188 degrees, or 600 kg/cycle of LOX. Theoretically we can go up to 900kg.

Sadly the storage does not work and the insulated abyssalite walls vaporise the product.

Estimated energy consumed is:

480 watts 2 gaspumps (gas shutoff is redundant, will remove).

0.67 x (1200 + 240) methane liquid pump and aquatuner. = 965W

0.67 x 240 hydrogen thermoregulatory = 160W

0.1 x 240 LOX liquidpump, used at 10% capacity. = 24W

= 1630 W.

If the system can be built next to a pO2 source, 500 watts can be saved by feeding oxygen via pressure controlled doorpumps.

Save attached in the end. Load, press play, wait.

Methane LOX machine mk2.sav

[feralfoo]

11 minutes ago, Carnis said:

Sadly the storage does not work and the insulated abyssalite walls vaporise the product.

I came across the same problem when messing with LOX. I overcame it by actively cooling the walls to < 183C, example:

I haven't tried yet, but another option could be adding a pump and gas sensor to the storage chamber, which recycles the o2 back into your condensing chamber. Then eventually the storage chamber will came down to temperature.

Nice build btw